Privilege doing its downtown thing.
Privilege doing its downtown thing. Charles Mudede

We are downtown. It is around 4 p.m.. The traffic is already too thick to move much. A car obnoxiously blocks a crosswalk. I decide to shame the driver by taking a picture of the situation with my smartphone. He gives me the middle finger. By this gesture, he says: Fuck you, pedestrian.

But I am not bothered by the insult because it is possible that the man brewing behind the wheel is actually a nice and mellow fellow when not encased by 4000 pounds of industrial materials. But once inside of it, once it becomes his other hard and senseless skin, it Hulkifies him.

Indeed, a great mind might one day see the true triggering element of road rage as the failure to establish a fulfilling erotics between flesh and the automobileā€”the subject of J.G. Ballard's short but great novel Crash. Ejaculating onto the dashboard or deepthroating a gear shift did not result in a new somatic and sexual chemistry. The disconnection between machine and man/woman persisted. The car did not become one but instead dumbed the driver. A consequence of this disconnection is a frustration that rapidly pools and pops during jams.

But what has yet to be carefully considered is the possibility that humans might be better at waiting with others than waiting alone. When one is by him/herself, movement is needed in a way that it is not when one is with others. I hinted at this possibility in the post "Public Transportation: What Humans Do Best Is Not Swarming."

As for the title of this post, thanks must go to Seattle Greenways.