Rush Hour (Prompt #13)

Miles of curvy road lay ahead, each of us in our separate cars but sharing a common goal: to get off the freeway.  Slowly but surely we are all beginning to regret not taking the sides streets to get home.  Now there's no way out but forward, a direction that nobody is moving as traffic comes to a stop.  This is not a healthy way to end a stressful day.

"I'll die of old age on this freeway," I mutter to myself.  "It's comforting to know that I'll leave this world to a serenade of honking horns and yelling."  What I find funny is that every day around 5:00 pm the freeway begins to pack itself with cars whose drivers want nothing but to be home in the quiet of their living room.  And every day those who have been attracted by the freeway's absence of stop lights and presence of luxurious speed limit signs of "65 mph" find that they have been lied to.  Tricked by false pretenses of speed.  Yet every day around 5:00 pm we all voluntarily choose the freeway.  Insanity is said to be "trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." We are like little robot drivers, void of agency, bowing to the will of the freeway.  Insanity our only defining quality.

Maybe it is the social scene that drives us to the freeway.  We as robot drivers cannot resist this chance to meet new people.  I know I sure get to know the people next to me when I'm stuck in bumper to bumper traffic.  The situation forces you to.  For example: today I'm finding out that the youth in the car to my left, poor soul, is deaf.  Or at least mostly deaf.  Or at least, that is what I assume from the inhumane volume of his music.  I can't be angry that all I will hear until my untimely death on this stretch of road is a reverberating bass from some song I never wanted to hear.  I certainly won't blame him for adding to my headache, because it must be horrible for him to be so deaf.  I should count my blessings.

I don't pity the man to my right, for he is obviously content with life.  He is either rehearsing for a play in which he plays a character such as a wicked stepfather or a murderous lunatic, or he is learning to dance.  As foreign as it may seem to me to rehearse either of these activities in a car, I figure: what the heck.  If he wants to flail his arms around and project his lines to other drivers during rush hour, to each his own.

I have nothing useful to do to pass the time I have left on this perpetual journey home, so I'll inch forward quietly and continue to meet new people, as I probably will again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next...