Redlines and Atomic Clocks
Every large city I’ve ever been through, it’s always the same. Montgomery, Atlanta, Knoxville, Charlotte, Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia. Twenty thousand miles I’ve driven through and between them. So predictable that, should it ever vary, one ought to look out for flying pigs or see if Hell’s weather report calls for snow.
Good-natured and generally law-abiding commuting and traveling turns into death racing. Either fleeing an impending five hundred foot tsunami, or trying to get the new Popeye’s chicken sandwich before they sell out. A two liter, four cylinder Nissan becomes a stock car at Talladega, a dodge charger with an automatic six cylinder turns at once into a Nuremburg Ferrari. Everyone is Michael Schumacher. Drafting, trying to nail curve apexes. Redline it just to get another car length ahead. Squeeze in, dart out again. Try and guess which lane has the most people also willing to risk it all for the trophy. A ten person simultaneous game of gasoline chess, wherein the prize is making it to Shake Shack before the lunch rush. Being not wholly committed, I feel compelled to take out a life insurance policy whenever I enter the leftmost lane. I think all the formula one drivers practice on Atlanta freeways at nine am on Mondays.
Everyone’s got to get to wherever. Clocks have never been more precise or prevalent, but we still can’t keep up with schedules that are routinely automated away from us. A billion wafers of silicon to shave three minutes from every task-which also happens to be the most important one. A sweaty Asian man somewhere has probably been working on an algorithm for the last decade to finally solve the Time Crisis. But he might run out of time, too. An intern at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plugged it into a supercomputer, and the terminal just returned “LOL.”
Imagine those poor old fucks with their trains a hundred years ago. Bullshit history books said they mostly ran just fine with pocketwatches less accurate than the clock on the cheapest blender Walmart sells. Impossible. Laughable.
Quantum physics says that a fast-traveling clock slows down in a measurable way. Big city folks must have all gotten a memo regarding this and took it literally. We must get to where we’re going with the consequence and pure desperation of a woman who’s trying to make it to the hospital as her husband rapidly begins to close out his mortal inhabitance.
If the accelerator isn’t on the floor and the fuel injectors don’t look like wide open fire hydrants and the brakes aren’t red hot we might all spontaneously combust or, worse still, miss the most current episode of The Bachelor.
The national highway system was intended to make long-distance travel more feasible, economical, and uniform. It was also the beginning of the trade between time and sanity, which has become less like a scale and more like a greased slide that ends in one of the two places time doesn’t exist: death and the DMV. Eisenhower sent us to the underworld on three lane low quality asphalt. Naturally, the circles of hell would be connected by swiss cheese pothole interstates.