Madness is Particulate Matter

It’s hot as all hell. My AC is dead and has been dead for over a year now. I’m sweating like a member of a chain gang and my ball is resting on the brake pedal. There’s a dime-sized break in my windshield and the angle the traffic is facing makes it easy for the sun to beat on me like I am an unwanted step child. This kind of suffering is mild compared to where I’m headed. I’m heading to a place I have to call home and the whole trudging journey there I must endure the horns and the sirens unable to make their way through the undead trapped in their metal machines in order to pick up the reported dead.

I’m headed to a place I have to call home. I cannot find any more energy to spend, dreading this way of life so I sit and wait like everyone else. I sit and contemplate the radio station reporting on the traffic and the weather and whether or not we are headed for economic collapse. Is it better to be a pessimistic fetus or an optimistic corpse? I’ve tallied enough days recycled by name: Monday, Wednesday, oh so holy Sunday. I’ve rallied myself enough sense of discontent to protest this congested line of working ants to rant myself into oblivion and honk my horn and found a synchronized dissatisfaction amongst my strange neighbors. I am the same as I was yesterday. I’m waiting for the light to turn green.

I lost my job today and still I’m waiting in the traffic with the 9 to 5ers. I’ve never been good at holding down a job but I like to think I’m better at fitting in. These days I’d say I fit in quite well. Major layoffs and age-old start ups that never quite took off are closing their doors. The people on this planet will never accept any less and always want more.

What an unromantic - indefinite suicide. Who invented these creatures, anyway? I’ve heard some say God and others say particulate matter but I find that either way is cyclical. A sickening satire where the punchline is so quick; the common folk cannot afford to laugh. Some laugh anyway. Call them thieves. Call them mad. Hell, call them whatever you want if you think it’s worth investing in. I find it all cyclical. Together in this weather, in this carbon dioxide addicted city, in this convey of unsettled zombies, we are the whispering choir before the chaos. We gain to lose and the loss of our hours paid, day to day are evaporating with each rent payment, each gas bill, each water bill. I’ve never asked for such an insufficient resource. I’ve lived on the street and was charged anyway. My vitals are addicted to water, I’m not sorry but goddamn that charge is so damn high.

I sigh myself a heavy dose of general suffocation and proceed to take my place in the team of forgotten faces, all twisted up in angst and pre-aneurysm or working class asphyxiation and worn out daze or bureaucratic constipation. All this to say, I stay put. Brake pedal pushed, AC broken and now I switch the radio dial. “It’s KW95 and what a time to be alive; where you can hear all the hottest classics at one time, here on PITSTAIN RADIO! That was Journey’s ‘Anyway You Want It’ taking us back to the bitchin’ 80’s and now we journey into another wild year with Hall and Oates’ ‘I Can’t Go For That’."

The song starts playing and my gaze wanders towards one of the cars beside me. I see a woman gripping the wheel so hard her hands are red hot tamales and her eyes are dripping lightly applied mascara and her hair is wiry blonde spaghetti that I could tell was done up nice earlier. I can’t hear if her radio is playing. Her window is up. My window is up. But, I can feel the sweat on her steering wheel as I grip my wheel as well. Hell, I had hardly noticed it until I saw her. It’s strange how certain senses turn off when you’re in the rut of outrageous routine. I realize I must’ve seen this scene before- waiting for the light to turn green.

I also realize that I try and think about these typically mundane things in moments like this in an attempt to feel romantic while I knowingly rot from the inside out. I try to imagine some grand yet hidden critic observing me in this whole operation. They’d come from an elevator reaching down from the sun and ask me questions like: “Why didn’t you just tell your boss to fuck off when he kept you overtime for a whole week even though you had recently promised Holly an effort to spend more time with her? What gave you the patience to sit in the deja vu of traffic? Why did you quit participating in the art program? Where are you going?”

Here I am, having barely moved an inch and I’m dreaming up a fantasy of someone giving a shit about the fact that I’m trapped in this congestion of metal monsters with decaying minions inside. I look back over to spaghetti hair but alas she has moved on and now in her place is a man with an undone necktie and a tomato red face as he screams into his phone. Again, I can only imagine what he is saying. I feel like it probably isn’t so different from the crying woman. I feel like it’s akin to what I would say if I wasn’t so numbed out by the harshness of the sun and the broken AC and the taunt of the classic songs on my radio and the sharp pain in my foot, nailed to the brake pedal. We’re crying, “I want to move but I can’t. I’m bound by my surroundings. I’m glued to my seat until the light allows me to go forth.”

I bite my tongue and already feel a blister forming. Then, I bite it harder in protest to the pain because it feels like that’s all I can do. The lights have changed already and my lane remained still. There’s too many of us in this exhausted horde. What good is a green light if I can’t move? What will it take? By this rate of mobility the woman will drown in her car and the man’s head will explode and I… Well, I suppose I will still be more or less the same. I suppose I shouldn’t complain but somehow I feel like that’s what got me into this predicament in the first place. But, unless I miraculously obtain the opportunity to view every alternate outcome of my life, every shift in possibility, every tiresome motion that keeps my wheel spinning, unless I get that chance- everything in my life will remain in a graveyard of maybes. The very idea of such benign tragedies leaves me sad and equally sickened by my motionless sorrows.

“Can’t go for that Can’t go for that Can’t go for tha…” I switch off the radio station with a waning patience feeding a snowball frustration in another pathetic attempt to grasp a dying breath of control. I think to myself that if I must be bound to this clockwork torture I should atleast be allowed to choose the soundtrack. Upon turning the dial I smile for a moment thinking I had opted for silence but in an instant I realize I smile the smile of a fool. A storm doesn’t subside just because you have an umbrella. A gash doesn’t stop bleeding because you’ve taken valium. We’re not given a job just because we need money. A light doesn’t switch just because you want it to. Traffic doesn’t move just because the fucking light is green! I mean, hell with as many cyclical forces of nature that I find on this godforsaken planet, it seems that the suffering is and will always be ever so linear. No curve. No intersection or convenient exit for the commoner. What will it take? Give me a break. I’m only on my way to a place I should call home. I suppose I shouldn’t complain but now without the stereo I hear the mass of strained hearts and smog-brained survivalists in desperation for a savior.

The truck in front of me bangs its horn with the steaming co-op of others also induced with cabin fever. I hear profane shouts and verbal attacks. I hear the man in the car beside me screaming his phone into ash. I hear my engine whining. I want out of this mess. What will it take? My hands shake despite painfully gripping the wheel. I keep the tips of my shoe on my brake pedal but my heel bounces and my brow sweats a tear from my burnt out mind. Then, I close my eyes and find a bittersweet comfort. The comfort of not having to keep my eyes on the road because I know it’ll still be the same when I open them. I begin to think about the particulate matter and I begin to think of the god and how they too would see the same thing if they were to join me in this refusal of unseemly sight. I begin to think of the woman crying before the motionless traffic that will not take the time to care for her. I begin to think of the man screaming at the phone despite the device being bound to indifference. I think of the car before me, honking with bruised insides and then of my job clogged with a team of machines that wouldn’t take the time to care for my struggles and then I think of my broken AC and the sun following the lights mockingly void of any green, instead only radiating a closed curtain of indifference. I can feel my bruised insides, my broken heart and shattered mind. I open my eyes and find my gaze in the rearview mirror and can’t help but cry. My green eyes glaze over with a longing and my mouth rests in a smile as I laugh. It is the laugh of a thief. It is the laugh of a madman.

I wipe my tears and shift my machine into park. I let go of the rubber wheel and for a second contemplate the keys that dangle from my ignition then decide to leave them there. I step out of my car and expect to hear a rush of commotion but instead I am met with a symphony fit for a dream. I begin to walk past the congestion of unpleasant ego and feel a breeze rushing down to welcome me. I am unsure of what exactly I’m being welcomed into and I’m also unsure if I had accidentally hit the switch of the radio dial on my way out but as I stroll against the relentless heat I am certain of the music I feel caressing my every move. I am sure of what it takes for the light to turn green.