Going Green.

In a board game of a world where the expressways have become depress-ways with troll tolls and clogged ‘bye’-lanes that even a plunger cant clear, what’s left are choked commuters and tired tires.

Traveling today is a session of snakes and ladders where one wrong move means a U-turn back to square one and one clever whiz through the smallest exactly-fitting gap means getting a lead of luxurious 5 minutes.

In those 15, 20, 30, 60 minutes of waiting that seem like (1+1/∞)^∞, we stare at that athletic traffic signal and that muscular red light, trying to coo and sway and compel and growl at it just so it would consider giving the other two a fair chance to show off their pretty yellow or green polka dress.  No cheesy lines work, no eye contact amuses and no mind games provoke. That red light is like a newly-joined diet plan. You want to throw a shoe at it right when you start. 

And those painful minutes of twiddling thumbs and tapping toes and fidgeting fingers, when vehicles comes so close that we can see the brand of the scarf of our neighbor in the car next to us, all sights and sounds and smells seem to come alive. The wailing of babies, the tra-la-la’s of radios, the crunching of chips, the flipping of the newspaper, the clikaty-clucks of keyboards, roaring of engines, rings of phones, gazes of kids looking like the hunchback of Notre Dam with their noses stuck to the windows, smiles and stare s and beeps and breaks and horns…its all just a really bad soup. 

Our flirty bar-looks turn into gawps of threat to give way, communicating from their rear view and side view and all available view mirrors and our poised poses turn into a bull-riding gesticulation. The only truly happy ones are those riding the Harley-Davidsons because who else has a mean machine as mean as that and dangerous tattoos as dangerous as those and crude leather wardrobe as crude as that.  They are the only ones who smile with smug and look 180 degrees to look if we are looking at them.

We need to seek inspiration from pacman who eats whatever lies on his road, coming back ten units ten times in ten different ways, dodging and escaping and turning and finally getting through.

And that is just level 1.