Tristes Traffique (2.1 ALT)

Waking up is always a bit rough. Today, I watch myself as I emerge onto the expressway, like a smoldering Mad Maxine. Testing my morning mettle, I pump the accelerator for a unit of petrol-plasma and pursue the cloying, sweet ‘bouquet’ that hangs around the ‘jams.’ These are the jugular juggernauts that plague any system of human transplacement. These are also the data most relevant, and most elusive, to my research.

I speak the first of my daily observations aloud for the recorder:

“The public concourse stretches taut in all directions, pulled by one-way conveyances as far as my perception dares to go. The din is maddening, and the color of exchange at the moment is flashing red. Electronic, valvular overload seems imminent.”

“Present: Very tense,” I say in conclusion.

Until recently I saw little need for traveling the open highway. Frankly I had no stomach for it. Now, I am hardwired to surveil even the metaphors of transit. I spend my working days racing like a synesthetic wildfire along the circuitry of the collective somatic switchboard.

Sensing the data as it registers across the vast network of post-industrial capillaries and 24-hour sinews, I simultaneously taste and smell and feel transit.