hot lava highway

Beyond the difficulty of navigating the rideshare business model, there is the deeper, existential challenge of metabolizing the raw sensory experience of rideshare driving. 

Maybe it is just the flux of human life on Earth in the early 21st century. Maybe I am too sensitive or too sheltered. Whatever the reason, rideshare driving feels rougher, more potent, and more chaotic than the life on Earth I am used to. 

It is like driving on a subterranean lava highway.

It is starting, swiveling, and stopping on a dime amidst a whirlwind of signs, codes, light, sound, and matter.

It is axles grinding and tires scraping the battered and pitted road.

It is the app’s spinning wheel of frozen death and its cheerful, chirping tri-tone of fresh life. 

It is tunnels and hollows where the signal is lost and panoramic four-bar summits.

It is odors wafting into the car on an unseen airy swirl: wings, fries, beer, cologne, curry, coffee, cigarettes, booze, perfume, weed, hospital, human sweat and struggle.

It is flesh of different shapes, sizes, and hues, wrapped in textiles and animal skins, heaving itself into the backseat. 

It is the stranger in the rearview mirror. 

It is how we size each other up according to codes buried deep within the cork in our skulls, assessing at the speed of light: friend or foe? Fight or flight?

It is a face hole opening to speak, cry, laugh, or curse; to spill its deepest red raw agonies or unspool its sinewy ligaments of hope.

It is fingers jabbing at the slick black sea glass screen embedded in its heavy-metal frame to bring sounds and visions of raucous idiocy or comforting delight.

It is the door opening, a body flung back into the maelstrom. 

It is fares, tips, fees, earnings, and filthy crumpled bills and lottery tickets that go back and forth and around up into the clouds where they vanish—cha-ching!—into the vault of sky. 

It is the sad struggle to clutch and count with our pudgy, lumbering baby fingers.

It is simple days of just living life slipping away between those same grasping fingers, a seeping trail of irreversibility leaked in the wake of our forward drive. 

It is the earth groaning under our weight while we roll mindlessly along, burning through the future. 

It is UNDER CONSTRUCTION, and it is ROAD CLOSED, and it is DETOUR.

It is our punching holes through mountains, stretching metal and concrete across rivers and gorges. 

It is the stories and pleas, scrawled on torn cardboard boxes, of the life-beaten unhoused, standing angry or ashamed or both or more at every four-way stoplight.

It is the heart-yanking dilemmas they silently pose: do I make eye contact? Do I open the window? Do I give?

It is our never-ending clumsy breaking of the gift of life.

It is our childish attempt to mend what we have broken or to hide it away, maybe with a sprinkle of electron magic.

It is our hurling our Happy Meal wrappers out the window in dissatisfied rage. 

And it is, meanwhile, the radiant heavens wheeling in great, watchful hawking arcs above us. 

And it is, meanwhile, the chimney swifts dipping and darting and the eagles and vultures gliding, all in that same wheeling sky, indifferent to us, the soon-to-be-sloughed detritus of four thousand-thousand years of slimy striving.

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