It'll stay hot here until December or so, cooling for a time in late November but hitting the high 90s again during the heaviest Christmas shopping. The New World. I always thought it would end up very Blade Runner dystopian, our future, and not desert and drought. Doesn't seem fair, really.
The drive in to work is one of a handful of routes depending on an entirely capricious system: when I approach the main street in my neighborhood, if there are cars approaching both directions, I turn right. If no cars, I go straight. Repeat several times. It's good for OpSec, but bad for any discipline I may have around getting to work on time. This morning, I took a longer surface-street route that avoids all the main highways. This is a faster route in the summer, but once school is in session and all those school zones light up and all those tired moms shuffle their SUVs groggily from point A to point B and back, and once all those school busses stop all traffic every fifteen feet, this route chokes with teeming frenzied late hourly workers.
So I get to the destination riding the trough of a wave of information workers and class 2 clerk typists, just ahead of the wave of CEOs and CIOs and CXOs and CPAs who, lingering in luxuriant Lexus finery, make their way barely aware of a road or other cars or the concept of society as a whole.
I listen to music on my commute in to work, and news on the way out. Normally when I listen to music in my car it is turned up loud enough that, well, it's a bit embarrassing. I'm a 41 year old man, fer chrissakes, but music isn't to be trifled with. It's not for the background. So, yeah, when I roll up to a light and my car is rattling I turn it down. A bit. It's the polite thing to do.
Noticed today while I belted out a Decemberists tune that is seems like no one in Austin sings in their cars. I've never seen it, anyhow. And that's what this town is, really. The Live Music Capital of the World, tightly packed with very serious people doing very serious things, trying very hard to make their costumes fit, needing to be taken seriously despite the standard uniform of golf shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals.
Maybe it's the whole of the first world, but here it seems endemic, this posturing. Everyone is trying so hard to not look like they are trying so very hard to be something slightly unique. You don't want to be completely unique, because that'll get you ostracized, but you don't want to be the 41 year old guy in work-casual clothes grinding away at a listless career with no chance of escapism either. No, you want to be just unique enough to be interesting without it being a) work or b) too interesting.
No one sings in their cars. Is that weird?
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