Beautiful and boring. Integrated in my head as a voiceless stream of environment, separate from myself completely. North to south and south to north. Between a river and a border like everything else. Every week I drive up and down the Taconic State Parkway from New York City to Hudson and back. Its soft curves make way for vistas of the Hudson Highlands. As the Bronx becomes exurb commuter communities, gas stations become predominant, and then a forest makes way for trees. Straight up farms up in there too. This is probably not the space to draw out every single social and economic dimension of my drive like the fact that the Parkway was the result of the last great era of 20th century American social programs designed by people who had to elevate the landscape towards a sense of myth around its emptiness and grandeur as the Yeoman farmer of the previous centuries began dying out as the productive capacity switched towards an industrial manufacturing capitalist economy to produce for example the automobile whose invention was necessitated by the imperative to revolutionize transportation so as to make the capacity to exchange things adequate to our ability to make things. They built this road for people to travel to the newly minted State Park system, to ascend the shoulder of the hills and look out over the green green valley. I often think about how much of the Earth’s surface is covered in concrete, and how long that will last. I’m in my Subaru Impreza listening to podcasts and I try not to notice my surroundings, the dull act of commuting deadens whatever psychedelic flares of trees and road signs and speed and skies are mixing into reality, now. There is a world out there, latent with historical processes, determining my experience— and my experience is still in all the waning possibility of love as we know it, full of the single miracle that is a ribbon of light, dancing for a moment in my windshield with all the specificity of nothing, breaking the spell of the present’s withdrawal. And I am snapped back into place, at a distance from beauty. It has been removed from me by the effects of history, placed before me by the sun. Maybe the kernel of rebellion is just that exact distance and it does not matter the manifold pleasures and distractions available to us; just as long as we are human there remains inevitably a concern for what is lovely and I believe that the Taconic State Parkway is not because it carries me between an apartment I can barely afford to a job I can barely afford. It’s really not its fault, and I like the view but existence is complicated. What is taken from us expressed in the car, the landscape, the food, the gas, the weather, and the light outpaces the promise of safety. I feel a little bit lonely and desperate all the time. Which is all to say there really is no such thing as banality. The violence expressed here is by significant orders of magnitude different than that experienced in other places in the world but threaded by the same ordering mechanisms and so when I look out my window at my world and see the cost of millions of ruined lives all along different points of the chain empire must cannibalize in order that there just be this many gas stations I become replete with my motive force to change our world to something resembling something we don’t yet know about, or something that could have been, has been, and so could be later. One need not wait for exposure to the crisis but rather sit up in your car and look around and measure what is available to you in terms such as power or beauty. I think I’m good on the false equivalence of difference. Boredom is a symptom of disconnection so maybe it’s the living that’s mundane and not the life.