An appropriate dose of stolidity to play against chaos

Impatience.  If every commute is really an experiment in chaos in which a different key word is hidden each day, a keyword that can be deduced from the millions of random interactions between drivers up and down the (in our case) I-5 corridor and surrounding communities, like a chaos pattern, then my guess for this morning is "Impatience."  Or maybe, "Inattentive."  Though I think the latter is a static condition of the experiment.

I witnessed several encounters between drivers this morning that left me shaking my head like a bewildered theologian. Near misses caused by folks apparently too impatient to take their place in the plodding queue. Giving the finger, sometimes literally, sometimes via their actions, to each other.   Like the planet Pluto (back when it was still accorded the designation of being a planet) when its orbit placed it in 8th rather than 9th place (distance from the sun) for a roughly 20 year period, as colorfully articulated by Fatimah Asghar in the poem, Pluto Shits on the Universe:

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun. 

Naw. 

I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped
moon, running free.

There is attitude in that poem (do follow the link and read the whole poem) that mirrors what I see in this morning's commute:

Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.
I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel.

Speaking of head-shaking theologians, I got my turn when a church bus pulled out of a side street directly into my path. If you want to practice living prayerfully, folks, that's fine with me.  Just pray with your eyes open while you're driving, please.

The perils, I suppose, of having a blog revolve (more or less) around the morning commute is having to acknowledge some of our less-best behavior as a collective community.  Like holding penalties in football, which they say could be called on every play but are usually overlooked unless the infraction really stands out.

Is poetry a rescue this morning?

As for the million others, they are blessed:
This is their age. Their slapdash in demand
From all who would take fright were thought expressed
In ways that showed a hint of being planned,
They may say anything, in any way.
Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they?
Nothing to study, nothing to understand. 

And yet it could be that their flight from rhyme
And reason is a technically precise
Response to the confusion of a time
When nothing, said once, merits hearing twice.
It isn’t that their deafness fails to match
The chaos. It’s the only thing they catch.
No form, no pattern. Just the rolling dice 

Of idle talk. 

     - Clive James, from A Perfect Market

Fitting and applicable, but it doesn't do much to shift my attitude.  What about music, then?

My commute music today was all from a Sigur Rós streaming playlist, with all the songs that popped up having single-word titles taken directly from the physical world: Obsidian, Iceberg, Surface, and Storm.  Yes!  A pattern emerging from a random process!  An appropriate dose of stolidity to play against chaos.

Today's Playlist (all by Sigur Rós):

• Hrafntinna
• Ísjaki
• Yfirborð
• Stormur