I confess to hating cars, and have done everything I can to avoid them, but for the last two weeks I have had to commute with a friend back and forth to work from auburbia. The most obvious thing is what a long waste of time driving is, and how barren the landscape of these herds of mechanical caribou is: far duller than Arctic tundra. This is all environmentalist cliche. More interesting seems to me to be the way that as the traffic gets worse, the cars are turning into living rooms, complete with phones and coffee holders and tape decks and in SUV's enough space for a coffee table. This makes sense: if you are going to spend your life in a car, why not have a mobile home? I assume that one day in one great massive traffic jam, the cars will all just stop, and people will set up house, put up fences, and the whole process will start all over again.

Is there anything good I can say about this experience: my colleague says that it is a time of the day he gets to think. I suppose the rhythm takes over: I drive so seldom I can't get into it. And I notice that (in spite of what people say), commuters are incredibly polite to each other: there is an elaborate set of rules of the road that most people abide by, warning others, humanizing the herd. And there are these moments of freedom, when you get to accelerate to 30 or more, gaps open up, and for a split second the commercials come true. But overall it is sobering: the plan seems to be to have 6-10 billion of these cyberpeople, cars wedded to bodies, covering what is left of the earth, and driving their living rooms around all day long.