The Left Lane Is For Passing Hats

There are very few opinions that a genuine majority of adults hold with real conviction, and one of them concerns the left lane. It is for passing. This is not a matter of taste; in many places it is a matter of law. And yet. What makes the commute good material is that the target is perfectly safe. Nobody in your life is implicated — the offender is an anonymous stranger who will never be identified, in a car you will never see again, and everyone reading the hat automatically assumes it is about someone else. That is a rare and useful property. It is the same reason a grievance about a utility company works and a grievance about your neighbours does not. The rest of the collection is about time, which is the commute's real subject. You left early and it did not help. Eight miles took forty-five minutes. The drive has stopped being a journey and become a fixed feature of the day, like a meal or a shift. All of it is first person, none of it is shouted, and the register throughout is the flat weariness of somebody who does this twice a day and has stopped expecting better.