Wordy Thursday - Roundabout

When I found myself back in the 9-5 in 2004, I had a go at chanelling my disgruntled feelings into a kind of monologue that I hoped might become a short novella... one equally pissed off bloke's thoughts as he leaves his suburban home and the wife he doesn't love anymore to make the commute to a job he hates. Cheerful, huh? Yet another of my stalled projects (is that a pun?). Maybe it was just too depressing. Here is a brief extract.

And now we come to the roundabout. And roundabout … and roundabout … and roundabout we go.

Or rather we don’t go.

We ease to a nudging, begrudging half-stop. Indicators click impatient. And we wait and crane our necks and mutter at the free-flowing cars from the bypass just as the lower orders have always cursed those in the privileged classes above them.
I wonder what pattern we make from space? Five lanes, a star from space. A pentagram of waiting frustration. How many such pentagrams are there, now, at 8.42 am? How many worldwide at their designated herding times? Perhaps we create one vast pattern, an interlacing smoky grey of tarmacked Nazca lines across the face of the globe.

Perhaps it is part of The Control. Are we, all of us commuters, part of the same mass cosmic plan? Have the hidden mystics who really control the world brought us to this halt through centuries of training? The trap of commerce and industry, wage structures, loans and mortgages … have forced us all into being part of this design, this cabbalistic web of pentacles across the northern hemisphere, which, at it reaches its mystic perfection, causes the Ancient Ones to sigh, cosmic-orgasmic.

At this precise second every morning evil harmonises and the demons the wizards serve are satisfied, the spell impels them to grant again their power, luxury and vice to the controlling few. And we, the unwitting slaves of the mystics, blink our indicators and rev our engines and drum our fingertips in an unconscious tattoo, a primordial rhythm to placate the Beast.