January 29, 2021:
As I dictate this into my phone, highway 215 south is five lanes wide and absolutely jammed. I'm moving at most five miles per hour, from time to time. Siri tells me this traffic lasts for miles.
When I went to school here, this road was named 15E. It was two lanes, and there was never traffic on it at all. In fact, the lack of traffic led to insanity. It was possible to go a hundred miles an hour on this road, and the few people using it, did. Some of the craziest drives in my life were heading south near here, where I was hitting 90 in my mother's yellow 1968 Chevy Nova and people were passing me like I was standing still.
The traffic nowadays comes from — I think — the developed and sprawling bedroom communities along this road and its sister road 15. When I was in school, for example, Temecula was a Denny's and a gas station. Lake Elsinore was a Greyhound station and a diner. Today both of these places are sprawling. They go for miles, between the hills, into the canyons, up the hills. These were developed specifically as bedroom communities for commuters working in the greater Los Angeles megaregion. It seems to have worked. At this moment there are at least a hundred thousand people on this road.
I guess this is good? But I hate change, and I hate traffic, and I hate sitting still.
This experience today is, for me then, more than merely visceral. It's an image or a metaphor for a world which is at best ambivalent. Where evolution in service of capital accumulation can be both progressive and extraordinarily destructive at one and the same time.