I woke up in the dark, got dressed, and drove to a doctor’s appointment in San Mateo. The clinic is a mile from my former office so this drive is one I’ve done hundreds of times.  

but today it felt... odd.  anachronistic.

it’s not that the drive itself is bad: there are way worse places to be than 280 at dawn, inside a warm masterpiece of German engineering. 

there’s hardly any traffic.  no billboards from enterprise software startups shouting at each other about the superiority of their product offerings.

when I did this commute daily (because there isn’t public transit where I’m going), I treated it like moving meditation. 

notice @74c65fe5 still asleep in the folds of the hills.  admire how the sun paints the trees a golden yellow.

in isolation, it’s not a bad diversion. 

but when we *had to* do it daily? each of us inside a small metal box, suffocating the very view we feel privileged to admire? 

that’s barbarian. 

will we ever do it again?

https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/111/167/967/224/020/576/original/bd02caddb3594ec9.jpeg 

 @58b2274a @74c65fe5.
On my last day of work, before retiring, I calculated that in the course of commuting for 30 years to workplaces in Palo Alto and Santa Clara, I traveled 780,000 miles on Interstate 280.

780,000 miles!

That's like making a trip to the moon, and back again, and then returning to the moon. Plus a couple of orbits on each end.

Time-wise (at 2.5 hours a day), if you put all that commute time together into one block, it adds up to 2 solid years of my life wasted on Interstate 280.

A chunk of that was in a 2 or 3 person carpool. But still, my carbon footprint is unforgivably huge. And the wear and tear on my cars and body... ugh.