“If you do not drive your neighborhood or region, what form of adult mastery and knowledge are you seeking in its place? If you do not drive your country’s highways and byways, what path do you have to a nonvirtual experience of the America beyond your class and tribe and bubble?” – Ross Douthat

If you do not drive your neighborhood
or region, what form of adult mastery
and knowledge are you seeking in its place?
What dallying god of degenerated pace
shall plaster his defunct phylactery
on your pedestrian brow, and call it good
to bike to CVS? To what worthless
walk in the woods or chittering crowded train
would you avail yourself in prayer to seal
your social order? Yet behind the wheel
of some bland Hyundai running reds on Main
you become yourself a god, mirthless
and grand: infinite; callous; cruel
as a child roused too soon for middle school.