Friday, February 06, 2004
Valid. And Other Things.
One of the symbols of bay area citizenship is the FastTrak box on one’s dashboard or windshield. You can live in SF, or San Carlos, or Mill Valley, and never leave your town and never need a FastTrak transponder - but then you’re not living in the Bay Area. You’re just a home-towner, and even if your home town is a world cultural capital, “Bay Area” is too grand a name for your constrained stomping grounds.
To live in the Bay Area means to perigrinate around the bay - down to the valley, up to the headlands, out to the windfarms, and back to the concrete canyons of what we call The City. The bay is part of your area and you criss-cross it on bridges that cut from Marin to Contra Costa, SF to Alameda, Alameda to San Mateo, Alameda to Santa Clara, Contra Costa to Solano over the mouth of the wide tired river… and as you stagnate in long lines of toll-paying hosers, those of us with transponders can skirt the stacks of cars waiting in line, scooting right along in the almost-always empty FastTrak lane, zipping through at freeway speeds and leaving all others in our proverbial smoke-choked dust. What power. What puissance. What joy.
The transponder is read by a plinth-mounted sensor at the toll gates that automatically deducts the toll from a pre-established and regularly refreshed account. If you have a valid funded account, they tell you that your toll has been paid by flashing a message on a small electronic board at the side of the gate: “VALID / ETC”. This, I like. It’s one thing to be valid. We all need validation, even - if not especially - from the machines that control so many aspects of our lives. But sometimes mere validation isn’t enough. I want to be more than just “valid.” I want respect. I want peace. I want the brass ring. I want to be actualized and adored. I want to die happy (sometime in the distant future), surrounded by loved ones. I want approbation. Enlightenment. Wisdom. I want to know the face of God. I want it all.
Well, that’s a lot to flash at me on an electronic sign as I careen at 60 through the narrow stile. I think their pithy “ETC” really covers it nicely, though. It lets me fill in the blanks.