Autobabel

The real New Year's Eve is September 1, when people return from vacation. That's when the city's needs and problems spill out onto the still-soft people still dragging around imaginary nets of beach toys, flip-flops, plastic beers or simply themselves.

On this mob, wealthy enough to have a car and a vacation, the inevitable descended one September. The city choked by seemingly more cars, now, after August, was almost gridlocked. On the streets, sidewalks, intersections, everywhere, the cars sit. They no longer move as those who made them imagined, but are ^stopped1, stagnating, pressing against the asphalt. They sit on the sidewalks, beside houses, electricity and gas poles and boxes. They follow cluttered ^curbs2. When a car struggles out of the inertia of the parking lot and moves elsewhere, the speed at which it travels is so slow that the air particles are pushed aside unopposed. The car's formal aspirations to speed, aerodynamics and the splitting of