What Speed Means to Marketplace Listeners

		Read More Speed Commentaries • Straight Up • Define Our Goals • At What Cost? • Time and Fruit • Workaholism • Faster and Faster • Overcoming Limitations • Length of Time • A State of Mind • Theory of Relativity • What About Honolulu? • A New Career From Speed • Speed Is Nothing New • It's All Relative • We're Being Sold Speed • Speed Means Missing Out • Time is Priceless • The Ride Keeps Getting Faster • Family First • Slowing Down for Frugality • Speed Serves Me • A Fortunate Layoff • Interruptions • Our Country's Material Obsession • A Personal Slowdown • Using Speed to My Advantage • I Don't Miss Much • Not Enough Hours In the Day • Peaceful • Speed, Oh Speed • Out of Control • I Live By Speed • Happy to Be Relaxed • Speed Is Choice Index of Comments

Out of Control (June 27)
Imagine this: You're driving. Up above you is a night sky illuminated by stars above and the last sliver of the waning moon, frozen. You can stare at it for hours and never conciously notice a change until the faint light of moon disappears beneath the horizon, or the stars of the sky are swallowed by the resonating energy of the raising sun. But I speak of hours, when you only have seconds. Peel your eyes away from the heavens; the only drawback to a convertible car is the fact that it offers so much more to be distracted by.

It's 3 a.m., you're returning from a party where you've just met a dream. "She was on fire, and I was breathing gasoline"—lyrics from an old song are the only way to describe the chemistry between yourself and the dream.

Your mind is lost, reeling and racing in a tangled web of confusion. You can barely think; the beauty of the world seems to overwhelm you. Briefly, you forget where you are as you drop your head. You drop your head, signaling your defeat, your surrender. In that single moment you realize the true size of the world is not quantifiable, no single number can describe the universe, no single word can give it scope.

Then suddenly, without warning your mind rips back to the here and now. The harsh iridescent orange glow of the highway lights burn into your skull. You glance up at them and see nothing but an orange blur. The lightposts fly past you at an incredible rate, each one making a soft, but deep, noise which seems to be amplified by the crushing power of the wind.

As you lift your foot from the accelerator, you glance at the speedometer; the needle is pinned far beyond the last number on the dial, 140 mph.

At first, you only gently apply the brakes, but soon you notice the effect is less than desirable. The needle of the spedometer has not moved.

The road turns you, but you do not. And as the car skids of the road in a fury of dust and rubber the world seems to slow down. Slower and slower. You watch in awe as the grains of sand and the particles of dust disturbed by the out-of-control, three-ton chariot of death, slow and stop. They are suspended in time and space. It is almost as if you can reach out and grab them.

You glance up at the sky as the world stands still. And before you a montage of your life's greatest achievements and worst defeats glitters in distant stars, strangly it seemed to last an eternity and yet no time passes. As the last scene is played, the darkness that surround the stars grows and the nothingness swallows you. You feel nothing. No love, no light, no life. The darkness penetrates you, searching the depths of your soul, absorbing you. And the last you feel is the cold grip of nothing grasp and squeeze your dead heart.

What is speed? Speed is the ice-cold grip of the dark nothing squeezing your heart. Speed is that feeling. Speed is the feeling you get everytime you drive too fast, you live too dangerously, you risk too much. Speed is many things. Speed is the millions of cells of blood coursing through the small veins as adrenaline pumps your heart into overdrive.

That is speed.

Ali Sajjadi
Wayzata, MN

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