This Post Is Better Than the Last But Still Read At Your Own Peril

If you would like to know if life has a meaning, I encourage you to go to the Harlem Department of Motor Vehicles. Once there, you will quickly realize that life is definitely pointless.

Monday, March 7, 2011, 11:45am. I enter the DMV to find a line so long that when stretched it would wrap around Earth at least 6 times. I wait in said line for god knows how long, only to find that this is the line only to get a number, at which point you need to stand, or, if you’re lucky, find a seat, and wait for your number to be called.

My number is B328.

There is also the A, D and F numbers. When it comes to B, they are currently serving B469. I ask someone who works here how the numbering system works, and I think he says – think because he spoke in some accent I couldn’t detect – that once at 499 the cycle ends and goes back to 0. Does this mean there are 357 people ahead of me?

I have no doubt that once my number is called, which will probably be in about a week, I will then be given another number, at which point I will go into another waiting area, and, after waiting another week or so, will get yet another number, ad infinitum.

A couple of things are coming to mind right now. The first: what the fuck? The second: the DMV is a pretty great metaphor for the absurdity of life. No one really knows what’s going on here, how the system works, which forms we might need to fill out in duplicate or triplicate, if we’ll even get what we came here for, etc. And, after all of this ridiculousness, we probably won’t even realize what we came here for in the first place.

This is the 4th time I’ve been to a DMV in my almost 29 years on this planet. The first was when I was 16 and got my license. The next was 4 years later when I needed to renew my license, and I got my new picture taken with a slight mustache that I had been trying to grow (it is a sad fact that to this day, I still cannot grow a proper mustache). The 3rd time was 5 years ago, after I had been in New York for 2 years and needed to exchange my Pennsylvania license for a New York license. And now, 5 years later, here I am again renewing my New York license.

It is rather amusing to look back on all that has transpired during this time. On the one hand, a lot has happened and I am a different person. On the other hand, nothing has happened and I’m exactly the same. It is ponderous indeed to imagine reviewing my license 5 years hence, 10 years hence, 40 years hence. What will the years have amounted to? Will it have mattered to anyone other than myself and the small number of people who care about me? Will it have been part of a larger purpose?

I don’t know the answer to this question, but I’m sure there’s some line, perhaps the D line, in which you can wait for all eternity for the answer after filling out Form DX235 (version 2).