Published: June 20, 2025
I’m parked outside a CVS. Engine idling. Heater humming. Dog curled up in the crate. Snow’s falling again.
Heidegger called it Sein und Zeit. I call it a shift. A route. A reason to keep moving.
Drop Out. Tune In. Turn On.
The old slogan carried the scent of rebellion, but mine’s different. Mine smells like motor oil, wet concrete, and whatever the dog just tracked in. This isn’t counterculture for its own sake. This is the rhythm of work, the rigor of repetition. Where others spiraled into abstraction, I stuck to the route.
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time is about Dasein, being-there, the human who exists in time not as a clock but as care — as commitment and anxiety, as projection and decay. [1] But what if Being wasn’t just pondered in a hut in the Black Forest? What if it clocked in? Hauled crates? Took left turns on red?
Rewriting the Grid
Reconfigure the coordinates:
Sein und Zeit: Being and Time. An ontological blueprint. All theory, no tires.
Dasein und Zeit: The being-there in time. Schedules, late deliveries, recalculations.
Sein und Da-Zeit: Being and this time. Conditions: ice on the pavement, surge pricing.
Dasein und Da-Zeit: Me, right now. Engine warm. Route loaded. Door half-open.
Hannah Arendt framed life through labor, work, and action. [2] If maintenance is labor and driving is work, then this essay is action — a way of showing up. The courier performs presence not in abstraction, but in motion.
Agamben wrote of zones of exception — spaces where rules are suspended, life reduced to function. [3] That’s the gig economy in a nutshell. Couriers exist in a suspended in-between: authorized, but not protected; seen by the app, but invisible to the polity.
Presence Is the Payload
This isn’t a monastery. It’s a mobile unit. Packouts rattle in the back. The dashboard chirps for service. The dog stirs.
Still, Thích Nhất Hạnh holds the wheel with me. His reminder — “You are here, you are now” — arrives not as comfort, but as coordinates. [4] Breath as ETA.
I roam the aisles of Home Depot like someone seeking scripture. I rotate tires in abandoned parking lots. I’ve never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I’ve lived it — tool in hand, problem in view.
Dispatch from the Escape
This 2017 Ford Escape isn’t a metaphor. It’s a machine. It gets up to speed fast enough to merge, slow enough to think. It eats up potholes and never complains.
I rotate tires on Thursdays. Change oil during slow weeks. Deliver crates, food, words. Sometimes I haul lumber. Sometimes I haul a thought that won’t let go.
This isn’t theory parked in a garage. This is application — live and routed.
Exit Strategy
I used to read Heidegger. Now I read maps, invoices, and the mood in my dog’s ears.
Drop out of abstraction.
Tune into the real.
Turn on the ignition.
That’s presence. That’s enough.
Footnotes
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Thích Nhất Hạnh. The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation. Translated by Mobi Ho. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.