Once while stuck on the West Loop I wondered if there are more people surrounding me in cars than there were American citizens in 1800. I looked it up: There were not. But it’s not an unreasonable query, I suppose. My imagination is that of a tired, middle-aged father. That the thought occurred to me says more about the West Loop than it does about me, because this tiny piece of horrific highway has a corrosive effect on one’s existence.

This segment of freeway — a mere five miles that spans from I-10 to the pavement formerly known as Highway 59 — has earned the dubious distinction of the most congested stretch of highway in all of Texas for the fourth consecutive year. And people say Houston is missing a dynasty.

These are some of my favorite West Loop memories:

· Once a mattress flung itself from a pickup truck and landed on my windshield where it rested for a terrifying instant before flipping like a gymnast off the vault, first over and then behind my car before sticking a landing beneath somebody else’s vehicle where it became their problem.

· Weeks later my daughter asked, “Is that legal? And even if so, could we pick a different lane?” She asked this because the pickup in front of us had 10 mattresses stacked in its bed, tied down by Christmas lights.

· One late night at an hour when Houston’s freeways are teeming with bad decisions, I saw a car decide to split the diff between a 610 lane and an exit lane and strike the barrier between the two. The car’s tail end flipped upward to where the vehicle was nearly vertical. Sparks showered down.

· A wooden pallet splintered several cars ahead of us and I tried to gently swerve within my lane to avoid the worst of the fragments. The next morning I found a six-inch shard embedded halfway through the plastic flap in front of a rear tire. Thanks, Mazda!

But mostly on this bit of freeway I see brake lights. A Warholian repetition of brake lights: Brake lights after brake lights, but each set slightly different. So many brake lights that I’ve started to see all manner of creatures on the backside of cars, between logos, brake lights, trunk handles and other details. Stare long enough and the effect is like searching for animals in the clouds. There are taillights that look like toucans, and others that resemble penguins. The trunks of most SUVs resemble robots.

“Do you see that sad clown?” I asked one morning.

“What are you talking about?” my daughter replied.

“Look: The headlights are the eyes. The bottom of the trunk is the downturned mouth!”

“I mean, yes, I see it now. But are you ok?”

Obviously, I’m not.

She then queued up Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now.”

“Better?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But no. I can’t see clearly. It’s all obstacles. In my way.”

She sighed.

This miserable parking lot reminds me of how much time we can waste between work and more nurturing activities at home. It is the epitome of time spent just getting there. I mean, it’s not really a waste. Without getting too deep into the weeds of dyslexia and public schools, I’ll say my wife and I decided to enroll our child in a school a few miles further from our home than we’d envisioned. And I don’t regret the move. But given locations of school and home, that decision created a polygamous relationship that included the West Loop as an auxiliary spouse. This auxiliary spouse, though, is a chaos agent that contributes little to the family’s well being.

Which is a weird thing to say, because nobody associates chaos with a 5 mph crawl toward an exit that always feels farther than it is.

I deliberately avoid any reference to “Highway to Hell.” At least that highway implies a certain swiftness toward a set destination. “All my friends are gonna be there, too,” goes the song. Not in our case. We love the kid’s school. But there is no Bon Scott “Whoo!” punctuating this trip. The West Loop is not a highway to Hell: It is, rather, part of a cyclical structure. Even if you don’t traverse the entirety of 610, you know it’s a circuit. And the smidgen of that loop that affects your day to day becomes its own cycle.

West Loop is more a highway to purgatory. There are no friends here. It’s just a mix of strangers, kind and unkind, with no way of knowing which is which until things get tight. Then you know.

Tom Cochrane sang that “life is a highway” and he wanted to ride it “all night long.” Cochrane clearly never put rubber to blacktop on the West Loop, with its flying mattresses and ill-applied Christmas lights. His song implied a certain linear progression. But who can relate to that? I think for more of us, life IS more like a loop. Want or not, we don’t ride it all night long. We ride it over and over every damned day with some variations along the way. And all night long? That’s when we rest before starting the cycle all over again.

And then there are the drivers. I’m sure the best of us are on the West Loop every day. But it’s easier to spot the worst of us. The opportunists and grifters. Those who think their minute is more precious than yours. But this nasty piece of highway is the great equalizer. Try to beat it. I have. You can’t. It’s like the flu: Monday’s access road solution on a Tuesday.

Waze will help you, right? It will not. I’ve followed Waze and seen my estimated commute swell like the national debt. I’ve ignored its directions and shaved off a minute — a minute! — only to have that minute added back later. The West Loop is a zero-sum game with deliberate parity. You may win today by skimming along the shoulder or treating an on ramp like a dedicated lane. But tomorrow, you’ll end up behind a mattress truck. So savor the Christmas lights.

After four years of fighting this beast, I’ve surrendered to it. Not surprisingly for a person who writes about music, it was a piece of music that helped me find my zen. I was on the West Loop (I deleted “stuck on” from that sentence because it’s a redundancy) and Tom Waits’s “Misery’s the River of the World” came on my shuffle.

Waits made his name in Los Angeles before moving further north in California. But ‘70s Los Angeles means he’s known clogged freeways.

“If there’s one thing you can say about mankind, there’s nothing kind about man,” he (sort of) sang. This is mostly true. But I’ve seen people stop and help strangers along this path. Not many. But more than none. I’ve also witnessed cannibalistic traffic behavior that makes me think the car is a far worse technological creation than the gun.

“All the good in the world,” Waits grumbled, “you can fit inside a thimble, and still have room for me and you.”

For some time I existed outside the thimble on the West Loop. I jumped lanes and looked for weaknesses and manipulated them. To some extent, I still do. If somebody is texting and lags, their spot is fair game. There were times when I couldn’t find the seams so I did what West Loopers do: gamble that I care less about my car than the other guy. Turns out that approach doesn’t work. I feel like I care about my car less than anybody in Houston, but this is a cutthroat town. I’ve crossed lanes with a Maserati making moves like the driver was piloting an ’89 Civic. Who does that?

But these years driving through the sand of this “freeway” has had the effect of slowing time for me. I’ve chased the rabbit down a feeder road hoping to better my fate daily. I’ve busted out and cut off people to get to an outer lane in hopes of cheating back in later by slipping ahead of another driver. I’ve jumped off the West Loop and navigated Galleria and Galleria-adjacent side streets in hopes of what? Shaving two minutes off a commute?

And at what cost? Now when people want to merge and I can accommodate, I accommodate. We’re all in this glob of road together. People honk at me a lot, and throw up the middle finger. But really the state of the flow doesn’t change by helping somebody. Recent construction has made this stretch of the West Loop worse. Completed construction — according to urban development theory — won’t really make it better than it originally was; it’ll just make it better than the horrible compromised present.

But I’m a changed person by it. I’ve surrendered to a more formidable force.

As Waits growls at the end of his song: “Everybody row, every body row, everybody row. Every body row.”