Warhol morning

I am stuck behind a Ford Focus that is stuck behind someone else that is stuck behind someone else ...

The Focus is splattered with bumper stickers that are too small to read without risking a wreck, but the vanity plate intrigues ...

Warhol.

I presume the intention is to honor Warhol, Andy. The artist.

That someone would go to the expense and time-consumption of acquiring a plate to celebrate Andy, sets my thoughts a-spinning. I try to glimpse the driver, a man probably a few years older than me. Probably would be very interesting to sit down and chat with in a coffee house.

We are between cities and I wonder if he is traveling to mine. But my natural impatience eventually overcomes my curiosity and I shift lanes and leave him behind.

"Whammer Jammer" by J. Geils Band is playing on the radio. Great start-of-a-summer road trip kind of song. I thrash around appropriately in my car. But sadly, I am going to work, not play.

I think about that old country song, something to the effect that every day, a man pulls up to a certain stoplight in town and must make a decision: right means home to the Wife, kids, mortgage; left leads to the open road.

In the corner of my eye I glimpse a bearded guy sitting on a box by the side of the freeway, playing a guitar. Surreal. But since I am now going 81 mph in the left lane, I have deprived myself of the chance for a closer look, I am half a mile beyond him before my brain clicks into gear. Oh well. Surely in my life I will again see a bearded guy sitting on a box by the side of a freeway playing guitar and next time I will be going slow enough to pull to a stop and have a chat.

Billy Idol is screaming "White Wedding" on the radio. Against my will and the mood of the music, I slow down. Don't care to give a traffic cop a score for the morning.

I pull into the dismal parking lot of my place of employment just as Pink Floyd begins "Us and Them." I consider sitting there and grooving to the whole song and being rather late. I shut off the music and begin another day.

I will make the right turn at the stoplight tonight.

Excoriating Accelerationally-Challenged Imbeciles

I. Hate. Slow. Drivers. In. The. Fast. Lane.

Die. Die. Die painfully and slowly, the way that you have driven.

I cannot understand how a person could be so clueless as to dribble along, slowly enough for an arthritic octogenarian to do cartwheels around his vehicle, while a dozen cars pile up in utter frustration behind him, trying desperately and at peril of their lives to squeeze into whatever gap may finally open up in the other lanes.

I encountered such an idiot today, driving some kind of panel truck. For a good five minutes, he put-putted along I-95 at a speed usually employed by ducks waddling around a pond. Car after car rode his bumper but he was oblivious. In front of his benighted vehicle, the left lane was free and clear.

I tried and tried and finally my chance came. I gave him a look of pure hatred as I passed and made sure that he saw it. I jerked in front of him and slowed down nicely for a moment or two. It was a wasted lesson. As he vanished mercifully behind me, I could see that he had no intention of changing lanes, ever, and the line of traffic continued behind him.

My choices of torture for such a person would involve electric sanders, razor blades, vicious ants, rabid dogs, red hot skewers, colonic cleansing utilizing caustic chemicals and ground glass, forcibly-fed toadstool puree and a woodchipper.

How quickly it all happens

I was southbound on the freeway this morning when I heard an odd noise.

To my right, a truck was losing its load -- a huge, metal drum-thing.

I don't know how many seconds passed -- maybe just one.

The drum bounced off into the road and across the lanes of traffic towards me.

I had to decide whether to speed up and get past it before it reached my lane or slow down and hope that it might stop bouncing before we met.

I sped up, which was a good thing, because it kept going across my lane and onto the center strip.

Who knows what could have happened? Thank God there was no one in the middle lane -- they would have had no chance to escape.

Life is fragile and can end in a moment.

Please be careful out there people.