Sunday, January 27, 2013

Just One More Log on the Heart Attack Fire

You people probably think I complain an awful lot. I assure you, you have no idea. In real life, at least in the last couple of weeks, I've been nothing less than a whiny little snot, and it's starting to get annoying. To me, I mean - I'm sure that Mrs. Arone is long since past that stage.

When I'm watching TV, and an advertisement comes on, and the narrator blabs on about how his product is "the ultimate [whatever]," I inevitably say, "Uh-oh! It's the very last [whatever]!"

"Every time, Cheech? Every single time?", Mac asks me. "Yes. Every time." It's like a compulsion. At this point in the evolution of the English language, most people probably wouldn't even understand why this usage of "ultimate" bugs me. Hell, man, I barely even understand why - it's an utterly insignificant issue, by any measure of the word. Yet here I am, bitch bitch bitch.

Or the stop sign at the intersection. Our apartment overlooks a medium-busy residential intersection, controlled by four-way stop signs. I love looking out the window, just watching people go by. But I just can't help but monitor the traffic and comment incessantly about how nobody ever fricking stops at the stop signs, in any direction. In general, of course, it's a safe intersection. There are no line-of-sight impediments, so pedestrians and vehicles all have clear views, and I never see any near-misses. And 99.9% of the time, the cars come to an almost-stop, then continue through the intersection. And I'm about the farthest thing there is from a cop. But all I can do is bitch and moan, and have long, completely imaginary conversations with the drivers about what they think "STOP" means.

Or the bicyclers. Oh, those wacky bicyclers. It's great that they're doing what they're doing to keep themselves healthy, but I want to fucking stab them, all of them, right in the face. I don't mind sharing the road, and I don't have a problem keeping their presence in mind. But the number of bicyclers who seem to give not the tiniest little corn-kernel-sized shit about traffic laws must approach 95%. And I'm not even talking just about the bicyclers in my neighborhood, I mean everywhere. This is something I've observed since I first started driving, 22 years ago and 3000 miles away. Dammit, if I, as a 16-year-old taking Driver's Ed, had to learn how to make and recognize bikers' hand turn signals, why haven't I seen a bicycler make one, even ONE, since about 2008? Fuckers. To their credit, however, I must admit this : most of the time, they DON'T simply blast through the intersection at full speed, while not even bothering to acknowledge the other wheeled conveyances in the road. That only happens like seven out of 10 times.





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