If you’ve never been to Seattle, the traffic system seems to have been laid out by drunken, blind squirrels. Roads come and go at random directions, loop around, cross over themselves. It’s not unusual to have five- or even seven-way intersections. And so, if someone does the traditional jackass thing in heavy traffic and pulls into the intersection knowing full well they won’t get through it before the light changes, they can block traffic in up to six different directions. To dissuade the practice, there are signs up informing you of the fine for being that kind of social douche. The cost for blocking an intersection? $101. Yes, one-hundred-and-one dollars.

I’m not sure what the thinking is there. Is that the magic price point people don’t want to go over, like the Nintendo Wii, where people say, “Hey, I’m willing to spend $199 on something, but over $200? Forget it!” Is it just to make it more inconvenient at the ATM when you go to get the money to pay the fine? “Aw, man… now I gotta take out $120, then find someplace to break the twenty…” Whatever the reason, all I can say, based on my observations of Seattle drivers, is that fine obviously ain’t nowhere near high enough to stop them. Maybe they should up it to $102.

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I’ve decided to buy one of those dumb-ass over-the-ear Bluetooth headpieces that countless cell-phone douches use to hold ungodly loud conversations with invisible people in the supermarket so they can continue buying toilet paper without having to tie up their hands. Please understand, I’m not going to use it for that purpose. I’m only going to use it in the car, and I’m not even going to hook it up to my cell phone. Just this way I can sing along with the radio and passing motorists will simply think I’m having an animated phone conversation.

Better to be thought of as an ass than a nutcase.

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Driving to work the other day and I pulled up behind a car plastered with patriotic bumper stickers. “Proud to be an American!” one proclaimed. “These colors don’t run!” asserted another. There was a standalone American flag, a 9/11 remembrance sticker, and several others, all announcing a love for and pride in anything American.

The car was a Nissan.

I always like a little hypocrisy in the morning; makes the day go faster.

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One thing I worried about when first contemplating the move to Colorado was winter. I’d heard horror stories about the amount of snow you could get this close to the mountains, seen photos and videos of huge drifts of snow, cars sliding around, people struggling through blizzard conditions. “Relax,” people told me, “Colorado in the winter is no big deal. They’re used to snow. They’re ready for snow. They know how to handle it.”

Having now gotten through part of the winter here, I can agree that, yes, Colorado does indeed know how to handle winter. They handle it, apparently, by not doing a damn thing about it. We’ve had several semi-hefty snowfalls now, and every time, nothing has been done. Oh, sure, they run the plows in a limited fashion along the main interstate, maybe hit the one most-driven surface street, but otherwise they do squat. No salt, no sand, and certainly no plowing.

We live on the north side of town and I can state with conviction that they have never once plowed any street within a fifteen-mile radius of us, preferring to allow the traffic to sort of plow little clear paths with their tires, which really only packs the snow into a frozen sheet of slippery death. So you skid and slide along, guessing where the lane might actually be, and praying at every stop light that you don’t just go spinning merrily through the intersection. It’s fun!

I guess they figure, hey, half the state drives SUVs anyway, might as well let them get some use out of the things.

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As I think I’ve mentioned, I moved to Colorado a while back and, for the most part, it’s been a nice change. The scenery’s nice, the weather’s been mostly excellent, and, aside from an overabundance of SUVs, I’ve had few complaints.

However, here in Colorado, roughly every third person is an avid skier, and they have those metal racks on top of their cars so they can drive their ridiculously expensive pieces of wood or fiberglass or whatever up the mountain where they can use them to try and hurt themselves. Fine as far as it goes, but if they’re behind you a ways in traffic, those racks can look an awful lot like police lights. So you’re tooling along in traffic, glance up in the rearview, “Whoa! Slow down! Cop, cop… nope, skier.” I think this explains a lot about the oddball Colorado traffic patterns.

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Driving to work the other day and pulled up behind a car at a red light. It was a new Toyota Corolla, red, still had the temporary tag in the back window. Shiny, clean, this thing had been off the dealer lot for maybe two weeks, three tops.

The back was covered with bumper stickers.

Harley Davidson logo in the back window, Happy Bunny showing me his butt, Support our Troops ribbon magnet, my [breed of dog] is smarter than your honor student, local radio station call letters, on and on. And I couldn’t help but wonder, what would possess you to do that to a brand new car? Are you so desperate to show your individuality that your first act as owner of a new vehicle is to destroy the paint job by covering it with corporate logos and snappy sayings that everyone else is already displaying? Do you need that badly for anonymous motorists behind you to know where you stand on the thorny issues of motorcycle brand and radio station selection?

Congratulations on making a personal statement with your vehicle, although I’m not sure “I just totally trashed a new car” was the best choice.

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There’s that famous saying, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” to which I think the only rational response can be: “Good.” The SBM and I drove across Kansas today in a trip that took, best estimate, forty-three hours and destroyed something precious in my soul. You can drive for hours and swear you’re in the same place because it all looks the same. Kansas is a vast emptiness, full of nothingness as far as the eye can see, and, to quote novelist Terry Pratchett (who admittedly wasn’t talking about Kansas but totally could have been), “All you can say about the place is it isn’t anywhere else.” Near as I can tell, the only thing Kansas has going for it is that it keeps Nebraska and Oklahoma from scraping.

Now, understand, I’m not some big-city snot who looks down his nose at anything smaller than a metropolis and can’t come to grips with something as bland as a meadow. I’m a small-town boy who came from a one-horse burg where the horse took off without leaving a forwarding address. I know about empty horizons, big-ass fields, and large gaps between towns, but Kansas does all these things like it has something to prove. There is literally nothing for miles, and then, when there is something, it leaves you wishing it had actually been nothing because the something is so pathetic. Although I can’t explain exactly how, I’m sure if we eliminated it as a state, divided it into fourths and gave a chunk to each of the neighboring states, the contents of each quarter would instantly improve.

Maybe it’s unfair to trash an entire state based on a single car ride along a single interstate. Maybe Kansas has lots of interesting features, friendly citizens, and a rich culture. Maybe it’s more than just large swaths of grass dotted with the occasional cow, ramshackle towns, and filthy truck stops.

Maybe, but I ain’t going back to check.

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I’m still seeing a lot of those giant ribbon magnets on people’s cars these days. You know the ones. They’re shaped like the little pins all those celebrity doofs wear on the awards shows to display their support for some cause or another. This is a fad I thought would have vanished long before now, just like Baby on Board signs and suction-cup Garfields, but it persists, spurred on by people’s deep desire for anonymous motorists to know what they believe in.

The one I’ve been seeing the most is this huge yellow ribbon that says “Support our troops.” OK, I’m at a red light behind you, I see your magnet… now what? What, exactly, am I supposed to do at this stage? Support the troops, right, got that. How? How would you recommend I do that? For that matter, what are you doing? Besides spending a couple bucks on a mass-produced magnet that gives money to some company cashing in on patriotism, I mean. You think driving to McDonald’s with a magnet on the back of your gas-guzzling SUV is helping the troops overseas? You really want to support the troops? Send ‘em plane tickets home. I think they’d like that better.

You know what I’m waiting for? When people get tired of this magnet craze in a little while and they all take them off and discover to their horror that they still have a magnet-shaped mark permanently embedded into their paint. A silhouette where the dirt and sun haven’t affected the paint the same and will always be visible until they repaint the entire car. That’s gonna be a lot of fun. Hey, maybe the car-painting companies are the ones making the magnets.

I could support that.

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OK, I’m sure we’ve all seen street signs like the one above. Fairly common, right? The baffling thing to me is, most times when I see them, they’re lying on the ground, still attached to their metal poles because someone has driven over them and knocked them down. I understand accidents happen but… this is a sign that specifically tells you to drive around it! Do not drive on this area. That’s the very clear, unmistakable message of this sign. There’s an obstacle here. Go around. So how do people keep driving over these things? Are they driving around in the dark with their headlights off and their eyes closed? I envision them driving along, squinting, trying to make out the vague shape floating in the darkness ahead, peering through the windshield as it gets closer, a little clearer, almost have it… oh crap!

You don’t see stop signs or speed limit signs plowed over and lying on the side of the road. Crosswalk, yield, do not enter, no passing zone, all safe. But the one sign that tells you clearly to give it some room gets run down with astonishing frequency. Come on, people, there’s other ways to rebel.

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Recently I wrote about our woes with the deplorable parking situation at our apartment complex, and how the office threatened to tow my fiancée’s legally parked car. I also mentioned how some people even park in the blue-slashed no-parking area next to the handicapped spot and how I wished death upon them. Well, this weekend I got my chance to make that happen.

I left the house on Saturday to go get some groceries and spotted a car once again in the blue-slashed area. Had the weather been colder, I might have gone back upstairs for a jug of water and poured it all over their car, taking special care to fill the door locks and gas tank. But the temperature was above freezing and I had stuff to do, so I headed out. When I returned, the car was still there. This was about 4:00 in the afternoon, which meant the car had been there all night and most of the day. Seemed likely it might be there the rest of the night. Seeing an opportunity to help these asshats get what they deserved, I headed over to the office to report them. Why not? Somebody called in bad info on my fiancée, seemed only fair that I call in good info on someone actually doing something wrong.

I popped into the office which was thankfully empty and collared one of the office chair-warmers. Here’s how the conversation went:
“Hey, wanted to let you know there’s a car over at building two that’s illegally parked in the blue-slashed no-parking spot next to the handicapped zone.”
“They’re parked in the handicapped spot?”
“No, the spot next to it.”
“Well, that’s okay.”
“How is that okay? It has blue slashes painted across it. That’s universal for ‘don’t park here.’”
“Oh, that spot. I thought you meant the other spot next to the handicapped spot. Yeah, they shouldn’t park there. Do they have handicapped plates or a hang tag?”
“What difference does it make? Handicapped people can’t park there, either. No one can.”
“Oh, right. Do you happen to have their license plate number?”
“No.”
“Okay, well if you want to go back over and get that, along with the make and model of the car, then come back with that information, I’ll pass it along to our courtesy officer.”
“Yeah, but, they’re parked there right now. You can just send your courtesy officer over there. It’s pretty obvious which car they are. It’s big and metal and parked in the no-parking spot. Hard to miss.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Why not? They’re breaking the law. I’m letting you know they’re breaking the law. All you have to do is send over your pet cop and have them towed.”
“We can’t do that without their plate number.”
“He can write it down when he goes over to tow them.”
“Well, we can’t tow them.”
“You can’t–? Why can’t you tow them? They’re breaking the law. Okay? Not just your little apartment complex ‘let’s keep everyone happy’ rules, but the actual law. And you can’t tow them?”
“We can’t do anything without their plate number.”
“*sigh* Okay, say I go get their plate number. What will you do?”
“We’ll let our courtesy officer know.”
“And what will he do?”
“Run the plates.”
“That’s very threatening. And after that?”
“Place a tow warning on their car.”
“And after that happens?”
“After twenty-four hours, if the car hasn’t moved, we’ll call it in to have it towed.”
“Which will take how long?”
“Oh, probably a couple hours.”

So there you have it. I report a driver that’s breaking the law and they refuse to do anything unless I do even more leg work for them, and then their entire response is to put a scary little notice on the car (if they get around to it) that the driver will see and then ignore because he’s moving his car anyway. They couldn’t be bothered to go and check, requiring me to go get all the information for them. And then nothing was going to come of it anyway.

So I left and went home, not bothering to call back with the plate number. The car was still there, and remained through most of Sunday. It finally vanished sometime late Sunday afternoon, before the 24-hour tow warning would have expired anyway. So someone flagrantly breaks the law for three days and nothing is done about it, despite my efforts, while we obey the rules and get a warning–excuse me, courtesy notice–slapped on our car for our trouble.

Shoulda gone with the water jug idea.

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