Freeways Filled With Dipsticks

In the utopian world that exists in my head, there’s a single-lane super-highway running from the end of my driveway to my office, eighteen miles away. With no speed limits or on-ramps, there’s not another car or pedestrian in sight because I’m the only one who can access this righteous thoroughfare. I won’t need a coffee coozie in order reach my office before steam stops rising from my cup. In this same perfect world my car won’t even have a horn.

Alas, confined within this dystopian reality known as the Dallas Metroplex, my eighteen-mile, twice-a-day journey in rush hour traffic averages a blistering twenty to thirty miles an hour, whether I crawl the interstate or just Pac Man my way through five cities. While either way takes about the same amount of time, The side streets seem less stressful because I at least know why traffic has stopped.

Most of my drive is consumed with waiting: 

• Waiting for a green light and all the buttheads in the cross street to clear the intersection they’re currently blocking. They have the brains of cattle.

• Waiting for the lobotomy candidate three cars in front of me to glance up from his or her cellphone and recognize traffic has already moved on. 

• Waiting to get around a pack of suicidal bicyclists who’ve determined that: (A) Evening rush hour is the only time they can get in a good bike ride, and (B) A major thoroughfare is the only place to do it. I’d like to block each one of their driveways as they’re attempt to leave for work some morning, while I search through my vehicle’s hand book for the instructions to resetting my oil change light or switching my clock to daylight savings time.

Lacking the freedom of my perfect world, I’d settle for a semi-perfect world where a cellphone in somebody’s hand in rush-hour would melt like a chocolate bar in their hip pocket. Why isn’t that doable?

In that same world, imbeciles slowing to get a good look at a stalled car would have to endure a four-hour tuba recital at a school for the musically challenged, with a full bladder. 

People stuck in the middle of an intersection at a red light would be plucked from traffic by a giant claw. Why can’t that be arranged? And those who hit the gas pedal to beat the red light– they should be dipped in chicken fat, rolled in fried bacon bits, and thrown in a lake of hungry snapping turtles.

If I had my way, anyone going out-of-turn at a four-way stop sign would have to participate in the Running of The Bulls with their wrists taped to their ankles and a target painted on their tailgate.

In this far, far short of anything-resembling-a-perfect-world in which I find myself, none of my dreams are plausible. I must share my commute with inept, brain-dead, clueless morons whose elevators go sideways. I have to use the same roadway as some uninsured, daredevil dipstick whose moral compass has a hand grenade pin for a needle.

And what about all the road-raging, knuckle-dragging troglodytes who paradoxically believe a gun can impose traffic sanity? They’re the ones who should be shot. 

Commuters should line up every morning like the Indy 500, with the more experienced drivers in front, placing me in the pole position of course. Drivers putting on makeup– back of the line. Motorcyclists cutting between cars– there should be a bumper bounty on them. Packs of bicyclists– wrong race.

All motorists talking, texting, or even looking at a cellphone should have to wait until 8:31 am to leave for work, because they’re going to be late anyway. 

How wonderful it’d be if, instead of honking my horn, I could mash the same button and every driver in a ten-mile radius would be instantly zombified and move to the far right lane, where they’d remain motionless for the next half hour. 

It’s not that everyone else’s agenda is less important than mine. It just seems as if their only agenda is to thwart mine.