Unsafe at Any Speed, Time, or Weather Condition

My job forces me to spend many hours I won't get back on the freeway. Traffic has always been crummy in Seattle, and I've always been amused at the excuses traffic reporters give:

1. It's too rainy.
2. It's too sunny.
3. It's too cloudy.
4. It's too dark.

Yes. Too dark. One night a few years ago, tens of thousands of Seattle drivers, caught unawares by the arrival of Pacific standard time, forgot that their cars came equipped with lights. How they got through so many years on this planet without an awareness of the existence of night escapes me, but there it is. I can just see them turning to their spouses or carpool mates and saying, "Um, when it's dark and you want to see, what do you do?"

It's this kind of thinking that may explain why so many drivers around the Puget Sound area get into accidents. For three consecutive days now I've been stuck in freeway parking lots because someone failed to take into account the presence of OTHER CARS ON THE ROAD when he tried to cross four lanes in one maneuver or to e-mail an office-mate pictures of his own ass. The one time I took a rear-ending on the freeway, the mullet-haired stick insect who transformed my VW Rabbit into modern art came up to me and said, "Sorry, buddy. My friend and I were talking and we just didn't see you there."

I thought, but did not say, "Didn't see me there? You were so busy comparing your sisters' blowjob techniques that you couldn't see me or the thousand cars that were stopped in front of me? Did you just come from a parallel universe where I have a beard and traffic is moving fine?" I also thought about throwing that skinny redneck over the guard rail onto the express lanes below, but that's when the State Patrol showed up.

Am I telling you all this just for the thrill of a self-indulgent blogger-rant? Yes. But it's also to explain why I'm linking to this little gem from The Onion. It has always been my worst fear that some moron would inadvertently splatter me against a wall--in many ways, my antipathy towards George W. Bush is an outgrowth of this, well, let's call it stupidiphobia--and daily contact with nimrods and twits exacerbates this condition.

So there.