DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour  

I’ve written before about how no matter what lane of traffic I’m driving in it seems that those somewhere in front of me want to make a turn, causing me and the conga line trailing the turning vehicle to have to stop or slow down to a turtle’s pace. Meanwhile, the other lane looks like Turn 4 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The increasing frequency of this occurrence puzzles me because I have a fairly extensive readership through my various media outlets and you’d think by now that with the millions who have read of my incessant displeasures about things that tend to tick me off, the instances would be fewer.

Of course, the operative words in that phrase are “you’d think.” Well the answer is not just “No,” but it’s “HELL, No.”

Case in point: yesterday I was driving to my favorite Chinese binjo emporium for some takeout dinner because my wife was babysitting the twin-grandboys. I drove the four miles to the place — just following the flies — and decided to count how many times I had to slow way down or stop completely because some toilet word decided to make a turn.

There are nine stop lights between my house and the ptomaine pit I frequent. Even giving the devil the benefit of the doubt I’m going to maybe miss five. When I finally arrived at the Big Wang’s Cantonese/Sudanese/Ethiopian kosher delicatessen I had stopped ELEVEN times; count ‘em, 11 times!!!!! I was so angry that I messed up my order and accidently wound up with a quart of Jewish Won Ton with BBQ pork dumplings. Damn I was mad!!!

That’s when I got to wondering just what I did to make The Big Guy mad at me. Some higher power has to have it in for me in order to ordain I get stuck behind a slew of bastards who have to make right-hand turns in order to just go home, thus causing me to slow down and take twice as long to get to my destination as it would if these people would just die and not spoil my view, if nothing else.

I came up with several possibilities. When I was a kid during the Jewish high holidays my mother used to go to temple while my father, dopey brother and I would either go to the Michigan City Zoo or some other place to kill a couple of hours, then we’d stop by the drug store food counter and have a cheeseburger, then go back to temple and pick my mother up so we could go to Rabbi’s house to break the fast.

Or the time that my Sunday school class was going with the Rabbi in his Buick station wagon that was big enough to hold the entire population of a small Indiana town, and the class hottie and I were carrying on like two dogs in heat. (It wasn’t my idea; the girl was a tramp, what can I tell you? At worst you could maybe label me an enabler.)

I think the Rabbi would have stopped his car and thrown both of us to the curb, but his young son was really fascinated by all this and I suspect the Rabbi figured that he may not have to have that Birds & Bees talk that he’d been dreading; he would let his son watch the carryings-on in the back row and chalk it up to a biology lesson.

So, as I said earlier, those two episodes (out of probably a hundred more) shouldn’t have been enough to curse my very soul to have such a similar future like Sisyphus (Google it; I’m running out of words I have to write). Whatever the reason I’m sick of it. I could very easily get motion sickness from the constant starts and stops that I have to perform between stop lights. Not to mention the wear and tear on my poor little brakes.

As nuts as it sounds I suggest that a law be passed that no vehicle is allowed to turn if there’s another vehicle behind them in the same lane. They should have to continue straight until the space behind them is perfectly clear and then and only then can they make a turn and from that point on they should be able to drive down local streets and roads until they can eventually wend their way to their own driveway.

Just think how beautiful life on earth would be if that were the law of the land; I often do, every damned time I have to slow down or stop to let some insensitive tick turd make his turn.

It’s a good thing I’m not subject to road rage because things could really get ugly.