Oh, how I wish that Chuck Berry still wrote songs nowadays, especially those car songs he used to write so well. "Maybellene" and "No Particular Place To Go" were great songs, and we could use some more along those lines.
If someone could write "Hey It's A Turn Lane, Not Your Personal Lane," that would be marvelous. First, they could write a new title, but we are seeing more and more people pulling out of side streets into packed traffic and just bopping along in that center lane as if it were paved and striped off just for them and their little jitney.
The other morning, I'm schlepping off to work, and here comes a blue car doing that number on the main road. Both westbound lanes were occupied steadily with cars going to work or school or wherever, and The Impatient One just had to get somewhere, so zoom! here came that blue streak, right in front of me.
When we got to Harford Rd and the stop signal, I looked over into the car with my practiced baleful look, designed to help the miscreant remember, the next time they have an urge to cut someone off in traffic, the last time they cut someone off, and that guy in the pickup with the Stewie stickers looked at them with daggers shooting out of his eyes like Sarge looks at Beetle Bailey. The driver was a slightly-abashed looking mom, but her son, backpacked and ready for another day in the grove of academe, looked at me like, "Yeah, I know, mister, she drives like holy hell."
Then it dawned on me. We learn our driving habits from our family, because it is their fenders which we dent first. And worst. But chances are, this woman had a mother or a father who drove as if they were in a demolition derby, too, and that's where she learned that devil-may-care way to drive.
Since she lives right around the corner from us, I guess I'll be running into her again, as it were. Do we really suspect that the devil may, in fact, care?
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