Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:44:00
Driving in Cocoon
Not in a cocoon. Like the movie. Old people everywhere. See, I know this place, a smallish upscale market where the cheese is overpriced but the steaks are to die for and the produce is simply the best in the state unless you’re growing it yourself. Seeing as how the only veggies left in this house are three giant onions and some truly sad-looking shiitake mushrooms that were fresh when Truman was president, I thought I’d pop over and get some good stuff.
Three times in the five miles between here and there I was almost hit by different old people. The first lady came up to her red light. Stopped. Looked at me. Then as I started my turn, with the green, she just looked straight ahead and drove forward. As though the laws of traffic, physics and space/time simply didn’t apply to her. I brake hard, she rolls through the red and off into the distance. OK. It happens.
Not 90 seconds later, I’m driving down a very busy, four-lane commercial district street. Every suburb/small city has one. Mega traffic, fourteen McDonaldses (McDonii?), 11 Subways and 42 strip malls. You know the type. 35 miles an hour limit with hundreds of cars actually going 50, and this old guy just barrels into the middle of the street from the KFC parking lot. Apparently that chicken needed to be eaten and he meant right the fuck now. I hit the brakes and I hear a squeal behind me; I actually had time to tense up before feeling what I thought would be the Navigator behind me smashing my ass end in. He stopped in time though. OK. It happens. Twice in a half-mile is weird, but it happens.
As I’m leaving the Awesome Mart (not their name, but it is in my head), I have to pull from a tiny side street onto another one of these big commercial four-laners. Luckily there are synced stoplights on either end of the block, so a hole opens up every 90 seconds or so. I pull out, safely ensconced behind a double row of waiting-for-the-green cars, getting ready to check the opposite lane before I pull into it when something to my left catches my eye. It’s a big-assed Crown Vic. I can’t see the driver’s eyes. I can see hair, forehead and some really impressive eyebrows. I thought for a second “Wow, this is so much like a bad stand-up comedian’s ‘old people driving’ joke it’s not even funny. Who did I piss off today?” The Crown Vic was creeping, at about two miles an hour, directly at my driver’s side door. I was stuck. Car behind me, cars coming in the lane I was trying to turn into. This nutbag is rolling up on me with all the speed and intensity of the OJ chase. He just kept coming. Like Jason stalking kids at Crystal Lake. I promise you, I am not enhancing this in any way; he got to within 18 inches of my door before a break came and I floored it the fuck out of there.
I’m staying home for the rest of the day. Screw that. :)
Oh yeah, I also saw something on the way home that made me laugh, then shake my head in sadness. A Ford Probe, looked to be maybe a ‘94 or ‘95, with what looked like 20” super-low-profile tires and the brightest, chrome-iest, ugliest god-damned rims you have ever seen on a car. If I didn’t know better I would swear they were actually Dubs, maybe the Ganja Floaters. No way would someone pay a thousand bucks a wheel for a mid-90s Ford Probe though, right? Can you even get 20” rims on a Probe? Whatever they were, the rims were obviously worth more than the car, my car and three of the cars around us. Utterly ridiculous. I wanted to snap a camphone shot but he rolled away too fast. The kicker? Car seat in the back. Priorities, people. Rims, then vehicle, then child. That’s how we roll in the 203.
Dinner tonight: Grilled asparagus and summer squash with a ginger/garlic marinade and some fierce steaks, trimmed nicely and burnt on the outside/red on the inside. I may be eating better these days, but I’ll be damned if I’m giving up the red meat. You can pry my steaks from my cold, dead, impacted, cancer-riddled colon as far as I’m concerned. Fuck you and fuck the AMA too. These teeth are made for chewin’, and that’s just what they’ll do. One of these days, if you try to take my meat, these teeth will be chewin’ on you. After I grill your tender parts, that is. With maybe some garlic oil and a nice rosemary-intensive spice rub.
Posted by JimK at 03:44 PM on July 17, 2007
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#2 Posted by Christian 
on 07/17 at 07:03 PM -
Sounds like that episode of South Park where the menace of senior citizens behind the wheel was addressed. My favorite part is where they hide in the old haunted house, only to find Old People in a car in the attic. “This doesn’t look like Country Kitchen Buffett”
Dude, I work in Wal-mart. Their ability to drive a car is nothing compared to their in ability to drive an electric wheel chair, whose basic operation is “push forward to go, let go to stop”. I had one old bitty get so flustered when she saw me in the aisle that she actually floored it and would have run me down if I hadn’t jumped out of the way. Flustered my ass. I think their old people ninja assassin squads.
#3 Posted by ErikTheRed on 07/19 at 05:36 AM -
We have something worse here - liberals. We buy produce at the hippy-dippy “Whole Foods Market” (because… they have the best produce around here) and the parking lot is full of these self-obsessed, holier-than-thou, Bush-is-t3h-devil-bumper-sticker-slapping assholes. Today there was a line of cars turning left into the parking lot (because everyone has to wait for the closest possible spot even if there’s another one one three spaces down). I know how these dipshits roll, so I came down another street so I could make a right turn into the lot. There’s no controlled intersection, so I have right-of-way over all of the fucktards turning left (hey, they could have gone around the block, too). Not good enough for this one left-turning (in more ways than one) bitch - she honks at me, flips me off, and yells at me because I turned in front of her. Stupid bitch should put her driver’s license back in the box of Cracker Jack’s (R) she got it from, and back away from the vehicle.
#4 Posted by jo-jo on 07/19 at 02:31 PM -
HAHAHAHAHAHA
ok, look. i know i’m a minority when i come here as a liberal. i usually bite my tongue and keep most of my comments to myself, but really? you’re going to blame crappy driving on liberals now? seriously? it was a joke, right? because it really didn’t appear to be ;)
#5 Posted by JimK on 07/19 at 03:31 PM -
Yeah, I’m not so sure it’s the “liberal” that makes them crappy drivers as it is the “self-absorbed dickweeds that think Whole Foods is like Hippy Mecca and bumper stickers are activism” part of their personalities.
The “right wing” equivalent would be the guy driving the F-150 with the “Gun control is using two hands” sticker cutting you off in the Wal-Mart parking lot. ;)
#6 Posted by jo-jo on 07/19 at 03:51 PM -
hahah exactly, oh brother-in-law o’ mine ;)
(ah, but just one of the reasons i avoid wal-mart like the plague… that and my ethnic+geographic upbringing… you can fill in the blanks there and insert the appropriate—yet accurate in this case—stereotypes ;)
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#1 Posted by Janna
on 07/17 at 05:40 PM -
During winter, AZ has what we call snowbirds. basically all the old people in the world move here for the winter because of our awesome weather. So basically, I feel your pain. Is a daily experience from about October through May.
I also apparently have a super cool invisible button in my car that I somehow keep hitting and it makes my vehicle invisible to other vehicles. I get a TON of near misses.
When I carpooled the running joke with my car pool buddy was which one of us hit the button. He always said he was shocked by the amount of near misses we had and the fact that they were not due to anything I did