Sunday's Drive Home

I live in the country. So that you get a good idea what that means, I offer this: My late Pekingese, Jack, was startled by gunfire one late summer Sunday morning as I walked him – it was the opening day of dove season. To get to my house one must cross the creek twice and avoid the farm implements. Bring a sack lunch to walk from the street to my front door. And so on. There is a two lane, blacktop farm-to-market road that I take to get to my house. The speed limit, in spite of the cross streets and homes, is 55. I rarely get the opportunity to drive at the limit because of the little old ladies and the asshats taking a country drive who apparently get their kicks looking at hay fields and dead skunks, armadillos, and opossums (opossi?). Then there are the complete jackasses who think that if you are an eighth of a mile away, they can pull out in front of you with no consequence…even if the car behind you won't be coming along for another 10 minutes. Apparently, math was never deemed necessary by these mental leviathans. Let's see here, 55 miles per hour equals 80.66 feet per second…an eighth of a mile is 660 feet…carry the 2…yeah, that's what I thought, a whole 8 fucking seconds!!! Eight seconds for you to pull out in front of me from a complete stop and THEN accelerate to 55 miles per hour, all while maintaining a couple of car lengths between us for safety! Unless you are driving a brilliant red barchetta on rails with a fucking jet engine, you are NOT going to keep me from having to drive my foot through the floorboard of my car trying to stop. To quote Will Smith in I, Robot: ASS!!.....HOLE!!

So I'm cruising along the other day on the way home, and I get to the really country part of the FM road with the higher speed limit. There's this car up ahead that I can tell is going slower than the limit, so as I approach I'm ready to start cursing the recycled 10W-40 lubing the cylinders of the goddamned '82 New Yorker when I start hearing this noise through my tilted roof. It's a loud sort of muffled grinding type noise that could be a stampede of bison from 12 miles away. I was so distracted I didn't notice the vibrating heads in the back seat of the Chrysler. As I edged closer to the POS, my distracted attempt at interpreting the clamor pounding my eardrums was interrupted by a piece of a tire hitting my windshield. That's correct; the douchebag in front of me (with 3 passengers in the car) was bouncing along at no less than 40 miles per hour on a flat rear driver's side tire. When my short period of customary astonishment and disbelief (along with a sense that I was somehow involved in a chase) had passed, I risked easing up a little closer to let the apparent wino know that I was not pleased with having to drive behind him and his quickly shredding Michelin Radial X. He responded by burying the needle. When the smoke cleared, he was a couple hundred feet ahead and I was left dodging a new assault of chunks of his amazingly abundant tire. The fucking thing never ran out. I slowed down and waited for a chance to pass. Once the dullard in the Mustang behind me had passed on the shoulder, ignoring both the law and the possibility of killing children riding their bikes or entire families out for an evening constitutional, I saw my chance and took it.

I have no idea what happened to the ninnies in the New Yorker, nor did I ever figure out whether they were plastered or just inbred. I didn't want to stare at them as I went by for fear that if they were stupid enough to take a Sunday drive on a flat, they were crazy enough to fill my brain with double-ought buck. Hell, for all I know they were late for a tee time.