He’s gone, you get me. I know, it’s excruciating.
Yesterday, driving home from work, I got caught in backup on I-97 northbound. Something like five miles of backup, maybe more. I imagine, given the glacial pace of traffic, that the backup extended well on to route 50 at its peak.
I have a theory about sitting in backup, in that it’s like mourning.
Step one, you’re upset. “Oh, man. What the shit is this?”
Step two, you’re pissed. “Fucking shitbaggers! Fucking go! Can’t you fucking see the cars are moving? Christ!”
Step three, final step: despair. It involves no speaking, no yelling. You’re just slumped in your seat, beaten, traffic bumper to bumper as far as you can see in every direction. You’re imagining you’ll probably die on that highway, wondering why in the hell you like to drive a manual transmission because now your left leg is sore.
Anyway, I was stumbling well into a hole of step three about an hour into the gridlock. There’s helicopters overhead and their buzzing is giving me a headache. Just as I’m coming up to the source of the gridlock - a trash truck which has managed to get flipped upside down - a van pulls up next to me. A late-twenties/early-thirties young man looks over at me, obviously trying to get my attention.
“Hey buddy,” Van Guy says. He gives me a thumbs-up.
“Uh, hi,” I reply.
“Hey, check this out!” Van Guy pulls out a magazine, flips to a page, and shows me, obviously pleased with himself. It’s at this point I realize he’s showing me a random page from the porno he’s been looking at. So I’m weirded out, a little, but don’t want to piss off a guy in a van in backup, so I laugh a little. “Hang on, hang on a sec. Check this out!” he says, as he flops the magazine open to a giant photograph of a vagina as he happily nods, complete with thumbs-up and shit-eating grin.
“Terrific!” I exclaim, laughing hysterically, just as an opening appears in traffic and I speed off onto the right-hand shoulder, the only lane getting around all three blocked lanes caused by the fucking upside-down trash truck.
Seriously, strangest thing that has ever happened to me in traffic, without question.
