How are you doing?

Good, that’s good.

How am I doing?

How nice of you to ask.

I am fine – especially now that I’m off the road, where my fellow motorists nearly parked me in that great garage in the sky on several different occasions this past weekend.

Holy cow! You sand-baggin free-wheelers need to learn to apply the breaks, along with some gold bond (and hopefully cool off that rash that’s got everybody so chaffed behind the wheel these days).

Everybody was weaving and winding, high-beaming and blinding; speeding and cheating; white knuckled and possibly reading – with the pedal through the floor gunning right for me.

I don’t think I was doing anything wrong, other than driving my trusty gray squirrel (a 1992 pewter GEO Prism that’s worse for the ware). In fact, I happen to think I’m a pretty good wheelman, who has a great deal of respect for my fellow wheelpeople, with a very good and well-defined understanding of the importance of good wheelmanship.

But many others obviously don’t. So that being the case, why do we even bother with the pleasantries and niceties of life outside of the car? Why should we care for civility in general – like family ties, friendships, greetings, compliments, and hand shakes – if we are just going to try and exterminate each other the second we start up the engines?

Who hasn’t seen this before:

“It was great working with you today Bill. See you tomorrow.”

“You too, Marty. Hey, thanks for being such a great friend. Tell Kelly and the kids I said hello.”

Then they get into their cars an ram on the interstate like two mountain goats, ready to crush each others’ skulls for no good reason other than that’s their natural instinct.

I’d rather that you give me a hockey-fight wedgie (up and over) and say “Your shirt made me do that,” than say with a smile, “That’s a sweet mock-turtle neck,” and then later on give me the old “McDonough Meltdown” into a guard rail somewhere.

We have got all our positive and negative energy directed in the wrong places. Let’s be kind on the road, and wretched everywhere else. In December, let’s decorate the road with Holiday lights and cheer. We’ll even slow our vehicles to trade Christmas presents with each other by way of a light toss.

During normal days on the road, carefully drive and write or mouth messages to each other that say “How do you do,” “Nice Weather, Huh?” or “I like your style.”

And we’ll fight and riot in the streets.

At, going to, and coming from work we will battle. In the malls we will rumble. At the movies our cell phones will ring, at our kids little league games we will bleed (bad examples).

We will put our lives at risk without conscience or care.

And we will get back into our cars and be thankful for where we live, and all our blessings.

Merry Christmas. I will break check you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Evening Sun Headlines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.