Do squares feel superior to other rectangles? I
remember in early grade school, maybe even in kindergarten, hearing
the phrase, “All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are
squares.” I had two reactions to this. The first was that the
word rectangle sounded like what happened to my sister’s yarn ball
after our cat was done with it. The second was a more profound
epiphany – it was my first exposure to elitism.
Just as some rectangles are more ‘special’ than
others, some people are the squares among our equiangular
quadrilateral society. Whenever I hear the term – doesn’t
measure up, I think of some poor rectangle being outed by a square
for having his height fall short of his length.
Pretty heady philosophical BS, eh? Yeah, I got layers. Don't put me in a box though - my thinking is too two-dimensional for that.
The thing is, most rectangles would never know their
equilateral failings if there wasn’t some snotty square out there
to point them out.
THIS is why people don’t
carpool. It has nothing to do with convenience, or apathy for the
environment. It has everything to do with the fact that when you are
at the wheel of your private vehicle you are the judge of what
constitutes good and bad driving. YOU are the elite, the square, the
standard, and anyone who doesn’t drive just like you do has a
deficiency in either his height or length – and (if you’re
feeling particularly judgmental,) maybe his angles might not be
exactly 90 degrees either.
So the road is full of idiots, bozos, morons and
rhombuses. Can anybody reading this not relate to that? If so (and
you’re not under the driving age, a wealthy person with a chauffer,
or the ghost of Mother Teresa,) write to me at headleyh@hotmail.com.
(If you’re the wealthy person with a chauffer, buy a
couple thousand downloads of Trouble in Taos while you’re at it.)
I don’t expect many emails on this one.
While most of my time on the road is spent waving a gas
can hoping someone will stop and give me free fuel, when I do drive,
I strive to go the most fuel-efficient speed possible. For my
twenty-six-year-old Yugo, that is fifty-seven miles an hour.
Fifty-seven is marginal ticket bait in a forty-five zone, slightly
annoying road hog in a fifty-five, and deadly speed bump in
sixty-five. When uneven pavement rattles loose bits of my Balkan
engineered understructure, I take it down to fifty-six.
I stay to the right. It’s the least I can do. If I’m
going almost ten miles an hour under the limit, I belong in the slow
lane. That’s what they taught me in Crash Smedley’s Driver’s
Education Class. Crash was right – back in the Ford
administration.
Everything changed under Jimmy Carter.
Have no fear political-phobes. I’m not about to
resurrect your robo-call nightmares. Political positions are for the
naïve and hopeful, and I, Headley H. Hauser, am neither. The reason
I mention our former peanut-pickin’ President is that he (at least
temporarily) lowered the national speed limit to fifty-five
miles-per-hour.
This threw our societal definitions of good driver
(already unstable) into total confusion. It was almost like throwing
a hex at the definition of square (which you do by adding two
equivalent sides and equalizing the resulting angles. I dropped out
of Geometry in High School because my Grandmother, Hortense Hauser,
didn’t approve of witchcraft.)
Hold-on; I’m lost. Let me reread my last paragraph
without the parenthetical comments.
Right! So our traditional law-abiding driver of the
Gerald Ford era and before gave new thought to his/her regular
practice of always staying to the right, and allowing swifter
(careless whipper-snapper) drivers to pass them. If the NATIONAL
speed limit was fifty-five, why stay to the right? Was the left lane
not in the same nation as the right? Why should those who obey the
law get stuck where an open drivers-side window exposes you to
law-breakers exhaust? Why not get some of that median weed produced
O2 available only in the left lane?
It wasn’t just a privilege; it was a duty!!! Cars are
not allowed to pass on the right; that was question seven on the DMV
learner’s permit test. If the patriotic law-abider drives at
fifty-five in the left-hand lane then… EVERYBODY will have to go
fifty-five!
Within a year the incredibly lucrative, Drive
and Shoot gun shops opened near onramps all
over Southern California. A year after that, ‘whatever’ became
an acceptable answer to question seven on the DMV learner’s permit
test.
We’ve had mutations over the years. I get people
behind me in the right hand lane flashing their lights. I think
they’re asking me to pull left so they can pass me in the lane
their parents always use to pass people in. A turn signal, once a
rule-of-the-road request to make way, is now interpreted as a
declaration of impending invasion. I get passed so consistently
after turning on my left blinker that I get angry with people who
back off and give me space to enter their lane.
My favorite is the driver that pulls up on my left
bumper and stays put. I’m not sure what the thinking is – it’s
not the patriotic, ‘fifty-five or die!’ thinking of their
parents. I think some of them are hoping to draft a few extra
miles-per-gallon off my boxy aerodynamics.
Imagine – people are now asking me to break wind in
front of them.
A few years ago I wrote a little ditty about these
special people:
Don’t
Box Me In
(to the tune of Don’t
Fence Me In)
There’s a line of
trucks afore me and you block the passin’ lane
Don’t box me in
You got us crammed up
tighter than the cars along a train
Don’t box me in
So drop the cell phone
buddy ‘cause it’s time to get busy
That’s a V6 that
you’re drivin’ not an old tin lizzy
There’s a trucker
shiftin’ down who’d like ta knock you dizzy
Don’t box me in
So what has all this to do with car pooling? When
someone else is in the car, you suddenly have more than one
definition of what constitutes good driving. The era of rules of the
road has passed. Each driver is now king/queen (emperor in the case
of larger SUVs) of their petro-fueled, electrical, or hybrid rolling
country. When other drivers buckle in, insurrection ensues.
Except with my darling niece, Hilda, a student of late
60s terminology who rode with me last week. I was tooling along in
the right lane of a four-lane highway at my customary fifty-seven
miles-per-hour.
“Uncle Headley,” she said. “You’re such a
square.”
“Thank you, Hilda,” I replied. “You’re pretty
equilateral yourself.”
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