… ZoomZoom
February 10th, 2004 byThe world outside is a blur. Zipping, skipping, screaming silently by.
The only constants are the zooming cars nearby, the cellphone addicts in their leather cars, and the cousins of the white stripes on the road coming one after another. We’re driving quietly quickly with the flow of traffic. We talk little, instead focusing on the road itself, each of our minds calculating, and extrapolating data of our nearby metal neighbors.
A good driver knows one thing: to go forward, sometimes you have to go backwards and sideways.
Driving in a large metropolitan area is a beatuiful wonderful annoying bloody hell get out my way you !@#! %!-
Let’s start over.
Driving is fun. Metropolitans are fun. Thefore, driving in a metropolitan area is fun. True, there be traffic jams, that got more cars then a beach got sand but there’s an element of intelligence about a large moving traffic that is almost non-existent in small towns. Here, when you drive, you’re playing chess and checkers at the same time on the same board.
It’s a chess board, where queens and knights are jumping and changing lanes crazy fast. There are pawns and bishops that refuse to move out of your way, only as a grudging last resort. And there are kings of the board, helpless idiots that needed to get off the highway fourteen exits ago but couldn’t because the queen wouldn’t let them.
And just like checkers, you zip across the lanes, changing speeds, angles, directions and intentions a thousand times a minute. Should you reach the end of the board (your exit), you are free to move as you like. It’s just a matter of getting there.
However, it’s the cunning driving that I adore here. Up on the highway, it’s war, with alliances made temporarily and given way to stronger forces. It’s insanity, a giant mad asylum because everyone is crazy enough to drive like that. It’s highschool all over again, when you only pay attention to the rules whilst the hall monitor is around, a careless reckless kingdom of halls for you otherwise.
She sat on the chair, leaning up against the counter, a 70 year old woman who had seen more world then I had seen life. And she tells me, in all her wisdom, nuggets of smuggled secrets:
“Listen carefully. Make sure you get yourself a V-6.”
February 10th, 2004 at 4:26 pm
The heck is a V6?
February 10th, 2004 at 9:28 pm
“you zip across the lanes, changing speeds, angles, directions and intentions a thousand times a minute.” ~ right. remind me never to get in a car that you’re driving.
as if I should say anything… the only complaint I’ll accept about jersey is it being a land of crazy drivers. because there’s just no arguing with that. especially now that the insurance companies have left us for dead.
but yes, driving is fun, and lifesize potentially-fatal chess and checkers is fun too.
February 11th, 2004 at 1:35 am
“And there are kings of the board, helpless idiots that needed to get off the highway fourteen exits ago but couldn’t because the queen wouldn’t let them.”
Lol, somehow, that’s not how I’d imagine a king.
And the traffic here is killer. It’s not a jam, it’s a shake. But a V-6 would get you nowhere fast. You need a lawnmower sized pocket car like my Mehran to squeeze through the crush.
February 11th, 2004 at 8:44 am
Owl: Hence the tagline “give me a corolla with a vette engine”.
Faiza: A V-6 is a type of an engine. Normally, you get a 4 cylinder engine in base level cars such as the Toyota Corolla. But higher versions of the Camry have a V6 emblem on them, denoting a more powerful engine.
Anju: Many have driven with me. Others, repeatedly, but that’s because they had no choice.