I had made it out of the WCC parking lot and down the road and was waiting in line to make the right turn onto Washtenaw, when I heard a huge engine-revving/tire-screeching noise behind me somewhere. I looked in the rear-view mirror and, to my horror, I saw all kinds of white smoke coming out of the car directly behind me. It was an old beat-up white Camaro. Remember those? Do they still make ’em? My brother would know and he’d be the first to leave a comment. Vee-hickle blahg? Vee-hickle blahg? Yeah! I once knew a guy who had a Camaro. No, he wasn’t my boyfriend. That made it easy to refuse to ride with him.

If the smoke hadn’t been accompanied by all that noise, I’d have probably just thought, “call the EPA!” or maybe, “get the fire extinguisher!” Instead, I was a bit concerned that my trip home from school might be a little more exciting than I wanted it to be.

As I turned onto Washtenaw, the Camaro kept his distance behind me. Okay, so he’s just into noise and being macho or whatever it is. That’s fine, he’s just a kid. And then. SCREEEEEEEECH! VROOOOOOM! He peeled out from behind me into the next lane and passed me, accelerating like a bat outta hell. Now, that would have been pretty much okay with me had we been out on I80 in Nebraska or someplace. But we weren’t. We were in the middle of Megalopolis negotiating the area surrounding the Washtenaw/US23 freeway interchange. A traffic flow nightmare featuring traffic lights about every ten feet and the worst cloverleaf in the universe. You know, the kind where the people merging onto the freeway have to *cross paths* with those exiting. And vice versa. Huge semis everywhere, people accelerating onto the freeway ramps, people decelerating at traffic lights. Criss-cross, criss-cross. *Why* do they design those that way?

I dunno what he was thinking. Did he not *notice* the chaos or the traffic lights or the umpteen gazillion vee-hickles that were everywhere going every which way? Or was his vee-hickle outfitted to lift off and fly over it all? I don’t know, but — to my total horror — at the moment he made his escape from behind me and my dirty old Honda, some poor little econo-car a couple of vee-hickles *ahead* of me made the hapless decision to change lanes too. Y-iii-yyy! They’re gonna crash! To my great relief, the Camaro managed to screech to a stop inches away from impact.

I didn’t have time to watch anything else because my next task was to get onto the tight little circle that passes for an entrance ramp to US23 and then accelerate just precisely enough to merge into a tiny little spot in the middle of all the big semis that were screaming along in the right lane. I stopped shaking at about the State St./I94 interchange. I hope the little econo-car got home okay. Grok grok. Was it my cute l’il ol’ car? grok grok. Th’ orange ‘n’ yellow Li’l Tykes car? Grok grok. Y’all know where I think the driver of the Camaro got his driver’s license, roight? grok GROK!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.