The first light on my way to work is only about 400 yards from my apartment here in Dracut, MA. In fact, you can see it
here if you look carefully enough. This is a dangerous light. Just yesterday when the light in my direction changed to green, some nut zipped by on a red right in front of me. Had I started more quickly I would have surely been flattened. I guess driving a car with less horsepower than a lawnmower has its benefits.
But then I noticed that people here are ridiculously impatient, particularly during rush hour when the lights are inevitably red, no matter from which direction you approach them. I mentioned in an earlier post that the roads here are terrible, and I wish I could express just how much of an understatement that is. My shocks would be better off with me having square wheels, I kid you not. What's even worse, however, is the fact that half of the roads themselves are only about 1.5 lanes wide without dividing lines. Or the lines are faint and suddenly disappear. Seriously. No one knows how many lanes the road has until suddenly you realize you're driving in between two.
My favorite part of the drive home, though, is when the 6-lane highway abruptly ends with a stoplight. Here you have a choice: take a right, or get in one of either turn lanes (there is no straight passage). Both the left turn lanes, as you soon learn, lead directly to a single lane street. Confusion en masse occurs with everyone bottlenecked in the intersection. It reminds me of the sink in my
sister's old apartment whose garbage disposal would reject any matter offered to it. This would supply herself and her dear husband hours of amusement with a bottle of liquid drainer and a toilet plunger (which I suspect was purchased expressly for this purpose). Unfortunately no traffic plunger of any size or shape exists to unclog this slimy hairball of impatient motorists, thus we're forced to wallow in the septic misery that is driving through Lowell, MA.
The problem, however, is that it is
impossible to get anywhere without driving. The roads through town are atrocious, rendering a bicycle useless. Public transportation outside of or between cities is non-existent. Walking would take hours, which leaves only
- skiing (requires snow)
- sledding (again, snow)
- teleportation
In my off hours I have been working furiously on #3, but with few meaningful results. This is attributable to the fact that the only documentation that exists on the matter resides in form of broadcast television episodes of a show "Star Trek," (apparently widely popular amongst teenagers in the 70s) and the mutant character Nightcrawler in the Marvel comics
X-Men. Seeing as I am neither a teenager nor a mutant, it will be unlikely that I will fully understand the concept of such technology.
Plan B is digging a hole from the front lawn of my apartment complex to the basement of the building in which I work. This will, of course, require a
B6.
Until these become a reality, however, I'm stuck behind the wheel. About 23 minutes each day. For 6.5 miles. To
and from work. Naturally having twenty stoplights (nearly all of them red) each direction causes a modicum of impatience to the driver. So pushing a yellow light, in fact, can shave whole minutes off the commute, particularly if one avoids the previously mentioned pile of traffic vomit at the intersection.
Up until yesterday I had resisted such temptations. Up until yesterday had not given into the seduction that is rushing that yellow light, lingering on the brink of red. Up until yesterday I had withstood the allure of the thrill that is accelerating through an intersection; your heart pounding, knuckles white gripping the wheel...
Up until yesterday I was citation-free in Massachusetts.
