The Fate of the Fiery Death

Little doubt can any longer be had that I shall surely die a fiery death on a lonely residential road in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. It will happen at the hands of one of three types of people:

1. An elderly driver whose face is so far below the dashboard that I will never see it.
2. Some idiot on a cell phone who will never notice me until his/her pickup is implanted squarely in the side of my little Saturn.
3. A young man, still in his teens, who will never hear my blaring horn over the thud, thud, thudding of his hyper-base speakers implanted somewhere in the rear of his car.

Please do not mourn for me. I know it could come, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it except stay off the roads.

As for the elderly driver, I will never see a face. I know my last sight on earth will be of two shriveled hands grasping the top of a steering wheel, with no sight of a head in the car. As much as I mourn the loss of freedom that such drivers will experience, I will support any petition drive to get them off the road.

I am not talking here about the perpetual left blinker that all of us Midwesterners know so well. I am talking about drifting across three lanes of traffic without any warning. I can attest to intersections run straight through with nary a glance to either side as the green-lighted traffic slams on their brakes in self defense.

I have screamed in terror as a beloved senior driver screeched to a halt on a four lane highway at the base of an exit ramp, wondering I assume if this is the exit he or she should have taken. And know this, honking your horn only insures that the befuddled little person will slam on the brakes no matter what the circumstances of traffic might be.

Do not assume you are safe in a Target parking lot. Reversing out of a parking space seems to disable the brakes of such elder-driven vehicles as they do not back out, but hop or bolt out of a space regardless of pedestrian or vehicular traffic. My guess is that the elderly are the most likely to get me.

However, they are followed quite closely by various idiots with cell phones lodged permanently in their ears as they attempt to drive both automatic and (much, much worse) standard transmissions, mostly on souped up pickup trucks. Yes, God forbid such fools should drive little harmless cars. I find myself yelling upward into the two story window of trucks without mufflers carrying drivers with no clue of the traffic around them. My zoned out fellow travelers are deep into a phone call without which surely their lives as they know them would cease to exist. What could possibly be so important that a 30 minute trip in traffic requires 30 minutes on the phone?

I have waited through traffic lights which went unnoticed by these phone junkies. I have signaled, pulled ahead and started to change lanes, only to be met with blaring horns from the trucks of these phone implanted empty heads who have only just noticed that I am on the same road as are they. Yes, some person unknown to me will be the last person to hear me scream, over someone else's cell phone.

I am so upset at this point in the writing that I cannot even delve into the curse of the background base or sub-woffer or whatever it might be called. Suffice it to say, all the curses mentioned above settle in the steering wheels of these music destroyers. Added only to such a danger is the tragedy that the last thing I will hear on earth will be the rattling of some cheap speaker attempting to crank out unintelligible noise, touted as music by the deaf young people who apparently listen to it.

Please, no flowers. A contribution in my memory to your favorite charity will be greatly appreciated (provided it is not the AARP Right-to-Drive lobby).