Changing Lanes On The Road To Nowhere

The freeway, as most people in modern cities agree, is a wonderful place to merge with other cars and pretend like you’re in the parking lot of the grocery store and you’re waiting for your wife who just ran in to get some tampons but got distracted by a Twinkie display and is now filling a grocery cart with frozen burritos, Gummy Bears and beer. The traffic jam is a classic here in Southern California and is beloved by all who participate. To be involved in a Los Angeles traffic jam is a special, special experience that, I’m pretty sure, shortens your life by about ten years.

It is a widely known fact that the current location of the 405 freeway here in Los Angeles is the site of a famous covered wagon traffic jam that occurred on a June morning in 1874 and lasted for seventeen days and four minutes. This was where a convoy of Mormon settlers was headed south towards Mexico in search of a great beanstalk that was rumored to grow so tall that it reached a Giant’s castle up in the sky. Along the way a cattle rancher who didn’t see the oncoming settlers sideswiped the wagon train with a herd of emus, causing the very first Sig Alert in Los Angeles. And, because a group of rubber tree farmers stopped on the other side to see what was going on, but never offered to help, it also gave birth to the term ‘assface who watches but does not help in any way and also impedes progress by blocking all traffic with their stupefying curiosity’. The term was later shortened to simply ‘rubbernecker’.

Ever since then Angelenos pay tribute to that blessed event by holding a commemorative traffic jam every day Monday through Friday at around 7 am and another one around 5 pm. However, because of the growing popularity of ‘The Great Western Pile-Up Of 1874’, as it is now affectionately called, the commemorative traffic jam is currently held seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.

It is in these awesome traffic jams that you might have the unique experience of observing one of nature’s most elusive and annoying creatures, The Constantly Running Late Lane Changer. Imagine yourself at a complete and utter standstill in your car along with six hundred and fifty thousand other cars. Now imagine another car desperately needing to get in front of you. You can tell because their turn signal is on and the nose of their car is slowly inching towards the nose of your car. This is the point where all of that high school algebra comes in handy and makes you realize that the physics of what they are trying to do isn’t going to work out. The math simply doesn’t add up. There is already a car in front of you and several thousand cars in front of that one that one and the probability of the Lane Changer occupying that particular space in front of you is very close to zero point zero zero. But don’t tell them that. Our forefathers didn’t sacrifice their lives so that we can be told that two objects can’t be in the same place at once. This situation is on the verge of becoming a freedom issue and cooler heads must prevail.

Somehow though, the Lane Changer, who is never cool in stressful situations, is running late as they do every day of their lives and therefore, in more of a hurry than the other four million people who are headed in the same direction. And don’t get me wrong, everyone wants to let them in, it’s just that we can’t. It’s physically impossible. Even when they roll down their window trying to get your attention with that desperate wave and the pleading look on their face. You feel helpless. It’s like watching a basket full of puppies being adopted by a family of hyperactive kids. You know those dogs are in for a lifetime of stress and panic, but what can you do about it? Hyperactive kids need pets too. For a moment you have a thought of putting your car in reverse and ramming the car behind you creating enough space for the Lane Changer to squeeze in, thus shortening their commute to work. But alas, because of the millions of cars behind you, this too seems improbable.

The Lane Changer believes that moving laterally, no matter how minute, gets you to your destination quicker. This may be true in their mind, but to the rest of the universe it doesn’t make any sense. Perhaps they are ahead of their time and that one day the cars of the future will have the ability to swiftly merge into each other without colliding, but at this moment during the commemorative morning traffic jam it seems like an idea that is light years away.

Upon further research I’ve discovered that the Lane Changing species goes back several thousand years, all the way back to the Buffalo Wing Dynasty in Upstate New York. It was here amongst crowds of people in wooden carts where they discovered that the way to get somewhere faster than anyone else was to be as obnoxious and irritating as you can with your cart. Constantly changing lanes creates the illusion of forward progress. In the end though, we all arrive at the same destination at the same time to a job that we all hate, wishing it was Friday so we could begin drinking our lives away. If you happen to know a Constantly Running Late Lane Changer perhaps you can recommend to them a book that I have written called ‘Always Running Late? Try Getting Up Earlier!!!’ It gives people tips on how to avoid staying up late on a work week and also includes a link to a PDF file that has the operating manual of every type of alarm clock made in the USA since 1967.

If you come across a Lane Changer, though, please don’t touch them, don’t look them in the eyes and absolutely do not feed them. We need to keep them in their natural state of being lost, confused and desperate and certainly would not want them to begin depending on us for survival at this point in the game. See you all on the freeway.

One Upping A One-Upper; Mission: Impossible

Ever tell a story about something that was so amazing that happened to you and then had it immediately swept under the rug by a One-Upper?  Do you know any One-Uppers in your neighborhood?  I’m positive they’re there.  They’re everywhere.  In pharmacies and bars and pet stores and public restrooms.  They’re a little difficult to spot from far away, but once you get up close and are actively participating in a conversation it becomes crystal clear that you are now face to face with a One-Upper.  They use your stories as launching pads for their better, more awesome stories.  They never listen to you or anyone else because they already have better anecdotes that always seem to border on pure folklore, cocked and ready to fire, waiting for you to finish so they can empty their story clip into your lame-o story and fill it full of holes, sending it plummeting to the ground where it crashes into a gigantic ball of fictitious fire, probably burning down several homes in the process. 

I imagine in the inside of the One-Upper’s heads there are stadiums packed with fans cheering and yelling as they reveal their spectacular yarns to stunned and thrilled audiences who hang on their every word.  You could tell a story about how you jumped your BMX bike over 20 schoolchildren when you were ten years old and the One-Upper will tell you how they jumped over 30 school kids plus a pregnant dog, which to them, counts as about six dogs.  You could tell a story about how one day you ate a twelve pound burrito in less than an hour and then pooped it out in less than five minutes and the One-Upper will tell you how they ate six three pound burritos in less than twenty minutes and didn’t poop for two weeks.  You could tell a story about how you competed in a triathlon on the moon with Neil Armstrong last year and a One-Upper will tell you how they flew to Mars, married an alien and raised a family of five, opened a small import/export business and retired before returning to earth.  It doesn’t matter what you say, the One-Upper will always surpass anything you may have done in your life that would seem slightly interesting to normal people but very, very boring to the One-Upper.  

If gone unchecked, the One-Upper’s tales of their own fascination with themselves can often escalate into a game of fictional ingenuity, even when the story may seem not only blatantly false, but supremely preposterous and sometimes even physically or mathematically impossible.  The goal of the One-Upper seems to be to garner as much attention as they can get.  They want us to shut the heck up with our lame stories and start ‘ooohhing’ and ‘aaaahhing’ when they give us access to their spectacular tales.  At some point everyone begins to silently realize that certain factoids of the One-Upper’s story may not be entirely true.  However, for some reason no one is able to rid the conversation of the One-Upper or inform them that listening to other people is not a bad thing.

The One-Upper often butts into conversations that they have no business being involved in.  All it takes is for them to hear more than one person talking and they immediately begin shooting down their stories like a duck hunter firing into a crowd of rowdy NASCAR fans.  They hone in on other stories like a lion chasing a gang of alter boys on Good Friday, dicing and mincing them up with their own tales of heroism or misfortune or that really, really funny thing that happened to them at McDonalds one day.

The One-Upper is a close cousin of the Know-It-All.  They both think that everyone that they’re talking to is an idiot.  They both believe that they are stimulating everyone’s boring lives with provocative and exhilarating yarns filled with gobs of juicy information.  What separates them is that the One-Upper is much like a hyperactive Chihuahua constantly on the hunt for baby chipmunks to scare the crap out of, where the Know-It-All is more like a sagely old elephant, slowly walking along dispensing wisdom and knowledge while thinking to themselves, “You’re welcome universe.”

The other day in my Operation Desert Storm Re-enactor’s club we were sitting around a campfire guarding about ten thousand Iraqi Prisoners Of War Re-enactors when a One-Upper tried to tell us about the time he personally invaded the country of Lichtenstein by himself, overthrew the government and renamed the country ‘Hank’ after his grandfather who was a cop in San Diego.  We took that One-Upper prisoner, unintentionally changing the course of that particular re-enacted conflict, held him for ransom for eight days, to which a billionaire from Saudi Arabia then paid six hundred thousand dollars for his release, but was immediately disappointed to discover that he had just paid for a One-Upper to a bunch of Gulf War Veteran Re-enactors who have never been in the military at all.  Only a couple of us had some Boy Scout experience.  Apparently, he thought he was buying a racehorse or something.

The fact that we even tolerate the One-Upper says a lot for our collective mettle, not to mention our national stamina.  That we endure the narcissistic, vainglorious oral compositions that contain more wonder, more danger, more action, more adversity and just all around more awesomeness than our own stories says in itself that we are a mightily tolerant society, where in a whole ‘nother part of the world the One-Upper would probably be packed into a suitcase and put on a flight to Antarctica where the luggage would be intentionally lost somewhere during a connecting flight in Brazil and never seen again.

Everyone has an interesting story.  Everyone has experiences that we can enjoy and sometimes even learn from.  One-upping someone’s story is not the way to have a good conversation.  It is a way, however, to identify yourself as someone everyone can really do without.  Let us tell our stories of spectacular parties we’ve been to or how poor we were when we graduated from college and had to survive on Top Ramen and sunflower seeds or driving really fast on the freeway while fleeing the cops.  Yes, we know you’ve been to more spectacular parties and that you’ve been poorer and have driven faster.  Yes, thank you for telling us all that.  Now, here’s something I bet you the One-Upper has never heard before: Please leave.

Nitwits: The Clog In The Toilet Bowl Of Life

There are some people who seem to dilly-dally their way through life, clogging up the rest of society with their indecisiveness, their selfishness and their overall stupidity.  Yes, there are a lot of stupid people, but these ones in particular directly affect the rest of us, especially when we are in line waiting to conduct some form of business or transaction.  These people are the reason that lines exist in the first place.  If it weren’t for them we wouldn’t need fast food restaurants or Quickie Marts because everything would be smooth and streamlined, flowing effortlessly in a virtual utopia of consumer efficiency and decision-making.  To them, venturing out of their home is just one big guessing game.  They don’t seem to know where they are, what they want and what they are even doing out of the house at this time of day.  How these people made it this far in life without running themselves over with their own cars is beyond me.

They are the Nitwits of our society.  Slow and boneheaded in every aspect of humanity, holding up progress with their confused and imbecilic ideas, believing that they can just wing it when it comes to simple commerce.  These are people whose brains are in perpetual first gear on the freeway of life, and a great many of them seem to be hopelessly stuck in ‘park’.  They are the ones who stop in the middle of the street because they are lost, rather than pull over to the side of the road and consult their map and try and figure out where they are in life.  They have difficulty understanding complex choices like ‘Would you like large, medium or small?’, to which their response is, ‘How big is the large?’  One could probably expect to hear them ask ‘Where do babies come from?’ and ‘Why is the sky blue?’ in the same conversation.

They are overwhelmed with choices.  Their brains cannot handle multiple tasks.  They are the people for whom the term ‘one at a time’ was invented.  In Biblical times Nitwits were considered to be a nuisance and were usually stoned to death out of sheer frustration and annoyance by people who waited behind them at the market for several hours while the Nitwits tried to decide whether to buy a sack of dates or a baby goat.

Nitwits are slowly killing the rest of us with their “not-knowing-how-to-do-anything-in-life” way of life.  I think these are the same people who merge onto the freeway at 12 miles an hour, causing other cars behind them to screech to a virtual halt or swerve out of the way, knocking other cars off the road, as the Nitwit happily listens to a loop of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in their head.  

At restaurants or coffee shops they are unclear on what to order when it is finally their turn.  There is nothing more excruciating and painful than ending up behind one of these human snails in line at a Starbucks and watch them try to figure out whether they want an iced latte caramel mochaccino with candy sprinkles or a blended mocha frappuccino latte with chocolate swirls, all while asking if the tomato and basil pesto sandwiches are gluten free.  I imagine this is what Purgatory is like. 

In restaurants they consume vast quantities of valuable time with their complicated and nit-picky ordering.  They want the waiter to whittle and carve and chisel the menu down to their obnoxiously finicky and fuss-budgety liking, turning the chef’s creations into a dumbed-down version of high school cafeteria food. 

They are the people at the grocery store who watch the checker scan their enormous order, scan all of their coupons, see the total, make a ‘wow’ face and then decide to write a check, which, of course, they cannot find. 

Nitwits like to linger at the front of bank lines and bombard the bank teller with questions about their account and about the American banking system in general, having absolutely zero knowledge in either subject.  The tellers often need extra help with the Nitwit’s asinine questions and must then consult other tellers, taking those resources away from other customers who are prepared and simply want nothing more than to get the hell out of there, join a street gang, commit a major crime and be willingly sent to prison for the rest of their lives in the hopes that they would never have to experience anything that hellish ever again.

It must be pure hell at a Nitwit’s home when it comes time to decide whether to take a bath or take a shower or to simply rinse off with the garden hose out in the backyard.  A baby Nitwit must be particularly frustrating at breast-feeding time when the infant, unable to communicate yet, begins crying at the lack of choices they have and wonders if their mother has a third nipple somewhere they can try.

It is not lame to know what you want beforehand.  It is not lame to be prepared.  It is not lame to be considerate of people behind you and perhaps try and facilitate moving things along in life.  You know what is lame?  Being blind to everything around you as you walk out your front door.  Have a plan.  Have a goal.  For people who can’t handle more than one thing at a time, don’t try to decide what type of coffee you want on the fly.  Plan it beforehand.  Write it down and then memorize it at home.  Try ordering to yourself in the mirror.  If it proves to be too difficult, give a couple of bucks to a Cub Scout and have them order for you.  If that doesn’t work then maybe a pack of stray dogs ordering your coffee will prove to be more fruitful.  If you still find success elusive, then perhaps it would be best for all of us if you just stayed at home and drank tap water while watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island, allowing the rest of us got on with our lives unmolested by you and your indecisiveness, you Nitwit.

Attack of the Know-It-Alls

Have you ever felt stupid before?  I feel stupid all the time. Every day, in fact.  It’s no big deal.  I’ve accepted my limited IQ and just try to learn as much as I can along the way while keeping the buffoonery to a minimum.  I feel especially stupidy, however, when I’m talking to a Know-It-All.  You know these people?  They get their information from the radio and the newspaper and their favorite Know-It-All magazines and then graciously dispense it to the rest of humanity, filling our empty lives with their liquid, life-giving knowledge.  Here’s the dilemma that Know-It-Alls currently have, however; the application of their useless information to real life scenarios.  They seem to know everything about everything, and yet, there they are working side by side with the rest of us dummies.  You’d think that being a repository of such a wealth of information would perhaps land the Know-It-All a job at some prestigious think tank where they would spend days and nights solving the world’s problems.  You would think that some company out there would pay top dollar to constantly mine the Know-It-All’s brain for valuable data on how to make that company wealthier and more powerful and more able to take more advantage of more people.  You would think that by knowing everything there is to know there would be a line of people at their doorstep begging for advice on how to make their lives better and more fulfilling and more like Brad and Angelina’s lives.  One would even go so far to think that a Know-It-All would be so valuable to the human race that the government would relocate the Know-It-All and their family to a specially built module in outer space in an effort to protect their massive intellect from being drained by all of us imbeciles down here on earth.

One would think.

The truth is that Know-It-Alls do have very large reservoirs of mind numbingly, tediously, inanely, stale information, and yet, they seem to have absolutely zero knowledge on how to interact with other human beings or make themselves likeable.  They believe that a conversation is a one-way lecture on the meaning of life, and they are not the student. They think that we enjoy being constantly corrected for semantical mistakes that no one else seems to mind.  A single Know-It-All can bankrupt a whole conversation with pointless factoids that no one ever asked for.  They question the validity of the details of our stories and are constantly investigating where we got our facts from as if they are the lead detective in a story mangling crime scene.

I bet you that cavemen never tolerated a Know-It-All in their society.  I bet that those hairy, unkempt relatives of ours probably put the Know-It-All in their place before anything got out of hand in that cramped, funky smelling cave of theirs.  I bet Know-It-Alls don’t exist in the animal kingdom.  Look at a colony of ants.  You think that thousands of ants working their asses off, risking being doused by a can of Raid, trying to get food from my kitchen because I forgot to wipe off the counter last night would tolerate a single knucklehead ant standing there telling everyone else that they should lift the crumbs with their legs and not their backs because it could cause spinal problems in the future? 

Most of the time Know-It-Alls tell us what we already know.   Yes, we know that staring directly into the sun is bad for our eyes.  Yes, we know that leaving the toilet seat up is frowned upon when you’re married.  Yes, we know that ant colonies can range anywhere from a few dozen to a million and that Raid kills them all pretty much immediately.  But, it’s the way that Know-It-Alls present their information that’s so off-putting.  They make us feel foolish and moronic.  They make us feel like children who couldn’t make the cut when we tried out for the school play because we got stage fright right before the audition and as a result, peed our pants in front of everyone, ruining our playground credibility forever.  They make us feel as if our entire lives have been a complete waste of everyone’s time and that every word we’ve ever uttered has been an endless parade of lies. 

Know-It-Alls interrupt the natural flow of a gabfest with their endless desire to repair misstated facts, grammatical mistakes and trivial, pointless information that backs up no one’s story at all.  They don’t seem to realize that there is a certain level of error acceptability in communication that most people simply let slide.  Not the Know-It-All.  They are the conversation police handing out tickets to criminals for various social offenses such as improper sentence structure, failure to know how asphalt is made and insufficient understanding in the area of American tax laws.  They are the beaver dam in the middle of a swift moving conversation, halting the momentum with trivial tidbits of useless information.  They are the burnt piece of pretzel in the Chex Mix of life.  A Know-It-All is the single strand of hair that has found its way into your Caesar salad, ruining your appetite for the rest of the day. 

Knowledge is good.  Being intelligent is good.  Being curious about life and having the humility to learn new things from other people is good.  Shutting the toilet seat so that your wife doesn’t yell at you is good.  Raid is good.  Walking around the planet with a smug look on your face and looking down the bridge of your nose at other people because they don’t know that in 1887 something happened to some guy and his family that changed the course of history and now that’s why we have indoor plumbing is not only bad, it’s lame.  Quite lame.

Freedom To Fear In Ten Years Or Less

I’ve recently learned that the Department of Homeland Security will be discontinuing the colored threat level of scariness, a system that was designed to keep us safe and scared since the dreadful events that occurred on 9/11.  I thought this was a wonderful public service that not only warned us all of great dangers that may or may not befall us, but it would have or would not have given us ample time to prepare ourselves for the impending/eventual terrorist doom that may or may not come eventually/probably. 

The fact that announcing threat levels will no longer be a public service anymore, it seems to me, merely adds to the danger/havoc/catastrophe that we can all be sure is coming our way. So, now what is our plan of action in the case of a probable/eventual terror attack? Today’s world is scarier, more intimidating and creepier than ever before in our nation’s history. We must be on constant alert for not only potential terrorists but also other deviant groups of people who constantly threaten the sanctity of our public lives like drug dealers, jaywalkers, loiterers, reality stars, people who refuse to wear shirts and shoes inside 7-elevens and people who just don’t know how to stand in line at the grocery store without bumping in to you every twelve seconds. In my opinion, the government’s past recommended activities for the now defunct threat level system seemed a little unproductive, so I’ve come up with a new proactive warning system for thwarting not only eventual terrorist attacks but can also be effectively used for preventing all kinds of unwanted human behavior like peeping Toms, boring story tellers and unwanted dinner guests.

My solution for appropriate behavior for past threat level colors is to respond with corresponding Fear Levels in order to battle the terrorist/peeping/dimwit forces of the planet. Let’s start at the beginning.

Fear level Green: The Fear is Not Ripe Yet.  It’s okay to relax, but not too much.  This is where terrorists get their foot in the door, if given the opportunity.  You could be at a backyard barbeque or reading a book at the library and the next thing you know KABOOM!!!, you, your friends, your family and everything that was on that barbeque are now the size of bacon bits, ready to be sprinkled on a terrorist salad.  This level should be spent quickly glancing around as if you’re a dog and you just heard a sound somewhere in the distance and you’re trying to figure out what it is.  This tells the terrorists that you are alert and ready to act.

Fear level Blue: The Deep Blue Fear.  This is where you need to kick the fear into second gear.  Shaking your hands and jumping up and down as if you were getting ready for a boxing match is a good start.  Perhaps some impromptu stretching may also help ward away radical, barbeque-hating insurgents.  Are you preparing for a Thanksgiving 5K charity run, or are you priming yourself to do battle with the forces of evil?  The terrorists will never know, and that’s the way it should be.

Fear level Yellow: The Banana Supremacy.  Clench your fists and furrow your brows.  Walk around and look like you are about to punch a baby panda in the face.  Don’t say ‘thank you’ or ‘excuse me’ when out in public.  If someone says ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’, do not, I repeat, do not respond at all. At this time we should also begin raising our paranoia level accordingly.  There’s a knock at the door at 2 in the morning; is it the neighbors there to tell you that your house is on fire because you haven’t cleaned the chimney in years and you built an especially crackly fire that evening full of floating embers that caught some of the soot in the chimney on fire before you went to bed in a drunken stupor, or is it one of Osama bin Laden’s soldiers there to blow you and your family to kingdom come because you believe in freedom and they cannot live in a world where you believe in freedom?  Whatever the answer is, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR!!!

Fear level Orange: Freedom Carrots.  Hold your breath until your face turns red.  Bug your eyes out as big as you can so that terrorists know you mean business. Of course, it’s going to hurt, but so will an ice chest full of grenades that are set to destroy freedom. Adding a twitch somewhere on your body is a nice touch of unpredictability.  Continue not responding to other human beings in public.  If you have to, look down at your phone or Blackberry and pretend to be sending an important text message.  This should let the terrorists know that you are not interested in small talk at all.

Fear level Red: Fruit of the Doom.  Prolonged bouts of shouting and punching the air will definitely scare any would-be bomber off.  Shave the number 53 in your scalp to confuse anyone trying to wreak havoc on your political beliefs.  (53 has no real significance to anything, it’s just another random, crazy tool in your anti-terrorism survival kit.)  Every once in a while you should simply faint so that terrorists understand that you are completely nuts and are to be taken very seriously.  Hopefully, they will then come to their senses and go back to the Christian-less campground that they came from somewhere on Mars.

May I add one more level to this scenario?  Threat/Fear level Black and Blue.  This is where we don’t just sit around waiting for the terrorists to strike, peeping Toms to molest us with their eyes or boring story tellers to lull us to sleep in our own homes, but rather, we go on the offensive and bring the fight to them.  We take the fight to their cities and their dinner parties and their bushes near the windows where we get undressed at night with the curtains wide open. We terrorize them, forcing them to come up with a system that warns their citizens of impending American freedom/justice.  Only then can we declare victory in the war on terrorism, peeping Tom-ism and people who just don’t know how to tell a good story at dinner parties.