March 2001

Commuted Sentence
The Lives of Commuters Special

I am part of everything that's wrong with driving habits in this country. Every morning I get in my car and drive five miles to my destination. It is a route totally inappropriate to walk or bike, especially as I have no bike. There are no shoulders or sidewalks (or enough time in my day) and I don't even feel safe from the idiot drivers in this town sitting in my own bedroom, let alone on the road without my army of airbags, so I drive.

I feel bad about this. There may be a special place in hell for me. But let it be known that I suffer. Most of my route is designated 25 mph, except for the two mile stretch with no speed limit, which is just there to make my low limit suffering more acute. And of course traffic in this town is a tangled web of tourists and pancake houses and college kids and retirees and rednecks. I call them the WilliamsBorg. I have seen a car swerve through an intersection against the light, cross over to the wrong side of the median and go the wrong way down the street for half a block to turn into a motel lot. Such is the joy of Williamsburg.

Really all this is still not so bad; it seems appropriate retribution for the commuter crime I am committing. And then last week I threw a wrench into works. I worked some bad mojo-- I created, dare I say, some super bad 'carma'. I decided to start jogging in the morning. I have to drive to where I run (I cannot run on asphalt as I have a mass of gristle and bone spur where my right knee should be, and I also prefer that neither me nor my dog get hit by a car). So I drive there, and run, then drive home and shower, then drive back to the same place I just went running (that is, that selfsame campus that is a mere five miles from my home).

I know this is evil, pure and simple. I had hoped whomever keeps track of this sort of thing remembered the summer I only got in my city-dwelling car to move it from one parking spot to the next, doing the parking tickect samba. Or for that matter the summer I chose to forego wheels altogether in favor of transportation of the four legged type. No such luck.

To make a long story short, I got a speeding ticket. At 6:30 in the morning. From a cop that I drive past every day, frequently more than once. Twenty yards past the sign that decalres that the speed limit is no longer an o so generous 35 but (as the officer called it) a 'pedestrian friendly' 25. Is this absolution for my sin, or a cosmic warning shot across the bow? Regardless, every morning I continue to commit my little bit of vehicular enviromental homicide, drowning out my conscience by howling along to my unreasonably loud and angry music.