You’ll be interested to know that I have stopped driving. The reason for this is that I have just completed traffic school, and I am afraid that if I drive, I will get another ticket, and I will have to go back to traffic school. I have told myself that if I am ever assigned to traffic school again, I will invest in some major plastic surgery and flee to Mexico.
Undoubtedly many of you have had to endure this form of legalized torture and therefore will agree with me when I say that it is an example of how the environmentalists have gotten way out of hand. You see, in the old days, traffic school was informative and interesting and not at all the hellish ordeal that it is now. But then the environmentalists flocked to Washington and, still smelling like saved whales, begged Congress to pass an official act that would make traffic school boring, thus encouraging people, like me, not to drive at all, thus reducing the number of cars on the highways, thus reducing the amount of smog. It’s all a big conspiracy, I tell you.
And if you try to say that’s not true, because Congress would never listen to a bunch of loonies like the environmentalists, think again. Congresspersons will listen to anyone with money, except each other.
Anyway, traffic school had two major flaws:
1. The instructor was a Southern guy named Larry, and while he certainly knew his traffic laws (which must make him extremely popular at parties), he seemed to be laboring under the illusion that he was funny, which he was not.
2. There was this woman there — the most irritating woman on earth, it turns out — who decided it was her duty to argue about every single stinking law presented and determine exactly WHY it was the law, and HOW they could possibly get away with enforcing it. For instance, Larry told us that it is illegal to drive while wearing headphones. (Gosh, Larry, you mean we have to be able to hear when we drive?!?) But, he said, it is okay to wear one headphone, and have the other one pushed away from your ear. So this woman — I don’t recall her name; we’ll call her Irritina — said that all we have to do, if we get pulled over, is just quickly push one headphone away, so it will look like we’ve been driving with only one. When Larry told her that a judge will always believe a cop over a lowly citizen such as herself, she started ranting about how they’d have to “prove it.”
This topic kept them busy for a while, and while they were arguing, I drew pictures in my notebook. One of them was of Larry and Irritina standing in the middle of a crosswalk and me in my car, speeding up so I could hit them harder. Basically, all I learned in the class was how to draw cars so they look like they’re going real fast. So I guess it wasn’t a waste of time after all.
This is one column I wish I could write again now, because I think I could do such a better job of it now. It was an experience truly rife with comic possibilities, and while I think this column is decent, it could have been better. (Although I'm really proud of "Irritina" for someone's name.)
If you have not been to traffic school, you have no idea how excrutiatingly boring and stupid it can be. And I don't think I can even describe it for you, not that you'd want me to.
