11.28.07 - In a Rush for an Early Grave

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In a Rush for an Early Grave

I suppose my last post might have come across as a tad bitter. Believe me, I don't hate the holidays. I love this time of year and seeing my family and drinking lots of egg nog. But declarations of childlike whimsy aren't really funny. Anger and disappointment, however, are hilarious. As long as someone else is experiencing them.

It's just that this season tends to make people a little nutty. Under the right combination of ridiculous shopping traffic and towering credit card debt, even the cheeriest person can crack, grab a rifle, and look for the nearest clock tower.

Here's a perfect example. Day before Thanksgiving, I'm off in the car to secure some provisions at the new Trader Joe's on Metropolitan Avenue (The Wife hearts Trader Joe's). Even though it's early morning, the roads are already clogged with other shoppers running similar errands. Plus, the other people who drive at that time of the morning in Queens: tiny men in gigantic Buicks, moving as slow as God will allow a V6 engine to pull a Boat-Car.

There is one stretch of Metropolitan that is relatively quiet, however. That's the quarter mile or so that runs through St. John's Cemetery. Such a length of road without traffic lights is practically a drag strip in Queens. Several of my ancestors are buried there. So is John Gotti, for what it's worth.

As I drive along this stretch, enjoying a few precious moments of what passes for peace in this city, I see that there's a car sitting in the opposite lane, waiting to make a left turn into the cemetery. There's just enough space between the car in front of me and my car that he could make the turn between us, if he really wanted to be a dick. But there's no one behind me, so I figure he'll just wait until I pass him, when it'll be much safer.

I figure wrong. As soon as the car in front of me passes by him, the car in the opposite lane screeches in front of me and pulls into the cemetery. He misses hitting my car by the width of one amoeba.

When people commit such dangerous vehicular rudeness, my initial reaction is to scream and curse. Then, I usually calm myself down. For all I know, The Rude Guy is a fireman or a doctor, or he's rushing to the hospital because his wife is having a baby. After I've launched a few epithets, I concede that maybe The Rude Guy has a perfectly good reason why he's in such a rush.

But when I was cut off by someone driving into St. John's, I could come up with absolutely no good reason why this should have happened. Because this particular Rude Guy cut me off TO RACE INTO A CEMETERY.

I defy you to come up with any scenario in which rushing into a cemetery would be necessary. The only thing worse than being late for a funeral would be to screech up to the funeral with smoking tires like you're a mourning Jeff Gordon. No cemetery I know of has Crazy Eddie-type 24-hour sales where every plot must go. ("Our mausoleums are INSANE!")

Even if the Rude Guy was late for a job, there is no work done at a cemetery where time is of the essence. If it takes three minutes or three hours to dig a grave, guess what? No matter when you finish, the guy going in it will still be just as deceased.

I guess it's conceivable Rude Guy was trying out a shortcut. If so, it would have to be the dumbest shortcut in the history of shortcuts, since all the roads inside St. John's are windy and narrow. He would have traded a straight route for a spaghetti-knot of humpbacks and cul de sacs. Not to mention that cutting through a cemetery to shave a few seconds off your commute would earn you an express ticket to The Lake of Fire.

So there was no good reason for him to cut me off, and even the bad reason (shortcut) made no sense. I could only conclude that this was no simple Rude Guy. This was a Colossal World-Class Douchebag. Perhaps the stress of The Day Before Thanksgiving had thrust douchebaggery upon him. But stress induced or not, a douchebag is a douchebag, as Gertrude Stein said (I may be paraphrasing).

I screamed out my window GUESS WHAT?! THEY'RE ALL STILL DEAD IN THERE! even though Rude Guy was already rambling through the St. John's access roads. I'm sure if he'd be ashamed if he'd heard my witty outburst, and if there was a crowd of cocktail-swishing literati to proclaim it the wittiest jape of the season.

It reminded me, vaguely and in reverse, of another example of vehicular rudeness on a much more stressful day. On 9/11, my roommate and I ventured into Williamsburg and toward the waterfront to get a view of the towers. As we walked down Grand Street, a kid skateboarded slowly down the middle of the street. A guy in an old Cadillac trailed him slowly. He beeped at the kid, briefly at first, then leaned on the horn, hoping to blast the skateboarder out of his way.

The kid turned around and yelled at the Caddy, FUCK YOU, IT'S THE APOCALYPSE.

Posted 11.28.07 08:07pm * Permalink