IN PRAISE OF DISTRACTED DRIVING

Game of Groans

Think about an object, an activity, or a cultural phenomenon you really don’t like. Now write a post (tongue in cheek or not — your call!) about why it’s the best thing ever.


The subject of today’s sermon was a hard choice, a tossup between distracted driving and my other favorite, humiliating “reality” television. Distracted driving won the day because I can choose to not watch TV, but driving is unavoidable.

Growing up, we were limited to relatively simple, though effective distractions. They got the job done in their own, primitive way. Women could apply makeup at 90 MPH on their way to work. People would cram lunch down their throats while negotiating difficult stretches of road at high speed. Then, there’s the couples’ favorite: the knock-down drag-out fight to the death in the car on the way to Sunday dinner at Mom’s.

Ah, the good old days. Make no mistake, the classics are still with us. Makeup is ever in need of application. Drive-through eateries encourage entire meal consumption while in rapid motion. And who amongst us can deny having had at least a few fights-to-the-death while en route to a family get together? Isn’t that the entire point of such occasions?

75-Pops2013_083

Please, let us not forget the first and best of them all — need I really remind you? — driving under the influence. Booze, dope, medication, exhaustion … whatever. The DUI never gets old. Nor does getting a blow job while at the wheel. Classics are classics for good reason!

Nowadays, though, we have increased our choices exponentially. You can weave drunkenly all over the highway merely by picking up your phone and putting pedal to the metal. You can watch a movie on your DVD player (it’s just for the kids, really), compile that overdue report on your laptop, play Angry Birds or text all your pals whenever you like as you navigate our national highway system. The possibilities are endless and the satisfaction? Well, for everything else, there are credit cards.

You can select your venue too. Small country roads allow you back up traffic for miles until desperate drivers will do anything to get around you. Alternately, you can weave blindly across as many as four lanes of ultra high speed traffic on the interstate during rush hour. Or why not choose a holiday weekend? You could cause accidents, near accidents, even a few fatalities and generally wreak havoc throughout a region. You might even make the evening news! Hard to resist the lure of that one, eh?

Uxbridge Cemetery

As we approach this Memorial Day Weekend, you too can be a statistic. So grab your cell phones, DVDs, tablets and laptops. Bring on the picnic lunch and your favorite nail polish, Wash it all down with a beer or six. If you die, you will merely be improving the quality of the gene pool, so let’er rip!



Categories: Cars and Trucks, Humor, Technology

Tags: , , , ,

22 replies

  1. And what about just talking on the phone? My dad, who never had a cell phone until about five years ago, now feels comfortable whipping across I-70, chatting to his kids, his wife, his clients. In fact, he CHOOSES to set aside driving time for this multitasking effort. Scary shit!

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  2. I was planning on gong away this weekend. I think I’ll stay home and fire up the grill in the back yard.

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  3. I like the old “read the newspaper while driving” trick. Things would be perfect if everyone else got off my roads.

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    • Oh yeah. It’s awful here because you can’t pass on most of our roads. Too narrow, too many blind curves. It makes Garry CRAZY. They really DO read the paper and sometimes, big fat (what appear to be) textbooks. Studying for exams?

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  4. But wait. It’s not me. It’s all those other drivers who are distracting me!

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  5. LOL! I’m going to remind all of my squirrel pals not to wander out into the roads this weekend….

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    • Good idea. We once went to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving. It took us 14 hours in bumper to bumper traffic to get home. A lot of the traffic was the result of accident. Since then, we do NOT travel on holiday weekends.

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  6. Probably karma for all the years I loved driving RAPIDO in those convertibles.

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  7. Oh, dear! In a few hours I’ll be on the road for a holiday road trip. Your post reminds me to drive defensively.

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  8. Fun, I am with you, but Mr. Swiss is Swiss, so I have to behave and he drives (like a Swiss)

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