Turnpike Gods

By an amazing coincedence, all of the really important people in the country were in New Jersey yesterday. They were not at a convention center or a hotel; they were on the New Jersey Turnpike.

I could tell that they were very important because they were going 15-30 mph over the speed limit, and would have gone much faster if there had not been a sprinkling of less important people in front of them. It did not matter how fast you were going, or how little space there was in front of you, they NEEDED to get in front of you. (I was there in the capacity as a VUP, a very unimportant person, traveling from Massachusetts to Maryland to visit my parents.)

The really important people used a time-honored technique to broadcast their status: they would blast up behind you, expecting you to go Eek! and then jump out of their way, even though there was no place to go. Research has shown an inverse relationship between the size of the driver’s penis and the distance between the front of his car and the back of yours.

There was a fellow behind me who must have had a prize-winning member. It would be a shame if he lost it because he crashed into the vehicle he had been tailgating, thereby ending prematurely a successful porn star career.

The guy at the top of the Turnpike power pyramid, the most important guy in the world — a kind of god certainly — was driving a BMW X6. Not content to travel at the speed of sound, he clearly was attempting to go at the speed of light. He sent me the “signal” described above, by rushing up behind me as if propelled by a rocket. He lingered there for a precious few moments, and then decided to find a different runway, even though there was traffic all around us.

This is what I don’t understand: when there is a wall of vehicles, why do these motorized morons think that they can violate laws of physics and slice through the rest of us like a knife through butter?

This god, this goliath, this mover and shaker found tiny openings between cars that a microwave could barely fit into, and at great speed and risk shoehorned himself in. He jumped from lane to lane, never signaling — that’s a sign of weakness, something losers do — and catapulted forward to leap ahead of the next merely very important person. Soon he had disappeared from view in a puff of magic dust.

I hope he arrived at his destination in time — the safety of the world was probably at stake.