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Got to be willing to be wrong

I don't know if it's going to last but the suns out! I'm ready to unthaw.

My first car was an Aquamarine 1968 Ford Falcon station wagon.



Above is a '69 and a much more pleasant color but you get the idea. The car was a gift from my Mom through my brother Dale. He gave her a different car and the wagon got passed on to me. I loved it. I was 16 and being a relatively good kid, could come and go as I pleased.

My friends and I took to calling it The Tank and it felt like one. It had a solid 289 engine and positraction rear wheel drive. The body was fairly straight and aside from the odd petrified French fry or chicken nugget, the interior was passable. My ride was huge with room for 6 teenagers and that was before we put people in the cargo area!

One of the strongest feelings that I carry with me from driving these older cars is a sense of safety. Cars prior to the 80's were, generally, made of solid steel and compared to today's cars seem indestructible. I can't count the number of times I've made a statement like "My current car vs. my first car? No contest, my Ford Falcon would crush one of these new plastic vehicles". The truth turns out to be something very different. The reality is our new technology beats the heck out of old solid construction.

In September 2009, for its 50^th anniversary the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety celebrated by performing their standard head on collision test between a 2009 Chevy Malibu and a 1959 Chevy Bel Air. The results were, well, startling. Here's the video (you may want to click on the video and watch it in a larger screen, some of the text gets cut off in the blog here).



With some thought it starts to make sense.  The technology put into the construction of the modern automobile is pretty amazing stuff.  Crumple zones, air bags, seatbelts, head rests are all things that contribute to why, as demonstrated in the video above, my 2010 Hyundai is so much safer than that old wagon of mine.

Why is it that we are so predisposed to believing that our modern way of living is so much less desirable than the recent past?  This way of thinking creeps into lots of places.  There's a huge push to return to natural food sources, stop using pesticides, and using hormones.  In this blog while questioning the "good" in technology I've encouraged people to tune out and have a look outside now and then.

Human's have an amazing ability to convince ourselves that if enough people say it then it must be true.  Hitler was unfortunately correct when he said "If you tell a lie long enough, loud enough, and often enough, the people will believe it."  It's good to have our assumptions challenged by things like the collision above. 

Here are a few thoughts about our recent past.  Life expectancy in Colonial America was under 25 years.  40% of children failed to reach adulthood.  In the early 20th century, that number increased to 45 years.  Today, thanks largely to advances in public health measures, and safer more abundant food sources, life expectancy is an average 67.2 years.

Before you start emailing me images of chickens in cages that are essentially two oversized breasts and a head, I'm not advocating injecting every grain of food produced with Methylethyldeath.  What I am saying is that we make frequent decisions, small and large, over things such as auto safety, food supply and climate.  Those decisions impact where trillions of dollars are spent and huge amounts of resources are applied.  With what's at stake I think it compels us to make sure that we are operating on a foundation of facts and doing our best to seek the truth.

As we go about choosing what products we buy and how we cast our votes perhaps it's worth the time to read up a little to make sure the truth matches the packaging. What does "all natural" or "organic" mean? Is there a single definition? What about carbon footprints and melting ice? If those questions just seem too daunting, here's one you might consider asking, "Who's profiting from what's being said?" It's amazing how often the answer to that question can be used as a measure of value in a statement.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Nice woofer you got there

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter. I was wow'd by the number of articles on the web news this year on the subject. From the significance of eggs, to the plausibility of a physical body resurrection and "how many Christians hold to that belief". I did so much head shaking over the weekend my neck hurt.

I live in a pretty quiet neighborhood. I wouldn't use the word sleepy. You still have to lock your doors and I don't think I'd live here without a burglar alarm, but compared to living in the city it's peaceful. Even out here though you will still get a "9x stereo" roll by and make our windows rattle. By 9x I mean a car with a stereo worth nine times the value of the car it's installed in.

Where do I start with this one? It makes my head swim.

What gives these rolling Eustachian tube cleaners their removal power is the subwoofer or "woofer".

These bass speakers will run the driver anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars. Being generally nerdy, I get the how of the mechanism but as hard as I try I don't get the why. I don't come from the generation that scowls at loud music. When I'm alone in the car I crank up the tunes loud enough that I can't hear my cell phone ring. In some of the cars I've owned turning the music up was how I solved most mechanical problems. When those wheel bearings started to make noise, "pump up the volume". Ok, so in the long run not the most economical form of automobile maintenance, but I'm not much for anything that doesn't come with a keyboard.

I considered that it may be the kind of music that says to the driver "what would really heighten my experience would be if there was enough base produced to occasionally cause one of my toenails to pop off". The only form of music I could think that seemed to fit was Rap.

I'm not a fan of Rap; in fact I don't really consider it music. I might put it in the same category as Beatnik poetry. Please don't hear me say that I'm making a stand against Rap as an art form or making a generally statement in opposition to all who create or listen to it. I'm the last person anyone should come to for input on anything that falls under the heading "art". I just don't get it personally.

Ok, back to subwoofers and Rap. In casual observation that loud thumping bass does appear to go hand in hand with Rap. The more I thought about it though the harder it became to be convinced that to call oneself a connoisseur required a "Womp-o-matic 200 Decibel Knee Krusher". Sure, I understand the adrenaline rush associated with a driving beat like that, but does having it loud enough to create a pressure wave that forces cars next to you on the freeway to go momentarily out of phase with the universe? Somehow I doubt that's a requirement.

It got me to thinking about similar things I observe, for instance, people with loud motorcycles. Again, I'm not a mechanical guy, but I can't imagine a scenario where any vehicle on a public roadway needs so much horsepower that coming in contact with a few pebbles might cause them to transition from "rolling" to "flying". Again, I appreciate enough oomph to get up to merging speed or to pass a slow moving vehicle (where it's legal), but I seem to be able to accomplish this without hardware on my car that risks cracking the pavement.

So yah, it's the cool factor. I get it, I really do. I've lived much of my life trying to get there. When I was younger I got frustrated because I never seemed to fit in with the cool kids. As I got older I started to think that what made those kids cool were the things they had. I chased that for a while. I don't have the physique or eye for clothes, so I tried collecting other things to get cool. It took me a while but eventually I saw folly in that.

My friend Dan puts the word "consumer" up there with some of the most reviled he's heard. I've seen his facial expressions change when it's used casually in a sentence. While I don't get quite to the places he does with it the discussions have caused me to change my thinking about how, where, and why I buy things. I probably won't be giving up my big screen but I do look at the value of placed on stuff and what that says about their owner differently than before. It's been a catalyst for some fundamental changes in the way I live my life.

What I want to say when folks pull up next to me, car windows flexing to the beat, wheel rims giving the illusion their car is still in motion, is that most of us are just annoyed by it. I'd hesitate to claim that most people reach a point where they stop chasing cool. My guess is that their definition of it just changes as they grow older, after all age is no guarantee of wisdom. Allow me however, to make a small suggestion before you upsize your subwoofer or put the next louder muffler on your car. As an experiment, take that money, and make a charitable donation. Maybe buy some food and drop it off at a local food bank. However you define it, try using that money to better someone else's life. My bet is doing that will make you feel cool, though it may keep you from looking the part. That's ok though, the feeling lasts longer than the look.

At the very least it may save us all some trips to the dentist and auto glass repair shop!

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

TugDug

Wow, Monday was a wild drive home. Going up the South Center Hill the hail was coming down so hard I was starting to worry about our windshield. It was so thick on the road that cars were losing traction. After the hail came the rain. Big sloppy rain coming down at a rate that even with our wipers on full blast we had trouble seeing.

I've mentioned my friend Doug here before. Doug is one of those men that are slowly disappearing from the American landscape. He's a wiz with all things mechanical and displays no hesitation when asked to crawl under machinery to see where "that drip is coming from". From what I've seen he can drive just about anything. I've seen him behind the wheel of a car, a tractor, a tow truck, and a front loader the size of Michigan. He is truly blessed with a wide range of skills and abilities. This alone isn't what makes him an endangered species. You see, Doug also possesses a truly genuine heart for people.

I know many people I would describe as kind. I've been blessed to know a larger than average number of folks who put their kindness into practice and the term "salt of the earth" fits them well. Doug however will always be who I think of when I hear the phrase "Be salt and light".

My friend Doug wears his love for people like a sandwich board. It's easy to see and the reading lamp is lit.

I wake up in the morning like a grumpy disoriented bear, scratching, grumbling and squinting with one eye looking for something to swat at. I imagine that Doug gets out of bed, does something akin to an Irish jig, and says "Who am I going to get to help today!" It sounds fanciful I know, but if you knew Doug you'd be able to imagine it too, if only a little.

One of the other things that Doug can drive, and it blows me away, is a tug boat. In fact that's what he does for a living. His boat is moored in Tacoma and he works all over the Puget Sound but spends a good deal of time in the San Juan Island area. To me this qualifies him as having one of and perhaps the most interesting commute. He's often gone for a week or more at a time and lately he's been sending pictures of his trip using his camera phone. I think Doug would have been quite at home in an era where people drew on cave walls. He is adept at communicating with pictures. His version of "texting" is writing a note on a napkin, taking a picture of it and sending it to the recipient. Here's Doug showing me where he was at one day.

 

 

Here's the view from his "driver's seat".

 

 

It really does make a bright spot in my day when he catches one of these shots and sends them my way.

Doug and I are very different people. You put a wrench in my hand and the most likely end result will be a bump or welt. I try hard never to use a hammer out of a strong dislike for emergency rooms. Just last weekend I stained the deck and opening the bucket of stain was nearly a cause for breaking out the insurance card. I've always been that way. Not only am I lacking aptitude in those areas but for the most part I don't have the urge to work with my hands. Don't get me wrong, I have skills, just not that kind.

I'm particularly good at identifying voice over actors. People are frequently amazed when I call out "Kiefer Sutherland" or "Robert De Niro" during a credit card commercial. If you ever find a need for someone to quote Star Trek facts, or recite lyrics from obscure bands like Oingo Boing or The Tubes, I'm your man. Tammy recently discovered that I can do a pretty good Bobby McFerrin impression and if there's a Muppet emergency I can do a passing Kermit singing Rainbow Connection. Oh, and yah, that computer thing pays the bills, but really, making sure people can get on You Tube or umm, well, read my blog doesn't really make a list of vital skills. When the power goes out no one rings me up and says "Wes, we need more RAM!" Good thing too because I'm too busy calling others to ask which hole the gas goes in on the generator.

Thankfully I know people like Doug and with any luck he's in town when the power goes out.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

P.S. – For those of you that don't know, the different colored text in these posts is links to something else. All my links are to things I chose, for instance the link for "these shots" points to the rest of the pictures Doug has sent me. Sometimes links in blogs aren't placed there by the author and just amount to advertising. So feel free to follow my links, it points to something I meant you to see ehehe.

A voice from above

Tammy is home and just in time too. I was close to forgetting what vegetables look like and was on my last Hot Pocket. Oh, and apparently if you keep compressing the garbage in the can with your foot it becomes impossible to remove. Live and learn. Hmm, and I appear to be missing several right shoes.

I'm not a fan of flying. I always end up with marks from the arm rests where I tuck my muffin tops in. I'd provide a link to a definition for "muffin tops" but I couldn't find one that didn't include inappropriate pictures of girls wearing jeans 2 sizes too small. So anyway, let's say I'm as comfortable on an airplane as a The Church Lady at an Ozzy Ozborne concert. Tammy has to do an Atlanta trip 3 or more times a year and she dreads it. Her trip back this time was a little different though.

We use technology to stay in touch when Tammy is out of town. We try to have video calls each night using Live Messenger but at a minimum we text chat through the day. Nothing makes up for not being together but it does take the hallow feeling away some. If you've ever spent significant time in an empty room you know what I mean. I've moved into new apartments and been too busy to unpack for a week or two. By the time I hung pictures and set out knickknacks I'd start to get fidgety. I'm still alone in the room when Tammy is away but the technology keeps me from getting fidgety.

Tammy's "commute" home on Friday had a little help from the Internet. Her flight was 7 hours long including a layover in Milwaukie. During the layover she sent me email with an update on her progress. We swapped several messages and she mentioned that AirTran was providing free Wi-Fi during her flight so for the leg to Seattle she broke out the laptop and we chatted. A couple weeks ago my friend Doug, who's a tug boat captain, sent me a link to a site that allows you to track ships at sea in real time. That got me to thinking and sure enough I found the same thing for air traffic.

So here I sat in our living room in Lakebay while Tammy was 36,000 feet over Wisconsin traveling at 400+ mph. She's telling me how cramped the seat is while listening to XM satellite radio and I'm letting her know as she crosses over state boundaries or flying over major landmarks. How crazy is that? The world does seem smaller these days. Her battery went dead shortly before she crossed in to Montana but I continued to monitor her progress. When she approached Washington State I left the house and the timing was dead on. As I walked up to her baggage carrousel she was coming down the escalator.

Ok, sure, I was about to do the nerd equivalent of the Ickey Shuffle but every time I get close to describing some technology as virtuous I start to think about the shadows left behind. While I never have to feel the severity of that separation the cost is never feeling the joy that comes from a reunion after a long absence. I may never have to sit in a quiet empty room, but it's becoming increasingly hard to find that empty room when I want it. Along with the all the benefits that technology brings comes a sort of digital leash.

I'm not saying that I'm concerned enough that I'm considering disconnecting the power and recycling our computers. I can pull off the look (I have the legs for it), but those brown robes are too drafty and I bet that rope belt chafes. It's enough though to keep me from giving my entire life over to a digital version of itself. There will always be something restorative about the sound a house makes when it settles. I love being able to listen to a good book in the car but there are times when the convenience can't compete with a comfortable chair and the feel of a hard back book in your hands.

So thanks for tuning into this blog and allowing me to decompress my stress. Now turn off your computer and have a look outside. If the lights are on out there then it means the thing we call "The Sun" is in the sky, don't stare at that, it will hurt. But if there aren't any clouds between you and it, you'll likely feel warm and that's pretty nice. If it's dark, spend a few minutes looking up at the sky. Those endless points of light you see are what the writer of Genesis in a footnote on creation referred to when he said "He made the stars also". And that my friend is real technology.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

A non-commute

Tammy-less, day 3. Supplies are low. Now eat meals compiled from a single main dish … no … time … for side dishes. Ugh. Martini olive rationing has set in.

Having my wife out of town is starting to wear on me. By the time she gets in tomorrow I'll simply be sitting in a corner trying to mediate a conversation my elbows are having on the effects of hand cream on nuclear proliferation (Left, oddly enough favors a strong offense and would like to see deficit spending increased 40% to create missiles powered by Pop Rock candy). When I woke up this morning the room didn't feel right. It was misshapen, and my vision was blurred. I was seeing doubles, 2 beds, and 2 sinks. The furniture no longer looked familiar to me. Not having Tammy around is making me bonkers, well that, or the fact that I stayed in a hotel room in Redmond last night to take a break from the commute.

This reduced my drive to a whopping 7 minutes this morning. It was a nice break. My car barely got up to temperature by the time I pulled into the garage. The experience has me thinking though. The distance between where we live and where we work is more than just a physical space. I slept late yesterday morning and toddled into to work about 9:30. I got a good day's work in then met some friends for dinner at P.F. Chang's in Bellevue Square. Afterward we saw Alice in Wonderland. It was my first time at P.F. Chang's. The food was ok though I have to say I'm not sure what everybody raves about. The movie was a lot of fun but the 3D thing doesn't really flip my lid. The real joy was spending a night out with the guys. One of the few things I miss about living closer to town are nights like that.

I didn't sleep great, ok, but not great. The bed was a little goofy and a bedroom always seems hallow without Tammy in it. Don't get me wrong though, it was a nice room. The internet access was complimentary, something you rarely see these days, the staff was friendly and the hotel was clean. I got in today about 8:00. As I walked into the building, even with the seemly relaxed schedule, I still felt weary. I shouldn't have, but I did.

I'm not sure how or if you experience this, but my brain makes very noticeable changes into different modes. When I'm working, my brain 'clicks' into that mode. I have a mode for home, yet another for vacation, for church, etc. I'm the kind who tends to focus on one major thing at a time so I guess this pattern fits me. I rely on changes in my environment to shift my brain into the next mode. The older I get the more I realize that life is a marathon not a sprint and the more deliberate I am about altering my environment to make the division between modes more pronounced. For instance, when I'm done working for the day I close my work email and do my best to keep it closed until it's time to get back into work mode. Not blurring the line between modes keeps my brain fresh and helps me keep a sustainable pace.

So, as I made the short drive into the office today it was the first time I realized how big an impact being a "country mouse" is having on me. The difference in pace is noticeable and it seems I've incorporated that change into my survival skills. The pace of where I live might actually be working its way into who I am and that surprises me.

I guess I've gone native. I probably won't take up hunting and gathering vegetables still means a trip to Albertsons but apparently the experience runs deeper than that. Go figure.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

No way out

Tammy is off to Atlanta for meetings this week. It's like sending a leg or my sense of balance off for several days. The feeling reminds me of my in-law's dog Baxter. At one point he had something go wrong with him, stroke is their best guess. Now he twirls everywhere he goes. He's a sweet little guy but when you call to him you can't help be a little sad watching him spin his way to you. I'll be that way all week, sort of teetering like a comically oversized 18 month old with tech skills in search of comfort food.

You can put on your favorite music and rock out. For some, talk radio gets it done. Some still (headsets please) take the time to call their mom. For me, audio books help me to ignore traffic jams. I'm currently listening to Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. Still though, even with the most effective distraction sitting in traffic is frustrating. It's that sense of freedom just beyond my reach.

I know when I first got a car that freedom made me want to hop around like Rocky at the top of the stairs. It must be in some small way the feeling that a bird gets when it flies. Who knows, but I like the image it puts in my head and I'm certainly not the first to use it. When I get slowed to walking pace it feels like falling back to the earth. Every time it happens I can't help but think about the cause ahead. At the very least it's going to be a bunch of people who don't know how to merge and at most it will be a serious accident caused by some who was behaving like a schmuck. The slower the crawl the longer I have to get ready to shake my fist at them. Oh boy, if it turns out to just be a bad merge I nearly blow a gasket because there's no one to rail at.

By the time I get home I'm so angry I could spit nails. Tammy has various solutions to calm me down. She shows me the Daily Puppy, waves red meat at me and if all else fails she head butts me in the ribs.

I get this way about what goes on in politics too. I see our representatives enacting laws for no reason I can see other than it gives them a claim to fame for the next election. No one solves problems anymore; they just nurse them along to justify the need for a support system. My work is much the same, just a never ending series of meaningless tasks on the horizon. No end in sight, no hope for release, no ability to make a run for freedom.

It's starting to feel like I'm going to be stuck in traffic until I take the dirt nap.

I'm bothered by this immensely.

I inhabit this space.

Tammy and I have talked about it a lot lately. Saturday we were having one of our permutations on this conversation. Sunday morning we scooted into church on the verge of being late. Sometimes God's presence is so full in that building that it changes the way the light moves in the room. Sunday was one of those days and Dan spoke right into the heart of this issue for me. The short version is that Dan reminded me that I need to remember to separate the person from their actions. It's such a simple concept and for me one of the hardest things to put into practice. Hate the sin, love the sinner. It's surely how I want to be treated.

Now I just got to figure out how this looks when traffic is merging. Maybe I could shake my fist at them but be holding a sign that says "big merge hugs!" Mostly I guess I better learn to stop taking it personally and find solace in the fact that the person behind that wheel is just that, a person. They might be someone who is also having a long day, a stressful job, weighty obligations hanging over their head, and perhaps not the support system at home that I do. That sounds like a good start at least.

Hey, a bumper stick that says "Hate the merge, love the merger!"

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Selective vision

One of my favorite features in my car is the prismatic rear-view mirror. That's the fancy name for the tab on your rear-view that you can flip to reduce the glare from the headlights of the car behind you. Once I get slotted into the spot I'm going to be in for a while the glare from the headlights gets to me. It's compounded by drivers who tailgate and people with LED headlights.

I know I'm going to get someone that will read this (assuming that anyone reads this) and tries to explain to me the practical reason for LED headlights. Even with the specter of that looming let me say that I've been driving long enough to be convinced that the standard headlight does the job sufficiently. This places LED headlights in the same category as loud mufflers, ground effect lights and fake body parts hanging from your trunk lid or trailer hitch. Simply put, they are attempts to draw attention. The occasional rubber hand hanging from a trunk lid does get me to giggle I'll admit. The naughty bits dangling from the bumper hitch, while unintentionally describing the compensation in play for the owner, I just find pathetic.

Tammy and I were talking this morning about how handy I find this mirror. She explained that she doesn't like to use it because of the way it distorts the view. It makes it harder for her to track the vehicles behind her. That's when the thought occurred to me. The rear-view mirror does make a pretty good metaphor for a coping mechanism. It fits in the vein of "wearing rose colored glasses" and "going around with your blinders on". I need to come up with a catchy way to refer to it. Hmm, let's see.

You're sitting in a theatre about to enjoy CSI: The Movie as The Chatterly family sits down behind you. The mom, Janice Chatterly, is on her cell phone talking with her friend Brenda about the pair of 9" heels she just bought. She spent the food budget for a family of 5 on them. Legs crossed, she's absently swinging one of her feet just enough so that her Jimmy Chu taps the back of your seat in a kind of gum smacking rhythm. Tommy (his dad calls him Champ) 7, is on his second tankard of nuke-o-cola and is jumping up and down in his seat while frantically pushing a button on his game boy with a thumb swollen so badly that it has turned fire engine red. Wonderful, angelic, light of the universe Tilly is 3 years old. Her brother has just bumped her elbow and caused the prized double scoop of vanilla fudge ice cream she was promised if she would stop crying in the car to be deposited in her lap. You hear this unfold behind you as the house lights come down. You just need to reach up and "flip the dimmer on your rear view", lean back and enjoy the show.

Hmm, maybe, I dunno. It is that kind of life sometimes though. I was mulling it over in the car this morning and Neal Mccoy came on the mp3 player singing Billy's Got His Beer Goggles On. It's a goofball country song but I'm more than just a bit of a goof so it's on my player. It really did get me to thinking though; it's an extreme version of my mirror. Just as my mirror is an attempt to deaden the glare of the light behind me, for some alcohol is their metaphor come to life.

He'll fall apart when he gets home.

But right now his worries are gone.

Life looks good, good, good.

Billy's got his beer goggles on, hey

I get that. I've had days recently where nothing sounded better than a couple of martinis. Just an hour or two to sit back and let the noise of life get reduced to a tolerable hum. The problem is when the alcohol has worn off and the metaphor breaks down there's no resolution. You find that your boss is still a pain, you really didn't follow the plot of CSI: The Movie and that guy with the LED headlights is still tailgating you. You can keep mixing those drinks or imagining yourself on a quiet beach in the sun but it doesn't solve the ultimate problem.

I haven't seen Avatar yet. I'm not sure I will. I was struck however by the stories of people experiencing depression after seeing the movie. They are fascinated by the beauty of this alien world inhabited by a peace loving people who don't seem to be infected with the idea that pushing another down is an acceptable way of rising up. Realizing that this life will never be like that their "whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning". So, for some it would seem, rather than being an escape this movie created a hangover like crash. At least with booze you can get drunk again.

Who doesn't yearn to live in a place where people live in harmony and beauty? I sure do. Sounds like heaven doesn't it?

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Tailgating or Tailgating

Whew, it was a busy weekend. Tammy and I spent all day Saturday and a smidge on Friday night at Camp Soundview for the Alpha weekend away. We had a terrific time. The facility there is very comfortable and makes for a great retreat setting. Tammy cooked 4 meals for us and received a well deserved round of applause for the effort.

I've been planning to dedicate a post on the topic of tailgating. Dan used this subject in his sermon this Sunday so I took it as a sign that it was time for me to give the topic a good thrashing.

I've never been one to put bumper stickers on my cars. There are all the obvious reasons like damaging your paint or lowering your resale value. However, the primary reason for me not declaring my political affiliation, particular breed of dog fancy, clog dancing enthusiasm, crocheting club fondness, or demand for ethno-religo-poli-unity is my behavior. People almost always judge a message from the actions of the messenger.

I know that regardless of how hard I try to drink my own "blog-aide" I will still manage to do some of the things I rage about on this page. We all make mistakes behind the wheels of our cars. My hope is that when it's me, my fellow commuters see it as oversight on my part not selfishness or worse maliciousness. Until car manufacturers provide some form of onboard apology system I'll refrain from putting a "Follow me to Jello Shooter Night at Rick's tavern and House of Tranquility" bumper sticker on my car. Rick would probably say I was "harshing his mellow".

I really do wonder what's going through the mind of people who tailgate. I can only imagine two scenarios and I'm not sure which one scares me more. At 60+ MPH they have their 4000 lb car so close to the rear of my 4000 lb car that a single sheet of notebook paper could be suspended between the vehicles without the proximity of the bumpers actually qualifying as "touching". The tailgater, both hands on the wheel, one eye closed as if aiming carefully, is having the ultimate drive by brail experience and through their brain is running one of these thoughts:

1. If this guy doesn't get out of my way soon I'm going to run them off the road, rip his head off and mount it to my hood.
   --OR--
   
2. Gee, I need to get some bread. Aunt Susie, call Aunt Susie. That American Idol contestant sure is dreamy. Dreamy is a funny word, word, waaurd. Werd up. Getuppa get on uppa. Got yoga tonight and don't call the instructor Yoda, that's only funny to me. Hair cut, yup, Fame! I'm gonna live forever…
   

Either way I always scratch my head when the crazed tailgater zooms by me and they either have an Ichthys mounted on their trunk lid or have a Coexist bumper sticker. Neither of the ideas represented by these doodads jive well with tailgating, at least not the kind that occurs at speed. I guess for some, tolerance doesn't apply to people that have the nerve to impede progress on the freeway.

Perhaps they should try the other kind of tailgating; the kind that occurs in the parking lot of stadiums during football games. In fact, if these folks embrace the concepts implied by their bumpers, tailgating could turn into a learning experience for both parties and probably a heck of a good time.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Hello, McFly

For me when I think about what the future was suppose to be two sets of images come to mind. Star Trek and Back to the Future. There are many iconic images from those shows, Star Trek in particular, that have become reality. The technology that let Captain Kirk chat with far-out hippie aliens on a large screen at the front of the bridge is arriving soon with LG and Panasonic partnering up with Skype. The flip cell phone was patterned after the communicator and the blue tooth headsets today sure remind me of that strange knob looking thing that Lt Uhura wore in her ear.

Fast forward 20 years and Robert Zemeckis brought us hover boards, tennis shoes that tied themselves and one size fits all self adjusting clothing. Oh, and of course flying cars that traveled through time. I'm still waiting on the Zemechis plan, but I'm hopeful. Self tying shoes are a large man's dream fashion statement!

I was trading emails with my brother Mike recently. 15 or so years separate us. It's just long enough for him to represent the prior generation to me (not an "old guy" joke bro, so no pinning me down and tickling me). Most of my earlier memories of Mike were of him as a long haul truck driver. Having logged over a million miles on the roads he has a rare perspective on commuting. He tells driving stories that will make you grind your teeth flat. So when he says "I truly hate the commuting process in this state" it carries Morgan Freeman like gravitas.

"Before me is a telegraphic key that is of special significance. It has been used by seven Presidents to open great expositions such as the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909, the Panama Canal, and many others. It was presented to me by your senior Senator Warren Magnuson at the White House last Wednesday. By closing this key may we open not only a great World's fair, may we open an era of peace and understanding among all mankind. Let the fair begin!" -- John F. Kennedy's opening remarks for the Seattle World's Fair, April 21^st, 1962.

In expressing his own frustration with this area's commute, Mike talked about the excitement that the Seattle area had as JFK spoke those words. The Monorail provided an expectant glimpse to the future of commuting and plans to extend its 1+ mile long route promised to launch the Puget Sound into the 21^st century. In reality I guess it did give us a look to our future, just not quite the ambitious, hopeful version expressed by the President. The Monorail never saw that expansion and it wasn't until recent years that we've seen any movement toward a serious mass transit plan for the area. As Mike said, after the fair it was like "all the smart people left town."

Here we are, 50 years later and we have The Link Light Rail in place that runs from Seatac to downtown (the same route as the original expansion planned for the Monorail). Does this signal a new hope for the area? Have the smart people returned to finally deliver on that promise? Well, I've ridden it and I'm not convinced. Don't get me wrong, the train is a marvel of engineering matched in scale perhaps only by its cost. My only real complaint about the experience is that the seats are really uncomfortable. For a big guy I don't have as much padding on the caboose as one would assume. After 20 minutes of "riding the rail" I was pining for the comfort of an aluminum bench seat at a little league baseball game and starting to think I had actually been "riding a rail".

Setting my admittedly somewhat unique comfort requirements aside, here's my real question. Is the plan to overhaul our transit system ambitious enough? The first iteration of the Light Rail takes passengers from downtown to the airport. I guess I get that this is a selling point for Seattle and they really pushed to get it done in time for the Vancouver Winter Olympics. As a traveler visiting the area, it does look good on tourist flyers that we have Light Rail service to downtown. But which problem are we trying to solve here?

Call me silly but somehow I would have liked to see that $1.7 billion put into a route that actually had an immediate impact on the commute for people that live here. Sure, at some point in the plan it makes sense to extend this service to Seatac, but was that the highest priority?

It will be some time before we know the truth to any of this and probably well beyond the point that I will be able to take advantage of it. I'm guessing though that if I haven't run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible by then I'll be sitting in my rocking chair on the front porch and saying "Meh, Light Rail, Monorail, same blasted pie in the sky silliness. Hey! You pain in my no-padding butt little miscreants, stay off my lawn!!!"

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Mach 9 with your hair on fire

Wow, it was cold the last couple of days! Western Washington weather is crazy and the way residents respond to it is even crazier!

We use a DVR for all our TV watching. We like being able to skip the commercials and frankly without being able to I'm not sure how much TV I'd be willing to sit through. That's another blog though.

There are a couple odd things about watching everything on a DVR. For one, I no longer know what time or network a given show is on. I find it in the list and mash play. Because it's all recorded everything we watch is delayed by hours at least and sometimes days. Last night, in our copious hours of free time, Tammy and I watched one of our favorite programs. It aired originally on Monday and we watched it 24 hours later. In the middle of one scene, a marquee begins to scroll across the bottom of the screen with breaking news.

Every time that happens it conjures up terrible images for me. It's probably the result of growing up during the paranoia laden Cold War era where America sat grinding their teeth waiting for news that the missile exchange was occurring and we should "assume the position". Maybe it's the memory of 9-11 and the days after too. It seems like we spent weeks dividing our attention between the talking heads and that stream of text scrolling underneath. Between the stress, trying to keep one eye on the announcer, and one eye on the text, I think I developed muscle cramps of a type never before experienced by a human being. I'm surprised we haven't seen ads on late night TV from sleazy law offices offering to sue the networks on our behalf. "Did you or someone you know develop Yappidypanic syndrome during the coverage of the terror attacks of 9-11? If so, contact the law offices of Ray Soosalot. You may be entitled to compensation."

Ok, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Scrolling across the screen was this message "Breaking news: Rain mixed with snow is moving into Western Washington and the Puget Sound area…" Umm, huh? Rain mixed with snow? Wow, send up the flares and break out the emergency rations. I nearly fell off the couch.

Drivers in this area really do go nuts in any weather that deviates from 58 and overcast. Add to that the way our news media turns every drop of rain into "Storm Watch: 2010" it's a wonder we get anywhere. I was thinking about this today as I rode through downtown in one of the big articulated buses. All this was going through my head as I watched this driver maneuver this giant machine through downtown Seattle at an amazing clip. I've been riding the bus long enough now to say that these folks have amazing skills. Seattle, like most cities, is a driving nightmare. Calling what the folks behind the wheel of these buses do "driving" are like saying Meadowlark Lemon could bounce a ball, Jimmy Wayne is out for a walk, or Jimi Hendrix played the guitar. I can drive our little Hyundai around those streets, but what those people do is a completely different thing.

I did have one experience though that brought me close to calling Tammy and telling her not to bother picking me up at the Renton Transit Center. The good news would have been that she could star home early that day and that the end result was likely to be considered accidental so the extra insurance would kick in. I got onto the bus out bound from Redmond and the driver didn't look familiar. Now, I haven't been doing the bus thing that long, so I didn't think too much of the "new face". As we headed out though, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the age and condition of the bus. Rickety is probably too kind a word. As we rounded our first corner, the driver cut it a little short and we rolled over the curb. Again, hey, these things are bound to happen, but I wasn't worried… yet. Next I noticed the bus seem to change speed a lot, and switch lanes somewhat radically. That's when I started to worry.

My brain is prone to spin on things and I began to do the math at this point. Rickety, older bus, erratic driving, and the driver seemed just a little lost. Either the bus has been stolen by a "wannabe" transit operator or we had a new driver. The likelihood of the former being quite low, I assumed the latter. I decided to take my head phones off and listen. Sure enough, our pilot was fairly new to the route and the profession. The other thing that became apparent was she was darned excited to be employed and was really enjoying the work. She couldn't have seemed more elated had she screamed "Waaaaahooo" and made calf roping motions above her head. It was both wonderful to see someone so happy to be working and colon cleansingly terrifying to be bouncing down the road with her at the helm.

I've been on her bus several times now and she's gotten much better. She's rapidly building her skill and my head phones are back in my ears. You know what though, the excitement she has for her new job doesn't appear to have decreased one bit. They need to issue her a cowboy hat!

I don't worry so much when I see her pull up now. In fact, I rather enjoy the energy that fills the bus. If I look out and see rain and snow mixed as she pulls up though I may have to make that phone call to tell Tammy the combo to the safe.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Hand me down knowledge

Tammy and I had a nice relaxing weekend. Last week was wildly busy and this week portends to be the same so we took this weekend and hibernated.

Several of my friends are getting (or have gotten) their first drivers license recently. Yes, these are 16 year old-ish "peeps", and yes I call them friends because that's what they are. I've gotten to know them over the last year or two through church. Granted there's a generation gap that keeps me from knowing when I'm suppose to put "izzle" on the ends of words and they aren't likely to want to spend a bunch of time talking about that awesome Merlot I found for $7.99. They will occasionally risk their reputations by giving me a lame old guy fist bump for which I'm quite honored. We don't blow it up after though, I don't want to get them completely ostracized by their peers.

Getting your license is huge. I still remember that sense of freedom that came with getting behind the wheel of the car that first time. Talking, well ok mostly teasing, my friends about getting their license made me think about teaching my daughter Alia to drive. I'm not what you'd call the most patient person. Anyone who has worked with me to accomplish any task from cleaning house to implementing a recursive API knows that sitting back and pondering the esthetic nuances of how I approach the task isn't something I do. I think if you asked her Alia would answer that I was a different person sitting next to her in the car. I've always been hard on her, but I may have earned a fist bump for the driving lessons.

All this got me thinking about what influence my parents had on me learning to drive. My mom taught me all kinds of things. She taught me to cook and how to persevere. She wasn't about to try and teach me to drive though. My father wasn't around when I got my license but he did at one point give me some driving tips. I guess I was probably 8 years old when he explained how useful the new bumps on the edge of the road were. They had just lined several streets in his area with bumps on the edge of the roadway designed to give an audible warning as you crossed onto the shoulder. My dad told me "When you've had too much to drink, you can put your tires on those bumps and it helps you to stay on the road. If you don't hear the thrum thrum, you stop the car." Ahh, wisdom that drains down like the stream in sports stadium trough urinal.

Dad was a two case a beer a day drunk. I can tell a mess of stories of being in the 63 Comet he had, no seatbelt, bouncing around as he drained the Heidelberg and Rainier. When we'd take long trips, like the infamous Independence Day trip to Caldwell Idaho, he'd take advantage of the wonderful park like settings of the Rest Areas to lay out a blanket and sleep it off. Yup, we were living the dream. Things got worse to the point that my parents divorced and I didn't see my Dad much until I was in my 20's. He got sober, remarried, and started a new family. He didn't seem to remember much of those times. At one point he bought his dream car, some sort of Ford Mustang, and had rolled it over on SR99. The car was destroyed and he woke up. He was sober the last 9 years of his life.

All too frequently as we drive down Key Peninsula Highway we get behind a drunk driver. It baffles me that at this point with all the statistics and education that I still see these folks, in the oncoming lane of travel on moment, and nearly in the ditch the next. Our police have a whole infrastructure underfunded just to manage drunk drivers. I understand addiction, I do. I get the desire to escape. I've had times in my life that I've crawled into my own forms of self delusion to pretend that pain wasn't there. That behavior that causes people to run in panic from life nullified my relationship with my father and played a significant part in the loss of my brother Lyle.

But what clicks in the inebriated brain that says, "Wow, I'm on my lips! Let's go for drive"? I know you think you can explain it to me. Lots of folks have tried. I'll still look at you and scratch my head. But here's an even more important question, what do we have to do to stop them? When I worked for the Patrol we would frequently hear stories from Troopers about drunks they had bagged who had been convicted 5 or 6 times! Maybe it's gotten better, but my guess is that it hasn't. Perhaps one of my friends that still work there will read this and chime in.

I went to Bing and searched on Washington State drunk driving laws, and out of the first page of results all but one were some kind of advertisement for attorneys who specialize in DUI defense so I'm betting the practice is alive and well.

I bet you are thinking I'm about to make an appeal for my own solution to this problem. Well, I'm not. Here's what I am going to say. It should be no surprise to anyone that our roads are filled nightly with some percentage of pickled drivers. It probably isn't a shocker when I say that we see a fair number of them on KPH. I will make this plea though. KPH is a dark 2 lane road with no shoulder in most places. Why is it that I see people walking down this thing wearing black jeans, black t-shirts and black jackets? Even worse, why are many of these pedestrians kids?

In truth I don't see a sustainable answer to these problems on the horizon. I think there are answers to be had; I just don't think we seem to be able muster up the collective will to solve them. Drunk driving was one of the earliest "hot button" topics I can remember. The moment a problem reaches that profile level all hope of solving them seems to dissipate. Too many people see opportunity in misery. They begin to use it as a platform to get elected to public office, write books, and start support groups. Can you imagine a lawyer who makes his money defending drivers charged with DUI becoming an advocate of a long term solution to drinking and driving?

The same story gets told over and over again. Terrorism, health care, pollution, you name it.

Perhaps I just lack vision. Where some people look at suffering and pain and see "book deal" I just see suffering and pain. I guess I need to learn to look on the bright side.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

A Bridge to Nowhere

When I was just a wee little commuter back in the 70's (I'll be 44 this year) I can remember the mood in the Seattle area being pretty dark. Boeing had a huge financial crash at the end if the 60's dropping their number of employees by 70% by 1971. That prompted two real-estate agents to put up the iconic "Will the last person leaving Seattle – Turn out the lights" billboard. This is the world I was born into. I can remember seeing half built housing developments all over, and lots of family friends struggling or moving away.

Sometime during that period they had begun building several freeway ramps and as the tax base dwindled so did those projects. Those ramps remained unfinished and loomed over the downtown drive for many years reminding everyone of leaner times.

We travel every day across an elevated section of freeway called the Nalley Valley Viaduct. In the last year or so they have begun a huge project to replace and expand this inadequate interchange. Traffic suffers on all approaches to this area and it really does need the work done.

The project is truly ambitious. They are just in that stage where several of the ramps are half built and I can't help but think back to my childhood and those bridges to nowhere. Considering our current economic woes and the country being involved in a long running controversial war I get a really odd nostalgic feeling as we travel through there.

All that aside, I am actually quite hopeful for the work that is being done. Generally speaking my experience with large freeway construction projects has never been good. They always seem like half measures that manage to keep construction companies employed but never go quite far enough to solve the problem. I-405 for instance has been under major construction near the S-Curves for as long as I can remember. Literally by the time they complete one upgrade or alteration it is already obsolete and they start all over again.

I have to say I was really reaching that point in life that I could say I was getting my "curmudgeon on" for large freeway projects. That's when the Tacoma Narrows Bridge project came into my life. If you aren't familiar with this bridge you may know it by its infamous name, Galloping Gertie.

When I first met Tammy and found out she lived in Lakebay my response was "Umm, Washington?" Then she clarified by saying, "Key Peninsula" and I replied, "Umm, Washington?" I had been out that way before on my way to Shelton and happily ignored all the place names in between. On our second date I volunteered to make the trek to her place, meet the parents, receive the obligatory dog piling from their vicious pack of toy poodles, and get a feel for where she lived. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, but it wasn't long before I started to get a taste of their pain dealing with SR-16 and "The Bridge".

After Gertie fell into the Narrows they replaced her with a new 4 lane bridge. As more people moved to growing areas like Gig Harbor the bridge became a strangle hold choke point that caused waves of delays all the way back to I-5. It was clearly time to come up with a Heimlich maneuver effort. Washington's typical underwhelming effort wasn't going to be sufficient. Then I heard the words Toll Bridge and despair set in.

We watched the bridge go up and I cringed with every brick and beam. Finally the day came for this monster to open and it was as if someone had punched the Narrows in the solar plexus. Tammy likes to say that SR-16 went from the worst part of her commute to the best, and that's saying something. Frankly it's the finest capitol project I've ever even heard of. The new bridge returns 20-30 minutes each day to us.

I still get M.A.S.H. flash backs when we drive through the new construction and probably will until those bridges grow into overpasses. I'll even continue to get the occasional vision of Speed launching the Mach 5 off one to safely land on another conveniently placed surface street. That car was shaped like a lethal weapon! He wore a 5 point seatbelt and helmet while Trixie bounced around in the passenger seat like a crash test dummy. That cartoon was awesome. Do kids even watch cartoons anymore? Eh, I guess with DVD players in the Family Truckster the stuff going on outside the window doesn't rate.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

It’s all about U

The drizzle was, well dismal. I'm not sure if that qualifies as a rhyme or not. Anyway, the trip in this morning was grey, dreary… Oh sorry, winked out for a moment.

I'm a quad tall 120 degree non fat latte guy. That gets my day started off with a bang. It makes 5 am much more tolerable. I do my best not to get behind the wheel without my coffee. It's understandably difficult to gather statistics about the dangers of driving while drowsy. There isn't a breath test for sleepiness and you aren't likely to still be all that drowsy when you are propped up against the guard rail, steering wheel imprint on your chest and glass in your head. Dizzy maybe, but drowsy no.

With that in mind, here's my assertion, reading probably isn't the best choice of things to do while operating your motor vehicle in a commute. Why is it then that the DOT thought it would be a good idea to put reader boards up along the freeway? I understand that these boards have great potential to provide vital information to motorists but I'm wondering if this delivery method is really the answer.

My skepticism comes from having this experience repeatedly. I'm sitting in a 2 mile, 30 minute delay on I-5. It's been a long day at work and I've worn a whole in my scalp scratching my head puzzling over corporate decision making skills. I'm watching my gas mileage shrink to near zero as I spot the reader board sign up ahead. I think to myself, "Ah, an accident, gee, I hope everyone is ok." As the text of the sign comes into focus, my rear end clinches tight enough to permanently fuse the cloth covering of the driver's seat to my big man jeans. "TEST TEST TEST ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()" is repeated over and over on the sign. 20 feet after we clear the sign, we are back to 60 MPH.

Yup, I'd put billboards, particularly the giant football stadium scoreboard versions, right up there. The Emerald Queen Casino did a fine job of placing their latest incarnation of this device right in the view of southbound I-5 traffic. Hey, who would be bothered by a few fender benders when compared to receiving the scintillating news that The Emerald Queen has the finest Thai entertainment in town! (No kidding, racial profiling is all the rage when advertising to potential gambling addicts).

While we are there, let's talk about people waving signs on overpasses. People, nothing is going to annoy your target audience more than causing a traffic jam and catching them in it. Allow me to pick on Casey Treat and his Christian Faith Center following. Folks, read your Bible and have a look at the definition of Agape. When I think "love in action" causing a traffic jam, or worse a car accident, isn't the image that comes to mind. I'm excited to meet Jesus too, but somehow I don't think dying in a ditch fully engulfed in an 87 octane blaze is the method he has in mind. Please, stick to Sunday morning TV and stay off the overpasses. Really, please, I'm begging you.

Whew, I feel better. I think I'll get another coffee.

This morning the reader board over SR-16 had a single letter on it, "U". See, it is all about me! Hah, I told you so!

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

PS –Shorter today, just because Surendra complained.

Recycling Resusci Anne

I should have put on Jimmi Hendrix or The Doors this morning; it would have matched the sunrise perfectly. I love the picture below. The smoke stack goes well with the skyline in a William S. Burroughs sorta way.

I was once asked the following question in a job interview, "You are stuck in traffic and are running late for a meeting with 'the big boss'. You are a key presenter in the meeting. The HOV lane is wide open, what would you do?" The interviewer said that the best answer he ever got for this question was "Find a homeless person and offer to hire them as a carpool buddy"! We agreed that it was a pretty good answer.

If the state of Washington they are considering turning the HOV lane on i405 into a HOT lane. I've read some of the articles on the proposal and I'm baffled. I can't help but see this as yet another effort by the state to use their new favorite phrase, "Generate Revenue". The recent economic woes caused our state's lawmakers to go into immediate Eeyore mode predicting the worst possible scenarios as certainties. They looked at the books and said wow we are going to come up short. I don't know about you, but when facing a shortfall in our home budget, the first thing we do is look for ways to cut back on the non essentials.

Luxuries go first, followed by comfort, and then necessities. There are a range of possible cutbacks in each one of those buckets, but you get the idea. We don't go after essential services first, what kind of sense would that make? Yet, across Washington State, and I'm betting much of the country as well, that's exactly what our Government appears to be doing. They start out with "Well, we'll just have to let inmates go free" or "I guess we'll just layoff some police". Shortly after publishing these doomsday proclamations we began hearing wild rumors like taxes on gum, candy and bottled water. Not much time passed before I-960 was suspended and it is now open season on "Revenue Generation" tactics.

Ok, so $.01 tax on each ounce of bottled water, cutting into my Juicy Fruit addiction, and raising prices on my Mars Bar, all exceedingly silly but manageable. It will only amount to people cutting back on those purchases, harming the industries that produce them (damn those bottled water companies!!!) and in the end the reduction in revenue from the commerce will outweigh the taxes raised, but ok, I can set that aside. Here's the piece I don't get about converting the HOV to HOT. One of the suggestions is increasing the requirement to 3 people to use the lane without a fee.

We (Tammy and I but really all of us who live in the Puget Sound and commute) re-arrange our lives around those HOV lanes. We chose the times we travel, where we live, and ultimately what jobs we pick. Screwing around with those lanes hits too close to home. For folks that are closer to the margin than Tammy and I, these changes might be devastating. How does that possibility balance with the kinder, gentler, group hug politics we practice in this state? The truth is, the economy is bad, and money is tight all around. If the people have less money, guess what? The government has less money. It sucks, but that's what it is.

The bottom line is that everything I've seen so far targets those folks closer to the margins. That being said, there aren't any other revenue generating solutions that make sense either. That's the root of the problem here. Our elected officials need to stop talking about "Generating Revenue", stop threatening us into compliance by holding up the specter of cuts to core services, and start dealing with reality.

I'm going to make a suggestion here, radical as it is, but perhaps we need to prioritize until the tax system we already have in place recovers along with citizen's incomes? So before we talk about programs like emergency response and road repair we make sure that we pause spending on non essentials like

• Parks
  
• Art (Like the fine shovel in dirt statue)
  
• Landscaping (not talking about erosion control)
  

Deep breath now, I know some of you would die for art and parks. I'm just asking that for now you not make that choice for the rest of us. Things will get better, and the money will return. When it does we can go back to spending money on square rocks. In the mean time perhaps the folks in Olympia might turn off their cell phones, send their publicists and campaign managers home, get a white board and make a some lists. In the end I bet there's a whole mess of things that could be shelved for a while in lieu of sending Troopers to the unemployment line or jacking up the price of my Cheetos.

Don't drive angry. Drive weird!

PS – Resusci Annie, or Rescue Annie is the CPR dummy I used to learn to inflate people made of plastic and rubber. We are considering a recycling program for these devices that allow them to be used as a 3^rd passenger in case they up the number needed for the HOV lane.

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa

I think I've mentioned it once before but on Thursday nights Tammy and I participate in a program at our church called Alpha. Last week, before the festivities began we were sitting in the library at the church about to ask God to bless the evening when Dan looks up at the picture of Jesus on the wall and notices that the eyes are looking down directly at me. He couldn't resist and said something like "Wes, Jesus has his eye on you".

Allow me to take a moment and explain. I spent most of my life not attending church. It wasn't until I moved out to the sticks and met Tammy that I began to go regularly. Dan is the pastor there and performed our wedding. Over the last 3 years I've grown more as a Christian and a person than at any time that I can remember. Much of that growth I attribute to Dan's teaching and friendship. Anyone who can step up to the pulpit wearing Converse minus the laces and use The Terminator in a sermon as a device to describe relentlessness is bound to catch my attention.

So, when Dan says "Jesus has his eye on you" my first thought wasn't that he was being cheeky and referring to the picture above my head.

He has that sense of humor though and we all had a good chuckle. The next day however I had couple of "3G double takes" when I received two text messages, both with the image above. The first entitled "I saw that" and the second "I heard that". If you look closely you can see the reflection of my friend Doug snapping the picture with The Holy Camera Phone capturing the image that will forever be my metaphor for iron sharpening iron. It's a joy to spend Sundays with a terrific group of chuckle heads.

So now, it is time for my confession. Hi, my name is Wes, and I'm a Road-Rage-a-Holic. I am constantly fighting the urge to wave at my fellow motorists minus 3 fingers and no thumb. I have Navy veteran friends who have winced after hearing me express my frustration at the lowered Honda Accord with the glass pack muffler that jammed itself in front of me. Bill, Tony, that's you, and no I don't know what a glass pack really is, but it's part of what makes those cars annoying I think.

Someone recently asked me "Who would want to read a commuting blog?" and my answer was I have no idea. I do know this; two things lately have kept the gamma rays from making me ruin my shoes, riding the bus and writing this blog. There is an extreme sense of helplessness when people do the things I rail about here. For me, it's like having my arms tied to my side while people whiz by counting coup.

Ok, ok, I'm not going to force someone off the road and beat them with French bread or anything. I'm sure that's the image that comes to mind when you see Road-Rage-a-Holic. That's what happens when the rage comes out of a person in a forceful way. Ultimately I have more of the Ox response, "My Doctor said I swallowed a lot of anger, along with a lot of pizza eheheh". Either way, I don't know any people who spend significant time in traffic that can sit back and say "Gee, gosh, these things happen". I think the bulk of us respond with either an inward and/or outward reaction to the frustration and anger.

Since I don't see physical altercations daily on the freeway I'm going to assume that most of us respond inwardly (mostly). I'm guessing that inattention accounts for some of these incidents but there are a fair number that are people who just don't feel that the rest of us are worth the time it would take to consider. Even harder to understand is the person who sees their behavior for what it is and revels in it. The last two are those that push me to the uglier parts of my rage.

Thankfully I have a support system comprised of family and friends who love me that keeps the pot from boiling over. It's a love that is so much more than the kind sung about on Casey Kasem's list. It's a verb, not a noun.

I'm better on the road than I used to be, really. Still though, I think that people who get caught doing silly things on the freeway should have to post their cell phone numbers on their rear bumpers. I might want to forward them a text message.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Mr. Watson – Come here I want to see you.

 

As I was having my sandwich assembled at a Subway in Bellevue I noticed this sign. I'm used to seeing this kind of thing in the Doctor's office and the start of a movie, but this was a first. My initial thinking was that of all of the potential challenges faced by the employee at this store how is it that this was the one that made the signage cut? Why not "Try to make your decision before you get in line" or "Please be polite, I've been on my feet all day"? It wasn't long though before I was able to visualize the scenario that led to this decision. It's hard to divide your attention when talking on the phone. It just is.

I spent 5 years perfecting that skill. Working as a police dispatcher conjures up some images for you I'm sure. The 911 operator taking the call, "You say your cats up a tree and he's annoying the neighbors by singing opera while grooming? We'll send someone right away!" The other image you may have is of the radio operator "One adam twelve, one adam 12, see the man, fifth and maple, on a four seventy five violation". During my time in the hot seat we had to handle both tasks, 9-11 and the radio, as well as answer the business lines all at the same time. Dividing my attention between conversations became second nature.

Today of course this is commonly referred to as multitasking. My understanding of the origin of that term comes from the computer industry. Something that is said to be multitasking isn't doing 2 or more things at the same time (that would be multiprocessing) but is in fact dividing its attention between tasks in slices of time based on priority. Allow me to use a Thanksgiving dinner plate to illustrate. On my plate I have

• Turkey, roasted, a touch over cooked.
  
• Mashed potatoes, perfectly done
  
• Cranberry sauce, that congealed type that makes the shlugsh noise when it comes out of the can
  
• Green beans with bacon that has been simmering most of the day
  
• Fruit salad, my Mom's recipe.
  

Ok, assuming one doesn't go crazy mix master on a fine meal and stir all this up (ick!), we'll be eating one food at a time. Now, the older I get the less I can hold, so I like to assign priority to each item so that when I become "moaning full" I have my favorites consumed first. So it goes something like this. Taters, beans, turkey, cranberry, taters, smack myself for putting the fruit salad on the plate and scrape it into a bowl, taters, beans, taters, beans, turkey, cranberry. This repeats until the plate is empty or I have begun to moan audibly, squint and rub my belly. This is multitasking. Your priorities will likely be different than mine, but this should give you the idea.

Thankfully you won't ever get feedback from an item on your dinner plate complaining that you should have given it more priority over the other items. Another unlikely event would be that if you fail to pay attention to one dinner item it may be considered a social offense. Even less likely would be if you ignore your turkey too much you suddenly careen off an embankment causing property damage, injury or death. Umm, well, if any of these do happen during a holiday meal, and you survive, email me and tell me I'm wrong. We'll make sure one of us gets therapy.

The truth is few of us can multitask well between tasks that require concentration. Having a conversation on your cell phone while attempting to order a sandwich is one of them and as the sign above would indicate, it's inconsiderate of the person assembling your meal as well as the other customers in line. Behind the wheel of a car this practice elevates to somewhere starting at rude, traveling through foolish and onto deadly.

In a 2005 study by a University of Utah psychology professor cell phone distraction causes 2600 deaths and 330,000 injuries per year. As the professor puts it, "If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone, It's like instantly aging a large number of drivers."

I'm glad to see that this study was done but only because it punches up this post. Isn't this really a no-brainer? If we take the time to consider it, doesn't the idea of dividing your attention between a phone call and driving your car scream "DANGER, DANGER WILL ROBINSON"? For me, I'm not a fan of talking on the phone any way, not really, and particularly on a cell phone. I'm the type of person that really needs the other 80 percent of the story that is non verbal. I get rather obsessed with understanding what people are saying and being understood. The telephone works well for disseminating information but for me it's no place to have a conversation.

To sum it up, when you are ordering your sandwich, be considerate. That person making your food works hard. They have an expectation on them to get through the line of customers in a timely manner with a smile and a genuine "thank you". If you are the only person in line, the person serving you has other duties to perform when they aren't making sandwiches and I bet they need to get to it. Oh, and if you are in your car hang up your phone. If I'm going to die young I want it to be from overstuffing myself while packing down my fruit salad not in a mangled mix of Chevrolet and Hyundai.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

PS – A 475 violation is of course "A misdemeanor citation for allowing your cat to sit in a tree and sing opera while grooming".

Smpaboak, smpaboak… Faiahhhr!!!

In preparation for today's commute I decided that proper planning dictated I ram my head into the edge of a wall hard enough to cause a wallboard burn. This is similar to a rug burn but with the wallboard texture used to apply the friction. The jury is still out on its effectiveness and I'll report back if it has positive impact.

One of my all time favorite comedy routines is Bill Cosby talking about his trip to the dentist. At one point in the bit he acts out the experience of trying to explain that there is smoke coming out of his mouth from the drill. Of course the problem is that his face is so numb that he can't pronounce the words. I've heard him do this bit more times than I can count and I still laugh out loud.

Driving down the road I'm always on the lookout for cars with their windows down. Whether I'm passing them or they are passing me one experience taught me to be weary until the danger has subsided. Some of you likely know where this is going but for those it's never happened to I'll tell my version of this story.

Some time ago I had a Cosby-esque experience on the freeway. Not with a dentist however, but another commuter. I was driving in the center lane and a midsized pick up began to pass me on my right. As his rear bumper became even with my grill the driver tossed a lit cigarette butt out the window. It's one of those moments that your memory records in slow motion. I'm doing 63, he's going 67, I see the projectile deploy from the other vehicle. It flips several times; smoke trailing while it stabilizes its flight profile. Spotting its target, my windshield, in my mind's eye I can hear the targeting sensor beep slowly at first but quickly cycle to one piercing steady tone. The single staged rocket motor kicks in and the Camel Filtered Guided Missile tracks for my car. I attempt to perform evasive maneuvers but I'm blocked at all sides so I deploy counter measures and begin to pray.

The lit cigarette hit my windshield and defying all the physics at play drops down into my engine compartment. Smoke starts to trail up into my view and I begin yelling "Smoke! Smoke! *expletive deleted* Fire! *expletive deleted* *expletive deleted*" I am forced to make an emergency stop on the freeway. So here's the tough part. Do I wait and hope that fire was simply my imagination or do I pop the hood and find out. When you have an engine compartment fire, opening the hood is probably the worst thing to do. You essentially feed the fire more air and make it angry. The best response is to step back and wait for the Firemen to show up and put it out. Either way, if there's a fire under there chances are your car is a goner.

It was my younger days and I wasn't terribly attached to common sense in any meaningful way and I popped the hood. Fortunately for me the offending item had lodged in a spot that wasn't terribly flammable and everything that was feeding my panic didn't come to pass. That being said let me assure you that my story isn't always the case. There have been plenty of motorists lose their cars to this problem.

I'll skip right by what makes smoking seem like a good idea, but what is it that makes discarding a lit cigarette out of the window seem like a good idea to people? I see this happen almost daily. Every summer the medians burn up, forest burn down, property is destroyed and lives are risked and lost. On the few occasions I've talked to people who do this their response freezes me to my knee caps. "I don't like filling up my ash tray". It's always some form of not wanting to pollute their space in some way. Yup, that's right, torch the rest of us, but hey at least their personal space is tidy and that's what really matters here.

I'm not much of an environmentalist. I think a good part of the ideals behind "the movement" are misguided at best and at worst an easy distraction that lets people ignore more serious problems (like hunger, disease and violence). When I lived in Renton I had a hippie van go by my house each day. In that neighborhood we only got a small bin for paper recycling and when that filled up I would take the mounds of trash that arrived in my mailbox each day and toss it in the covered garbage can. One day Cheech or Chong's wife brought the Nice Dreams mobile to a screeching halt and began to lecture me for tossing paper into the landfills. I had two questions for her before I walked away. "Have you considered protesting about the unsolicited garbage the Postal Service is allowed to deliver to us? Wouldn't it be better to stop the garbage from being printed and shipped instead?" That of course might actually necessitate my neighbor to get involved in a way that required them to invest more than the 20 seconds a day she spent yelling at people like me. In fact, it might actually mean they had to really get involved.

Ok, that aside I am a believer in being a good steward of the land and people who litter make me furious. People who throw objects on fire drive me biting-my-shoulder-barking-bat-weasel nuts. I know the fines have been increased, and I know policemen who gladly write tickets for the offenses. Yet we still have roads covered in trash and smokers who think the world is their ashtray. Here's a thought, perhaps we can add a little activity related penance to those fines. How about all the ecology clubs and people doing community service who pick up trash from the freeways collect up their findings. Then we take people found littering come by and for say two weeks fill their car with the fruits of their labor and drive around with it? Too much? Eh, well, I guess there's a reason I'm not drawn to working in the justice system huh?

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

A playing card in your spokes

Wow, what a terrifically crisp morning. I'm not much of an outdoorsy guy for that I have to defer to my friend Jason, but I must say when you inhale that cold air, even with the diesel fumes in it, you sure do feel alive!

We were treated to some amazing views of Mount Rainier this morning. Tammy grabbed a bunch of shots. If you just can't get enough camera phone pictures of our commute, all the images we take end up on our Flickr site. There are a bunch there of the mountain this morning.
Growing up we weren't a family that had resources. My Mother could tell stories about living out of a broken down car next to the river and making soup for my 4 older brothers out of water and wishes. More than once my brother Terry and I spent the afternoon pretending that a plastic bread sack with a rock in it was a spaceship to the moon. With the rock inside and the end tied shut you can whip that sack around fast enough to get some pretty good hang time.

I can remember my first bicycle (well, it's the first bike I can remember). It was given to me. At the time I thought of it as a gift, but looking back on it I'm pretty sure if I declined its next destination would have been the dump. It was a smaller rusted boy's bike that had a seat post and a jagged edge where the seat had broken off. I loved it. Conventional wisdom would dictate that I not ride it until a new seat could be obtained, but I've never been one for conventional wisdom. I was Evil Knievel and I still have a couple of scars in some unmentionable spots.

We did get a seat eventually and like any young man I enjoyed the fun and freedom it afforded. The real excitement began though when we rounded up some playing cards and safety pins that turned our bicycles into roaring street eating road machines. We'd clip that card on the strut so that the card extended into the spokes and made a sharp flapping noise as you road. That, my friends, was cool.

I know I'm taking a huge risk here and I fully expect the rotten vegetables to come flying. The bicycle is a sacred form of transportation here in the Puget Sound. I know, it's big everywhere, but here it's sacred. The bicyclist is the highest form of commuter. We spend millions of dollars every year to insure that their needs are met on our roadways. Even more than that, I work in the self proclaimed Bicycle Capitol of the Northwest, Redmond. People here are fanatical.

This picture shows the Pedal Dynamics Bike Shop. This shop is part of the Overlake Transit Center. How many bus stations have that as an onsite service?

If I haven't convinced you of the risk I'm taking, so be it, here goes. If you are riding you bicycle make a decision, you are either a vehicle or a fast moving pedestrian. If you are a vehicle, then you should behave like one. That means stopping at stoplights and stop signs. No, you don't get to weave in and out of the cars when traffic is backed up; you get to wait like the rest of us. If you have a special bike lane, terrific! Enjoy that tax payer provided benefit, but please have respect for the money spent and obey the rules of the road.
On a side note, allow me to point out that the roads and all parts on them are fully funded by your fellow citizens. No, the government isn't some special agency that somehow generates wealth and resources for us to consume, it's a cooperative pooling of money. Have a look at your paycheck sometime, that FICA thing is the key to my point.

So anyway, if you don't care to adhere to the rules of the road and would prefer to have the special consideration afforded pedestrians, I'm ok with that. Ride your bike on the sidewalk. Yes, I know that's not recommended, and yes I know that there's good reason for not doing this, and YES I know it can be hazardous for the people walking there. So, if you make this choice to ride your bike on the sidewalk, here are some things to consider: You can't do this in such a way that is rude or endangers the people walking there, which is why choice one, stay on the road like a vehicle, is the better choice. However, should you choose to ride on the sidewalk, guess what? You have to act like a pedestrian. That means, when the "don't walk" sign is lit, for you it should be understood to mean "don't ride".

I know you look cool in your sleek fitting bicycle getup. Yes, the color yellow is very fashionable in a Lance Armstrong sorta way. The aerodynamics of your helmet is very impressive and you are in enviable physical shape. Guess what? None of that makes you special enough to ignore the rules of the road or to be immune from having to show your fellow commuter common respect. Please stop zipping in and out between the cars and scaring the crap out of the rest of us. Please stop blowing through stop signs and stoplights as if oncoming traffic will somehow bend around you like light around Harry Potters cloak (no, not a fan, but I saw the scene and I'm betting most of you have too so it illustrates my point).

If you ride your bike as part of your commute, I am really glad for you and impressed by the effort. All I'm saying is this, if you want to feel special while doing it, try some playing cards and a safety pin.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

DON’T PANIC!

Ah, another week down!

Picture this. You're driving along, traffic is light, and the sun has graced you with its presence. It's mid to early afternoon though, so your retinas are in no risk of frying. You've got the cabin temperature just right. You've been driving for a period of time that still qualifies as a welcome relief from your previous postural position. In other words God is in his heaven and all's right in the commuting world.

As you sing along with "59^th Street Bridge Song" a flash of white appears in your peripheral vision. Your eyes begin the terrifying bob up and to the right. Yup, there it is, a mid size American made sedan with angry red and blue light bar. Suddenly the fire ants begin the conga line dance across your brow and 2 bottles of what should be your six pack fold in on themselves.

Now, we all know we should look at our speedometer first, but we don't. Instead it turns out that each of us has a tiny reptile brain in our thigh that only begins to fire when a policeman appears behind them. Two things happen next. First you wish you had some idea just how fast you were traveling and second it occurs to you that you've just flashed your brake lights at the trooper behind you effectively acknowledging to him that you knew you were speeding.

Ok, whip out the checklist. Wallet, check, clear path to the shoulder, check, vehicle registration (signed of course), check, and proof of insurance, check. No wait, you have one of those insurance companies that send you something in the mail 4 times a week, did you put the most recent card in the glove box? Ugh! You can hear the officer now, "Do you know why I stopped you?" How do you answer that? "Why yes officer, I was speeding, I have a tail light out and I'm quite possibly inebriated". The next question will probably be "Do you know how fast you were going?" There's another hum-dinger. "Yes officer, somewhere more than a Segway but something slower than The Starship Enterprise?"

Just as you (hopefully) start to remind yourself that this person with the campaign hat and perfectly creased wool trousers is in fact just a human being and even more importantly a public servant whose overriding goal is public safety, the dreaded machine makes a dip for the shoulder and uses one of those handy Police Only u-turn paths in the median.

I've been the unhappy recipient of two speeding tickets in my life. The first was when I was 16 while driving my first car, a turquoise '69 Ford Falcon Station wagon through Mukilteo and the other recently while speeding through Home. 2 speeding tickets in almost 28 years of driving doesn't make me a serial offender. Add to this the fact that I worked as a radio operator for the Washington State Patrol for a number of years you'd think I would be spared that onrush of baseless guilt. Not in the least.

Where does this come from? Sure, there's a good chance that your checking account will be lighter after a traffic stop, but the vast majority of us take the lesson away that we are suppose to and slow down, if only for a time. So what's all the hubbub, bub? The truth is that every time this happens to me it's a pretty safe bet that I was speeding. Not fast enough to whet the appetite of the freeway shark, but who drive's the speed limit? In seems either people are driving 10 MPH under the limit or mach 9 with their hair on fire. Still though, I know it was fast enough to fall into the speeding column.

There's something deeper at work here I think. At times it seems like there's more experiences grounded in fear, guilt and dread than joy. Each week on Thursday Tammy and I participate in a program called Alpha and at one point in the evening we get together in groups of 10-12 and talk about each night's topic. The course is a basic introduction to the Christian faith and the conversations are a chance for the participants to share their thoughts and feelings. One thing that's been very uplifting about participating in the leadership of this program is getting a chance to not just listen to others, but to actually hear what they are saying. I have to say it's been genuinely liberating to hear that those feelings are mostly universal.

So, next time you see that light bar in your rear view mirror remember, we've all been there and very few of us actually respond differently than you do. Of course there are a few who respond with "Game on!" but there'd be no good movie chase scenes without those folks would there?

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Look Up, Look Down, Look All Around

Driving as far as we do each day provides endless scene changes. We start the day surrounded by single wides, farm houses, and acreage. Some mornings are like playing a Bizarro World game of Frogger as you swerve back and forth trying to avoid the animals crossing the road.

Once we get off the Peninsula and turn onto SR-16, the drive opens up to the small town of Gig Harbor and the road slowly widens to freeway size as you approach the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. One of these days I'll do a post about this bridge, but not today. Follow that link if you want to get a preview. For now let me say that crossing this bridge and moving through North Tacoma provides some of the most spectacular sunrise scenes you can imagine. As you climb the hill after the bridge deck, on a clear day, you are greeted by Mount Rainier to the east. If you still have enough sleep in your eyes and the light is just right it seems like the mountain rises up out of bed just in time to say hello. More than once I've been tempted to pull over and take some pictures of this view point as SR-16 winds its way to I-5. Simply amazing.

From here on it's all about people watching. If you aren't driving you get time to see stuff that will make you feel like you've just finished a face acting exercise. "Show me happy, now terror, now desire, ok, ok, now gimme shy, winsome, panic". At one point on the bus I looked down at the car next to me and saw the driver texting on her Blackberry in one hand (the one resting on the steering wheel) and eating an apple with the other. She was passing us. It still makes me grind my teeth and tense my shoulders.

It is really worth the time though to watch the world and people around you. It's something that I haven't gotten the chance to do in many years. I spend most of my day tapping on this piece of plastic and trying not to get to devolve into caveman-nerd.

One of the things that I want to do with this blog is to share those experiences when I see them and so today I thought I'd start. Oddly enough however, the thing that stood out for me today didn't occur until the very end of my commute. Prior to my increased in-office days I would make the drive to Redmond on my own. I parked in the garage, walked in the door and sat down. Riding the bus has given me the chance to see that part of my trip differently too. I walk from the Overlake Transit Center to my building and into a door that until now I had never been through. This morning as I started up the stairs I noticed something hanging on the wall that made me pause for a moment.

This is the Garaventa Evacu-Trac CD7 - Evacuation Chair

From reading the website, this device "provides safe, reliable and fast emergency evacuation." Wow, crammed in this little box is a sleigh that lets you give rides down the stairs. I have to admit my first thought was to break this bad boy out and give it a whirl. I don't often indulge my adventuresome side, but I was sorely tempted here. The adult in me took over and I began to consider the practical aspects of this device. First, let me say that I've never seen one of these before. I've worked in a ton of "my company's" buildings and this is the first time I've encountered anything of this sort. So, what are the folks in all the other buildings to do in case of emergency? I guess they just roll their injured down the stairs, how blessed am I to work in this building! Then I took a step back and got a little more puzzled as I saw this.

Allow me to rewind for just a moment. My observation is taking place as I enter the building. This means I'm at the bottom of the stairs. The coolness meter for working in this building took a sudden dip. Why didn't they put this device at the top of the stairs? I may just be ignoring another fine opportunity to get a little cardio here, but I'm thinking it would be a lot more helpful if they had placed this closer to where it might be used, that's just me I guess.

That's it for today. I'll let you know if I ever get the nerve to ride the sleigh down the stairs.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!