I am presently sitting in a vacant suite on the 3rd floor of a mid-rise building in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For the first time in a considerably long 10 or so days of work in a row, I have a moment to relax and reflect.
I get around a lot, driving sometimes thousands of miles a week. You read that right, thousands. Last week was nearly 2,000 miles. Now, that hardly qualifies as thousands, but this is Grandiose Ruminations, not Exact Accountings, so let's just go with it.
I see a lot of boneheaded "maneuvers", if you can put such a lovely sobriquet on some of the idiot things I see. What spurred on this particular blog was the anger and tension I feel, 40 feet up from the hustling throng of rush hour traffic below.
Ann Arbor, for those of you unaware, is condidered the quintessence of laid back cosmopolitan living in Michigan. Progressive, (and that's an understatement, for I have termed this town "The Peoples' Republic of Ann Arbor"), exuding a studied cool, you would think you were in Portland, Oregon, but for the fact you would worship Wolverines instead of Ducks.
But from the sounds of the car horns on the third floor of this building at the corner of Main and Huron, I hear tension. I hear anger, I hear... wussy ass car horns.
The problem with having road rage while driving a Prius or its ilk is that you don't get a good "EFFFFFFFFYOU" horn. You get a soft, sorta polite horn that sounds more like a kazoo that went to the gym sometimes a few years ago. They barely move enough air to warrant a doppler effect as they pass by.
One particularly angry person in a Hondota Fitrolla just melted the entire front end of his car by staying on the horn too long in his protest of some fair trade coffee drinking pedestrian who was not paying attention to the big red hand exhorting her to stop. This little horn started up sad, waned quickly toward the end and finally became piteously dead as if the song of white breasted swan, even as the amped up driver, no doubt wearing the latest fashions and listening to NPR at a reasonable and prudent volume, pressed with all his might at the center of the tiny steering wheel, not unlike the ones in the driving games he probably developed as a software coder down the street.
Chillax, bro... this is Ann Arbor. This is not the place to waste energy on anger. Anger causes heavy respiration, heavy respiration emits carbon dioxide... a greenhouse gas. You just became part of the problem! Now you have to donate nine months of your life on a Greenpeace vessel that runs on self importance and used french fry oil. Sure, whale oil would work in a pinch, but the mere suggestion of that seems to be onerous to some folks. Those that live in Ann Arbor, especially.
Now Naples, Italy, that's a place that knows how to use a car horn. In fact, I think it's the accepted language of the city. It pervades the atmosphere. It is relentless. For all its ferocity, if one were to listen long enough, with enough sensitivity to the nuance, one would hear subtlety in the different patterns of honks.
There exists a "c'mon, I'm not going to give you this space forever" honk just as there is the ubiquitous "BUFANDO, EH!" America seems to only focus on the latter.
There exists a great need for a couple things in this advanced world of ours. Those are a sarcasm font, which I am convinced will drop the murder rate to nearly zero in most major urban areas, and a dual or even tri-note horn so we can bring nuance to the inter-car and car to pedestrian communication home to America.
Forget the moon, Mars or interstellar travel. We as a race will look at every day that came before the invention of the multi-gesture horn as the dark times. Life as we know it now will cease to exist and a new age of radically advanced humanism will emerge, like some sort of, I don't know... renaissance. (Note to self, wiki "renaissance" and take credit for it if it has't been used.)
I drive a sporty little Audi that is the paragon of conspicuous consumption. It is the smallest car with the biggest motor sporting the loudest exhaust possible. It has a horn the size of Schwarzenegger in a body the size of Jenner. It's bodaciously loud coming and going. It is obnoxious and wholly inappropriate for a town like Ann Arbor. At least that's how I interpret the looks from the gaggle of "adjunct professors", (read underemployed academics cum baristas), hanging out on the corner, hoping to attract the eye of some university dean, cruising silently in his hybrid electric car for the next young thing to "tutor".
It is clear I am not what they are looking for, which is fine. I will just turn up my obnoxiously loud stereo and thump down the street, ejecting whole epochs worth of dead organic things out of the quad tailpipes of my car in a gear that allows for that subtle little 'poppoppopopop' of timing overrun as I let off the gas to coast to the intersection.
That's how to chill, Ann Arbor. Take a lesson.
Bill Uebbing is the Author of Grandiose Ruminations Rooted in Minutiae and he thinks very highly of himself, thank you very much.
