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Dammit, Where's the Carnage?

I was driving to work this morning, minding my own business and singing along to this great Toad the Wet Sprocket album I bought, when I hit stand-still traffic. This is typical, but unlike today, it usually takes me more than 38 seconds before I get to it.

There is this big hill outside of town - people who have never been to Colorado would probably be tempted to call it a mountain. There�s a quarry on the only highway heading out of town as well, so I�m constantly getting stuck behind these big lumbering dump trucks carrying loads of whatever it may be out of the quarry at 15 miles an hour. My usual reaction is to kick my little electric mobile into high gear (2nd) and pass them along with the 15 sheep following behind them. The only problem is I have to do it illegally in the nothing area that used to be a lane before some idiot bureaucrat decided to paint big yellow diagonal lines through it. �DO NOT DRIVE ON ME!!� they scream, but I throw caution to the wind. I�m not going to let some yellow paint tell me what to do.

Low and behold I got stuck behind a line of 15 cars and a big lumbering dump truck this morning, and as I was about to kick it into gear and pass them, a screaming ambulance came barreling down the hill, using my yellow diagonal lane for his own selfish purposes. Hmmm. Ambulance screeching down the �mountain� and traffic not moving. Must be an accident ahead. I decided to actually look past the lumbering truck, and yes, there we cars in front of him, too. Also not moving.

Another day, another accident. I�ve been through this before, but this happened at quite an inopportune area. The hill is just enough to give Herbert the Honda trouble, but so does a speed bump.

It was stop and go for 30 minutes, and then it was over. Just like that. We were going 5 mph and then we were going 50, and I thought, �Wait a minute � I didn�t see the scene of the accident.� I may be a horrible person, but if I�m driving and it takes me 30 minutes to go a few dozen feet, there had better be some broken glass, twisted metal, pools of blood, screaming children� something. But there was nothing. �What the hell, did everyone just FORGET to move?� I thought out loud � loudly.

My four and half personalities, all of them extremely dysfunctional in their own Mary Tyler Moore way, tried to reason this for us. Here�s what we came up with, you decide for yourself.

The Childish Theory

Someone was drunk or crazy and thought they saw a gaggle of Smurfs crossing the highway and decided to stop for them. They then spent the next 30 minutes wondering, �Hmmm, �gaggle�? School, pride? What do you call a group of little blue singing people with white hats? Maybe something more smurfy, like a smurfle or a smurpple of smurfs.�

The Current Events Theory

It must have been New Jersey�s own recently defrocked senator Robert Torricelli who was recently forced to retire due to �ethics� issues. He had probably stopped his Mercedes bought with stolen tax-payers� money as he had a moment of grief about being forced out of the senate race, and he dropped the crack pipe in his left hand and the hooker�s breast in his right hand to cover his sobbing eyes.

The Alarmist�s Theory

It was actually the American Association of Psychiatrists trying to drum up new business by making the residents of New Jersey extremely irate and schizophrenic by making them sit in their motionless cars with only their own company for half an hour.

The Coloradoan in New Jersey Revelation Theory

This is New Jersey at morning rush hour. What in the hell do you expect? You want a reason? I got your freakin� reason right here!!