December 30, 2002~~4:18 p.m.
Messages that Really Drive Home
Picture this: You drive a hooptie all through high school and college and the better part of your early work years. You save and save and penny pinch until you have enough for a down payment on a nice new car. You go to the dealership. You haggle. You win! You drive your new car off the lot. It sparkles. It shines. It is a hatchback, but no matter! It is yours, all yours! And then, it happens. You back into the garage so as to better see the bumper in the dim light near the tool bench. And you do it. You stick a bumper sticker on the back end and it says �If you can read this, you�re too fucking close!� Sigh. Do you think that people ever stop to consider that when they put a bumper sticker on their car, they are making use of a valuable and non-renewable resource (the only-so-long bumper) to make a statement about who they are? And if they ever stopped to consider this one chance at a statement, be it political, sociological or humorous, they might make a more wise choice in what to say, exactly? I mean, when you are driving behind an anonymous being, the only thing you know about them is the kind of car they drive (and thus, perhaps a glimpse into their tax bracket) and without any stupid stickers or stupid driving, you are free to imagine them as you wish. But the minute they put �Fear the Government� on their back end, it is all over. You KNOW who they are. My personal favorites are the defunct political stickers for power-hopefuls who then lost in a landslide on voting day. Like the �Simon for Governor!� sticker I saw on the back of some LOL�s Buick that was bound to never come off except maybe in little tiny bits of flaking sticker. And if you are going to risk having the world know that you supported a conservative would-be loser for his/her run for office, wouldn�t you rather the permanent sticker be for at LEAST a presidential race? Then, when the guy loses, you can always point to your bumper sticker in times of impending war and doom and say �Well, humph. I voted for the other guy, and I�ve got a pregnant chad to prove it!� Or something. The same rules apply for stupid personalized license plates. What good does a personal plate do anyone if nobody but you can decipher the code? Many a road trip have I been on where I have been stumped by the strange letter and number combos driving in my path. All it does is increase my road rage because I think I may have suddenly been stripped of my ability to think creatively or know common-knowledge things. And I�ll go over it and over it in my head thinking, �what the blazes does �2NTLLL� mean?!� And I will be annoyed. The other peeve I have with personal license plates is the ones that state the obvious, like �BEEMR� on the back end of a BMW or �CIVIC� on a Civic. Um, hello? I think we can see that you have enough money to a. purchase the BMW in the first place without needing the extra info coming in the form of the personal plate and b. contrary to popular thought of upper-class white men everywhere, not all women are idiots and we can, in fact, read the actual CAR decal to find out the make of said vehicle without needing your help with the license plate clarification. In the case of the latter, I�d just like to say, if you have the money to purchase a personal plate just so you can reiterate that you drive a Civic, maybe you should think about being more frugal so you can buy a more expensive car for better bragging rights. Just a thought. Today on the way to work, I saw two stupid license plates. One said �WEEPEPL� assumedly for a car driven by dwarfs or midgets or �little people� or whatever the PC term is for the vertically challenged, and the other said �NUTNSEZ.� Thank you. Thank you for that clarification on the world and how things work. I am so glad to see that driving a mere lane away from me, is yet another person on this earth with disposable income which they have no problem spending on statements of an obvious nature. One redeeming sticker in a world dark with the unintelligible and unintelligent: �Earl�s in the Trunk.� Thank you Christa, for with that one sighting, you have brightened an otherwise devastatingly dreary day.
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