Red Curtain of Blood
Kim Du Toit, in his Glossary of Kimspeak speaks about the RCOB, and I have experienced it tonight.
No, I don’t get the RCOB the way he does, a lot of the things that make Kim see red, I have become used to, perhaps even expect. Like PT Barnum, I never underestimate the inherent asshattedness of the average American.
No, today’s RCOB is dedicated specifically to the morons that plan and execute highway repair projects in the greater Chicagoland area.
Tonight, I drove my usual 55 mile trip home in just under three hours. It should take 55 minutes. On saturdays, with no traffic, I can do it in 45 minutes. With tolls and construction, during the week, its more like 90 minutes, on average.
Trouble now, is that the construction is going on in several places at once (great game plan, you fuckmonkeys!) and it backs traffic up from the middle of Indiana all the way to joliet. It’s more annoying than it is possible to describe.
Now, I love my gig, love what i do, love the folks I work with. I wouldn’t change gigs for , well, it’d take a lot.
The commute is even ok, most days. It’s the days like today, when due to the combined evil forces of the Toll Authority and the construction crews, as well as the occasional idiot who “forgot” to fill up with gas before he got on the expressway, these are the days when I want to draw blood.
I can back down on my own rage at Mikey fuckface, I can cool down about Ketchupass, but one subject which leaves me in a perpetual rage is the morons who do this to my commute.
So, for all the idiots that plan this stupidity to make my commute a living hell, here’s what I’d like to see.
I’d like to see you chained to a concrete barrier block, and forced to drag it the length of the tollway systems. I’d like to see you beaten raw every day and then sizzle your open wounds with the sweat of your own toil, and I’d like to see you burn in summer and freeze in winter until every nerve ending on your body has experienced pain to the point of it’s eventual failure. I’d like to see your home address published on three hundred foot tall billboards every mile of construction so that every person who has missed their kids soccer game, or gotten home too late to mow the lawn on friday night, can stop by your place and piss in your gardenias, and throw dogshit in your chimney, and let the air out of your tires. I’d like to see your family struggle to drive through the mess of your creation and arrive just in time NOT to save Uncle Festus’ life. I’d like you to have to miss every moment of your children’s life in reparation for the lives you are disrupting, and I’d like you to pull in your driveway at night to see a big, brawny construction worker pat your wife on the ass, and watch her wave goodbye as you pull your broken body up the sidewalk, and I’d like her to slam the door in your face. I’d like her infidelity to you to be the subject of a horribly produced network reality show where everyone laughs at the fact that all “your” children look like someone else and you eventually die of shame. Then, I’d like to see you sitting behind the wheel, stuck in traffic, wasting your eternity away, in hell.
There are absolutely not enough words in this or any language I know to describe the frustration and rage; today, if I’d known the location of the moron responsible, I’d have hunted him down and garrotted him with his own intestines.
Sorry. I’ll be back to normal in a few, well, months.
12 comments Og | Uncategorized
Gee, Og, you seem a bit miffed.
Gahh. A three hour commute? That would eat me alive.
“Justifiable homicide,” for sure. I wonder if the law has anything to say on the subject of justifiable torture?
Not to mention that the repair/updates to said tollways/interstates is *designed* to need to be done again with in about a 3 to 5 year time frame. They need a whole new circle in hell for the whole IDOT. And the lowest bid contract they (tried) to ride in on.
Og, have a couple of scotch on the rocks…sometimes that is the only thing that can help.
You’re a better man than me, Og. I usually have to insert a Valium drip in my arm before executing my daily commute.
buy an ultralite? i’m very seriously considering it.
Ha ha. Here in Denver, we got T-REX (Transportation Regional EXpansion) and last I knew, it was ahead of schedule and under budget. It’s even possible to get across town in rush hour traffic. The party in control really makes a difference, eh?
Oh yeah, killer rant, too.
Take Action!
About a year ago I pulled up to a movable sawhorse type barrier which with some cones was blocking a lane. A city repair crew was repaving another part of the road. The blocked lane had nothing in it. No people. No equipment. Nothing.
Blocking one lane had caused a 15 minute backup.
In a fit of rage, I got out of my car and heaved the barrier and the traffic cones off the road and onto a grassy verge, all the while projecting obscenities at the paving crew.
Cheers and applause from other drivers.
I drove by on my way back an hour later. The lane was still open. There had never been any need to block it. The crew just did what they wanted and did not care.
I was not particularly a libertarian til then. I now am. Always challenge government or quasi government authority. Hit them high. Hit them low. Do not give them an inch ever.
That was beautiful.
Hah. How about being stuck in a public bus (because one has no car) in the rain, at a railroad crossing, while one of those mile-long trains carrying nothing but loads of gravel or something inches slooooowly in one direction, comes to a dead halt for like fifteen minutes, and then lurches slooo-oowly in the opposite direction… and repeats this over and over for about half an hour.
While one feels as if half the Atlantic Ocean had somehow miraculously been teleported into one’s bladder.
Did I mention that this was in an industrial district, after six pm, therefore with no open business establishments whose bathrooms I could have used if I’d left the bus? I wanted to kill. Everyone. On Earth.
That’ll be me when they start the shit on Cline; as it is now, with all the shit on 41, I can’t get from my crib to St. John in less than 45, and it used to take me about 20 minutes.
Fred, I had an experience rather analogous to yours, although I didn’t have the balls to pull into the blocked lane and remove all the cones. (Actually, even if I’d had the balls, I wouldn’t have had the TIME, since they went on for TWENTY MILES with no workers, no work, and no sign of previous or planned future work except for those damned cones.) This was on a limited-access state highway in Michigan, whose _normal_ compliment of two lanes in each direction is already insufficient for the volume of traffic it has to carry between two metro areas that exchange a LOT of commuters every day.
The next day, there were cops posted on the road, pulling over anybody who drove in the blocked lane…but still no workers and no work. By the time the actual work started (a week later), I’d figured out a way to make the trip on surface streets that only added about half an hour to my usual time for the trip…whereas attempting that freeway made a 3-hour commute into a 5-hour commute.
I’m not saying Chicago’s road construction is any BETTER than it was in Michigan…but at least here in Chicago, I don’t actually _have to_ drive every day. :)