Me and My Hoopdee....

Today I want to talk about drivers, their cars, the environment and me and my hoopdee. I found this hilarious and very informative article in the Washington City Paper Archives this morning when I was searching for how to spell hoopdee :) If you want a laugh with your morning coffee go check it out!

Every morning I take my son to work in rush hour traffic. Every morning I come back home pissed off at some stupid driver that almost cost us our lives. Inevitably it is a black female on a cell phone driving something like a Ford Excursion or something equally as insane for the environment. Apparently, I have pissed them off because I, in my 1988 Nova, am not going fast enough for them, so they must floor it to go around me, using an untold amount of gas in the process, only to get to the next light right in front of me, never missing a beat on the phone.

I have driven all of my life. I think I learned how when I was eight or nine on an old 1960 Datsun pickup truck that my uncle used for the farm. I think all of us kids learned how to drive on that truck. I have driven standard shift cars and trucks for the most part all of my life. That is until I got a job as a courier in Atlanta. All day long, sometimes 12 hours in Atlanta traffic will quickly wear out the wrists with a standard shift vehicle. The happiest day of my life was when I traded in my 1993 Toyota extended cab truck for a 1995 Subaru Legacy wagon. Not only was it automatic but it also had all wheel drive. If you have never driven a vehicle with all wheel drive then you have never really driven, period. I would be going 70 or better in the pouring rain on the interstate with 18-wheelers passing me or me passing them...not one shimmy, sway or anything else scary. That sucker held the road like nothing I had ever driven before or have driven since. I felt like a god. I think it was in that car that I really learned how to drive, drive fast and drive fast and safe. I credit Atlanta and my courier job for preparing me for my next crap job here in Mississippi as a cab driver. It was the only job I could find here that would pay me anything near what I was used to in Atlanta. Of course, no one told me at the outset that I would have to drive 20 hours a day, as fast and as well as I could, to make that money. :)

Anyway I digress as usual. My point is that this morning I am pissed at all drivers out there that intend to drive the biggest vehicle they can find as fast as they can. The next time you find yourself frying during a Mississippi July you can thank yourself for contributing to the fact that we don't have an ozone layer anymore to protect us. Me and my hoopdee will just keep plugging along, knowing that on any given day we can out-drive you... should we so choose :)