How to Drive Without Killing Me: A Basic Lesson for People Who Don’t Want to be Fucking Morons

On February 10, 2025February 10, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Okay, y’all, see that lane I’ve marked with a blue arrow?

If you are driving in that lane, and there are stopped cars in front of you because of a light or a stop sign or whatever, and someone is waiting to turn left across traffic into a parking lot or a retail establishment or whatthefuck ever, do not ever ever ever under any circumstances stop early to let that motherfucker turn left in front of you.

Don’t do it. Don’t ever do it. You’re not being nice. You’re trying to cause a fucking car accident, and I hate you because you’re an idiot and you shouldn’t be driving.

Had some dipshit pull this move on me this morning, while I was in the lane on the far left, and of course that fucking slapnuts was driving a F4500 or whatever the fuck the big truck for guys with tiny dicks is, and because the yellow car can’t see through the car that is waiting for them, and the oncoming traffic in the far left lane can’t see the yellow car either, that stupid son of a bitch turned directly in front of me and damn near got T-boned for his trouble. Even a tiny bit of ice on the roads or the slightest bit of distraction and my ass would have totaled my car and his.

And, I tell you what, if I get into an accident under those circumstances, and I live through it? I’m not gonna blame the person I hit, even though they’re also a moron for turning directly into a blind spot. I’m coming after the idiot who stopped and let them through. I will flip your Goddamned car over with my bare hands.

You’re not being nice. You’re going to get someone killed. Anyone who needs to turn left should expect to have to wait until it’s clear.

Don’t fucking do it.

In which my day is expensive and needley

On October 24, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I managed to hit a parked car in my own fucking driveway this morning.

We have, for lack of a better word and in the interest of not telling a long story, a Tenant in our house. She’s been here for several months. She parks her car in the driveway every single morning. Because our garage is currently packed full with bullshit, my wife has also been parking in the driveway. I am on Fall Break, as all of you know, and for some reason when I left my house for a doctor’s appointment at 7:50 this morning, the fact that my wife’s car was not in the driveway made my fucking brain short-circuit and I assumed that that meant the other car was not in the driveway either. I realized my terrible mistake about half a second too late, and I don’t know yet how much my fucking idiocy is going to cost me.

To the doctor’s! Where I received a hepatitis B shot (needle #1) and had blood drawn (needle #2) so that my A1C could be tested. It’s 5.7! The diabeetus is officially Controlled! I can go off one of my many medications now!

Seriously, one of these days I’m going to take a picture of the pile of fucking pills I ingest every night. It’s ludicrous.

I also had to fill out the questionnaire about my mental health that I have to fill out every time I go to the doctor since I’m on brain meds. I was honest on the depression scale, but I handed the anxiety scale over to the doctor and told her flat-out that I was lying on it. Why? There’s a fucking election in two weeks, and my anxiety is off the scale but not in a way that adjusting my meds is going to help. We’re gonna leave those alone, and in about two weeks I’m either gonna be fine or I’m gonna need a prescription for fucking strychnine.

I mailed the postcards.

And then I went and got my second tattoo (Needles #3- God, who knows) in two months. My appointment started at 11:00 in the morning and I wasn’t finished until 4:15. My arm fucking hurts— this was easily the most painful tattoo (and the biggest, and the most colorful) I’ve ever had, and you can see from all the open pores at the bottom of the image that my arm isn’t terribly happy with me. Hummingbirds were my mom’s favorites, though, and I absolutely love the design. Griffin Freehling at Enamored Arts, LLC does great work. But holy shit, I need to not spend any more money at all for the rest of my break.

In which it was almost a REALLY bad day

On December 20, 2014November 4, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

I CubsLarge spent a good chunk of my day at work yesterday not actually at work, but running various errands around town that took me out of the office– I had to deliver some stuff to another school, to pick up keys from another staff member’s wife (more essential, and also more ridiculous, than it probably sounds) and to drop some stuff off at the administrative offices downtown, because inter-school mail stops working over Winter Break and I needed them have the paperwork before we left. I probably spent a third of the day in my car or otherwise out.

Our administrative offices are downtown. South Bend’s downtown is not large, but it is much like other downtowns in that parking can be tricky because there are a lot of one-way streets and a lot of street parking. I lived in Chicago for long enough that I can confidently declare myself the best parallel parker in the state of Indiana, so that’s not a worry, but there’s still lots of “Is that a space? Will I fit there? Wait, which way does this road go? Can I turn right here?” going on while looking for a spot, and the fact that I can never exactly remember which east-west road forms the northern boundary of our administrative offices doesn’t help. I tend to turn a block too early, which means I need to turn away from the office when I hit the street it’s on, which is annoying. And I’ve done it enough times that I have only myself to blame.

Anyway. On one of my various turns and backtrackings I drove past the county courthouse. The courthouse is directly across the street from the St. Joseph County Democrats’ headquarters. I assume the mayor’s office is around there somewhere; probably in the same building the courthouse is in, or the County-City building, which is attached. At any rate, I’m in the right lane, driving north, meaning there are parked cars to my right because it’s a one-way street. I’m a little distracted in that looking-for-a-parking-space, kinda-not-certain-where-I’m-going way that one gets when looking for a spot in a downtown, slightly unfamiliar driving environment.

And somebody walks out between two parked cars in front of me.

This is less dramatic than it probably sounds; I stepped on the brakes and never got within five feet or so of him, and he realized immediately what he had done and shot me an apologetic little combined head-nod/bow thing. He was never in any real danger, just one of those “OH SHIT oh we’re okay” sorts of moments that you get sometimes when you’re driving.

But I was close enough to him to recognize him, especially once I noticed that he was wearing a City of South Bend pullover– not exactly a garment I see on a lot of people around town.

I had just nearly run over Mayor Pete.

Who had been jaywalking.

Killing the mayor would probably have really screwed up my weekend.

In searching for an image to use with this post, I came across this parody Twitter account. Which is not the mayor, obviously, but… well done.

The best part of waking up

On December 9, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

I’ve been a little preoccupied with dying lately, right? You can understand why if you’ve read my post about last week. I spend a patch of my drive in to work on a highway, a highway well known to be treacherous in bad weather by basically everyone who lives around here, and as I was pulling on to said highway this morning it floated through my head that there were no less than three places on my way into work where my chances of getting killed in a car accident were going to spike.

My highway cruising speed in my current car is around 60 MPH, which is slower than most of the cars on that road are going to be going. It’s not me, it’s the car; when I rented a car for the Nashville trip I was driving faster. In this particular car, for whatever reason, I have to think about it if I want to drive faster than about 60.

I’m on my way in and the idiots on the radio start blathering about some study some yahoo did to determine how much Santa Claus ought to make. They’ve decided it’s around $137,000 a year, and the idiots are going on about how they’ve combined yearly salaries for a whole bunch of things– shipping, delivery, receiving, manufacturing, blah blah blah.

For whatever reason, this sets off a chain of thoughts in my head where I’m musing on how much difficult work in this country is compensated shittily because we don’t value the people who do it. I’ve said this before, and it’s true: people who make minimum wage in this country work harder than I do. I’ve had minimum-wage jobs. They are much harder than jobs that make much more. What they aren’t is more valued.

But anyway. This post isn’t actually about politics. What this post is about is that I looked down at one point during this brain-rant and discovered I was going eighty miles an hour.

Make that four places where my chances of dying were going to spike on my way in to work.

I’m safe at my desk now; hopefully that’s the last dumb thing I’ll do today.

In which I almost die but don’t

On November 13, 2013November 14, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

IMPORTANT NOTE: Spoiler alert; I don’t die at the end, and neither does anyone else.

Also, I’m literally making dinner while typing this, so I may be slightly less coherent than usual. I’ll be stopping every couple of sentences to stir and it may distract me a bit.

Also also: the last time I made this dish I forgot the goddamn avocado. Don’t let me forget the avocado!

Anyway. Every Wednesday, without fail, I go to the comic shop after work, because Wednesday is New Comics Day and us nerds need our comic books. I left work today kinda weak and dishevelled; it was a pretty damn good day for the most part (needed, after Monday, and I even have another nice story or two I might type out later) but I wasn’t feeling well again this morning and I needed something to eat. I found myself with the rarest, but hardest to deny, of cravings: Chicken McNuggets.

So I got some. I’m a grown-ass man; if I wanna play to stereotypes by buying Chicken McNuggets to eat in my car while I drive to the comic shop, that’s what I’m gonna do. Also, sweet tea, because why would I pass up sweet tea? No damn reason at all, that’s why, and you’re a filthy Communist for even asking.

(This kind of thinking may be one of the reasons my ass is… well, grown.)

(Before I get any farther: yes, I know exactly how stupid every part of this is, especially the part where I deliberately eat Chicken McNuggets and french fries as a fucking mid-meal snack like some sort of animal, and I’m making a goddamn vegan dinner to make up for it.)

So, yeah, picture this: I’ve dumped the fries and McNuggets out of their original packaging and into the bag to make them easier to eat while I drive. The bag is in my lap, and my tasty beverage is in a cupholder to my right. I scarf a McNugget or two and a couple of fries and then, pulling out into traffic on what I should point out is a fairly busy road, reach down and to my right and pick up my beverage. By the rim of the cup, around the lid.

Note that I have performed this maneuver dozens, nay, hundreds of times in my life without incident. No more!

I lift my delicious iced sugary beverage to my mouth to partake of its loveliness and the fucking lid falls off. Well, not quite: the lid stays where the fuck it is. The cup falls off.

A number of things, as they say, happened very fast.

I may have said a swear.

I yanked my knees up to catch the cup and leaned forward. Now, this seems as if it should be impossible, as I’m typing it, but if I’m lying to you at least the lie is entertaining: I somehow pinned the cup in between my upper body and the wheel before it hit my lap and exploded, losing only a miraculously small amount of liquid. Of course, this wasn’t terribly helpful, as the car was moving and the act of yanking my knees up removed my foot from the accelerator and also took it away from the brake.

This is bad. There was traffic.

Somehow– in a feat requiring either ninja reflexes or the will of God or incredible bloody-arsed luck or, most likely, at least two of the three, I managed to get the cup away from the wheel, into the cupholder, and my car out of oncoming traffic and flowing properly with no more than a couple of tablespoons of liquid ending up on my coat and in my lap. I decided to stop pressing my goddamn stupid luck and waited until I got to the comic shop to eat the rest of my disgusting, fat-laced calorrific “snack.”

And then had to text my wife to be talked out of buying the incredibly awesome Hulk statue pictured above, where– I swear to God this is true– part of my justification process for trying to talk myself into it was “Fuck it, I already spent a grand on the cat this week; I may as well blow some money on myself.”

I educate your kids, folks.