Drivin' and cryin'

“Tonight, tonight, the highway’s bright, out of our way mister, you’d best keep
The summer's here and the time is right for racing in the street” – Bruce Springsteen, Racing in the Street

Ah, yes. There’s nothing like the lure of being behind the wheel of a car out on the open road, wind in your hair, freedom in your eyes.

It is a notion that has been romanticized by some of my favorite songwriters. In Thunder Road, Springsteen writes “So roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair, well the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere.” Tom Petty sang about it in Running Down a Dream, and Mark Knopfler’s Speedway at Nazareth is one of the best driving songs ever.

But none of those guys has to commute into downtown Atlanta every day. Trust me, I do it, and it has sucked every bit of romance out of being behind the wheel.

I drive in about 25 miles each way, every day. It takes about an hour in the mornings, usually a little less coming back home. And it is a miracle every day that I arrive home safely, because the highways are filled with morons, miscreants and homicidal maniacs.

I have seen people do all of these things while driving: Text message, watch a DVD, read the newspaper, take notes on a legal pad, eat a salad, apply makeup, and a few things you normally only seen done in a car on HBO’s “Taxicab Confessions.” It is disturbing.

There are all sorts of crazy drivers out there. I enjoy the people who, in heavy traffic, like to change lanes constantly, weaving in and out, even though you can see that cars are bumper-to-bumper for five miles ahead. Through all of their maneuvering, they generally get to their destination about one second faster than if they had just stayed in one lane.

Then there’s the “This left lane is just for me even though I’m going 15 miles per hour slower than everybody else” crowd. There’s a special place reserved in hell for these folks.

And of course, you have the tailgaters. These people believe they need to stay so close to the car in front of them that you couldn’t slide a credit card between the bumpers. How there aren’t a thousand wrecks a day on I-75 between my house and Atlanta, I’ll never know.

One morning, I was driving an Oldsmobile Cutlass and I was right downtown, in morning rush hour traffic, when it died on me. Seems the alternator had crapped out, so there I was, sitting helplessly until the police could come. And how did my wonderful Atlanta fellow travelers react to my plight? By sitting on their horns, shooting me birds, and rolling down their windows to call me every dirty name in the book.

I’m not exaggerating. Osama Bin Laden would have been treated nicer than those people were to me. What did they think, that I broke down there on purpose? I gotta tell you, it kind of hurt my feelings.

I once calculated how many hours every week I sit in traffic, and it depressed me so much I never did it again. I could have used that time to write the great American novel, or work myself into tip-top shape, or figure out that little golf-tee game they have on the table at Cracker Barrel restaurants.

There are days when I get ready to leave work, and I just sit in the minivan for a few minutes without cranking it up because I dread getting into that traffic. Then I have to leave, in part because the air conditioning only works when the car is moving, and if I sit there much longer I’ll melt like the Nazis at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

There’s been talk of putting a high-speed commuter train down my way, but I’ll be retired before that ever happens. So I’ll just keep on sucking it up, wading into that sea of traffic every morning and every afternoon, and pray the Lord my soul to keep.