What Really Grinds My Gears April 11 2009

I can't even say what really grinds my gears! I mean, there is such a thing as censorship, and it isn't PC to say what I want to say, so I have to talk around it. So, in an annual celebration of Spring, the daughter and I wend our way in pilgrimage to the local Twist 'n' Dip for cones, blizzards, sundaes, and ices; in short, as soon as it warms up, we have to sit around and wail for the the disappearance of winter by eating - not bitter herbs - but ice cream! Ice cream! Oh, ice,ice, gone and melted! Next year in Khoref - winter! Oy! (what would human history be without our charming paradoxical behavior?) I was telling her that earlier that afternoon, I had witnessed a mother starting to push a baby stroller across a busy street, and a large, cream-colored SUV began its turn to the right off the red light, heading directly at mother and child. The accident was avoided, but I saw the mother had some nasty looks for the SUV as it drove off. "Was the driver a woman?" my daughter asked. "Yeah. She was." I said. "I'll bet she was on her phone." my daughter said, saying it with a real force of conviction. Then she added: "I can just see her sitting there incredibly smug with her insane sense of entitlement." I was flabbergasted. I mean, if it is so well known to everybody that it is a commonplace that a woman driving an SUV will be on the phone and will pose a threat to life and limb, why are there no laws being passed? Or is it merely because we can't single out all these smug chatty Cathies, because it isn't PC to do so? Well, after my daughter had said this I reflected on it. I remembered one harrowing situation where I was being harassed by a large, black Monstro the Whale of an SUV - a Lincoln Navigator or a Cadillac Escalade - sort of the real deal Truck-o-saurus! Finally, as it pushed me up onto the median and drove away, I could just see through the darkly tinted windows a woman on a cellphone! She held it aloft as fearsomely as the Headless Horseman lofted his burning pumpkin head, and she raised up and - in my fear - I imagined she threw it directly at me! The SUV drove off in a cloud of dust and a cackling of insane witchery. Whew. That's what really grinds my gears.