I don’t sleep well, haven’t for a decade or more (probably a side effect of graduate school when it was easier to get a film editing table at night than at any other time) so it’s not unusual for me to awaken three, four, five times a night. The past few nights, though, I’ve been drugged out of my head on antihistamines and decongestants and sleeping the way I slept as a teenager (out like a light for 14 hours or more). That is until the screeching of tires and brakes pulled me out of a rather mottled dream that had more to do with social anxiety than I care to think about (something about not being young enough or feminine enough to measure up) in the bright sunlight of a late-November day.
See, my house is on a dead-end street, “No Outlet” posted in big letters on the corner of our nearest cross street. My block is bisected by an alley which has been used by way more traffic than it should since the NIMBYs up the block had the terminal two blocks of our cross street changed to one-way northbound in anticipation of a day-care center that never materialized. Instead, the transportation vans from the hospital up the street, in addition to all the hospital personnel (at regular shifts of 2pm, 7pm, 11pm, 3am, and 5am), all use the alley to get to the major cross-town artery that is a block south of us. The city says there is no additional traffic through the alleys as a result of this change; my dining room, living room, and guest bedroom walls say otherwise in the cracks they’ve acquired in the plaster from all the additional traffic over the past five years.
But since people don’t really pay attention to traffic signs when they drive – as is evidenced by the removal of said signs in several European cities – we get a lot of people speeding up the block thinking they can cut across town. I’m not quite sure how they miss the big building at the end of the block, but my neighbors and I never fail to give them a big thumbs up when they’re dumb enough to do it in broad daylight with an audience and are forced to back down the street to get where ever they wanted to go in the first place (usually they choose down the alley…what a shock). Last night’s imbecile, probably drunk to boot, decided the backing down wasn’t enough.
Whomever he was, he was a helluva driver. He managed to make a U-turn, drive over my lawn, right through my flower bed, down the sidewalk, and back out into the street without hitting any of the cars or taking out the light post that stands between me and my neighbor. I’m guessing ATV or some other bullshit form of personal recreation vehicle…or really tiny sports car (a mini, perhaps?) given the wheel base and the width of the tire tracks in the street (yes, I played CSI out in the street with my Stanley 50 footer).
Suffice it to say, the next time I hear screeching tires that loud, I might just get out of bed to have a look.