You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Pot Hole Hell.
I’m driving up I-65 and it’s like motoring along the dark side of the moon.
There are craters big enough to inhale an entire car.
Chunks of highway are missing as if they have entered the witness protection program.
There are holes deep enough they generate their own gravitational field.
There are cracks wide enough, Evel Knievel will rise from the dead to jump his motorcycle across it.
There are sections of my lane that are simply gone. The top 3 inches of asphalt have been stripped away as if a concrete dermatologist has produced a scalpel and shaved away the top layers of dead tar.
Driving north, my tire hits the indentation and my car starts to pull in a direction that I am not ready for.
I over compensate and bring the little SUV back into the center of the lane.
Middle Tennessee has been hammered by frosty, icy, snowy conditions.
It’s not TDOT’s fault. There’s nothing county work crews can do.
It simply is the end result of a vicious freeze / thaw cycle.
For a while, motorists only cared that the roads were clear of ice.
Now that the ice is melted, drivers are bitching like crazy about the holes in the road that are denting rims and causing wrecks.
There are hundreds of miles of roads to maintain.
It is going to take time to hot patch all the spots.
So until then, drivers will do what they did today.
They will drive a Mexican Hat dance of highway death.
The commute to work was always a crap shoot. Now it’s an asphalt roll of the dice.
Sure you might arrive safely.
Then again, you might get a stone cold slap to the head.
Today I watched cars slide their tires over the lane to avoid the Oklahoma sized pothole in the northbound lane.
That’s OK if it’s just one lane of traffic avoiding the hole.
But when a number of cars are all sliding over the lane divider at the same time to avoid pot holes in different lanes, it creates chaos.
It’s hard like juggling knives while driving 70 mph while performing a lobotomy on a small rodent is hard.
The problem is, you can only see so far ahead. You dance the pot hole dance in one stretch of road, only to have your tires fall off the face of the Earth a moment later.
At 70 miles an hour, off road driving is a cavity vacating experience.
I was driving back and forth in my lane today like a drunk pirate high on rum fumes.
I moved to the left, then right, then left again.
I was a boxer, weaving against the ropes, doing the highway rope a dope so that my tires wouldn’t go off the edge of the grand canyon before me.
I waved I’m sorry to at least 4 drivers on the way to work.
I’m lucky I got to wave to them and we didn’t end up trading paperwork on the shoulder.
At one point I was close to a truck pulling a trailer, I could have reached out and stolen the ham sandwich from his hand.
He was moving his right wheels over the line while I was moving my left wheels over the line.
We were both avoiding the same monster pot hole at the same time.
We saw each other and both jerked our vehicles back into our respective lanes of traffic.
Ka Chung.
The tires go off the smooth asphalt into a rocky abyss.
The vibration was sudden and shocking. If I hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, I would have surely left my seat.
I have a friend at TDOT. She says they are getting hammered by the public; angry emails and phone calls asking when the pot holes will be patched.
I feel for her. It’s a thankless job. The public simply expects it to be done.
“Our Tax Dollars at work” they scream.
But I also know that thousands of motorists driving crazy like this is a recipe for disaster.
The public won’t stop bitching till the holes are patched.
And guess what? to patch the holes they will have to implement rolling road blocks causing massive traffic jams.
You know what tax payers hate more than cavernous pot holes?
Long lines of traffic while orange vested guys fix pot holes.
Get ready for more angry phone calls. Tis the season of discontent.
Life’s Crazy™