Halting progress

Yesterday I had an all-too-appropriate and utterly undesirable “welcome back” to the greater Northern Virginia Sprawl, in the form of total traffic cock-ups in both directions, heading to work in the morning and coming home in the evening. The impact was (ever so slightly) lessened by the fact that I was riding the bus and could to a certain extent distract myself by plowing through my latest beach book, but overall a certain cognitive dissonance undeniably asserted itself. Part of my brain kept thinking “Did everyone forget how to drive over the long weekend?” and other parts of my brain had to remind the first part that my Little Bro’s nuptials were not, in fact, a national holiday and there had been no long weekend for the overwhelming majority of my fellow commuters. So no excuse, then, really.

The morning delays were the result of an accident that shut down the HOV lane on 66, one which involved injuries serious enough to summon multiple fire engines and ambulances to the scene. I’m hoping there were no fatalities, but I did see one serious injury being immobilized on a stretcher. Accidents happen and there’s a reason they’re not called “on-purposes” but as the bus crept past the vehicles involved and I observed the various instances of violently reconfigured car shapes I was hard pressed to come up with any sequence of events that could have led to those shape and size impacts in those places except the following: somebody merged into the HOV lane without checking over their shoulder, and the person in their blindspot rammed the driver’s side door at an oblique angle. Which, I mean, COME ON, people.

The commute home was, from the moment the bus left the Pentagon parking lot, like driving through proverbial molasses, and for no discernable reason whatsoever. This incenses me even more than presumably negligent driving, and with no target upon which to vent my bile, to boot. There is a made-up word my wife and I have adopted in our travels along the highways and byways of the Eastern seaboard, and that word is “splick”. Splick is “that which the inexplicable lacks” and almost always is utilized exclusively in traffic-delay contexts. If the line of cars on the interstate slows to a crawl, eventually passes some construction or a disabled truck or a state trooper holding a speed gun or whathaveyou, however illegitimate the reasoning in people’s heads that caused them to slam on the brakes, at least there was the splick. Once you get past the splick, traffic immediately gets back to cruising speed. On the other hand, sometimes there simply is no splick, and that is the worst.


Today was better (so far, at least) for whatever that’s worth. Of course it’s all relative. As in, I spent a good chunk of the wedding weekend fielding the usual catching-up questions from my relatives, including “where are you working now?” and “where are you living now?” and “so how is the commute?” And I elaborated at various lengths in my answers to the first two but pretty uniformly dispatched with the third one with “Terrible!” every single time.