It’s a wide road, four lanes to a direction, and crossing it on a left turn means crossing a lot of real estate. To it’s merit, the intersection is fairly well-lit in the evening, bathed in the gangrenous glow of those sodium lights purported to be cheaper and longer-lasting than the clean pure white-lights of my childhood. Sitting int the pole position while waiting for the light to change to comforting green can often be an exercise in frustration. Somehow, the wait is always roughly 3 hours too long at this particular light…but at least there are plenty of things to look at. Gas station on my left, high-end apartment complex far over on the right, a small plaza area at 10 o’clock with the requisite McDonald’s, hair and nail salons, and video stores, and then, of course, the cars cars cars.

One such car is passing in front of me, executing one of the aforementioned left turns that can leave you vulnerable for interminable lengths. It’s a small white car with no name, made in the mid-whenevers, that will forever and ever, never dazzling anyone, simply plodding along through its immortal life, and always having at least two emptied fast food bags crumpled in the passenger seat foot-well.

There is another car in this scene, a taupe station wagon of some kind. Its travels begin in the extreme right corner of my vision, continue into the previously empty lane beside me, and then rush to meet the small white car in the middle of the intersection. I assume they are good friends.

I am mistaken, they are horrible horrible enemies. Taupe station wagon greets white no-name with a horrific shove, spinning it around two full rotations until it slams into a signal pole, all the while flinging tiny shards of itself every which way. I have a feeling that white no-name may have cheated on taupe station wagon to have illicited such a response, seeing as TSW never even flashed it’s happy red lights in greeting and instead met WNN with full force.

I pull over to survey the damage and check for injuries. The drivers of TSW and WNN are shaken, not stirred, but that seems to be all. It would appear that neither one of them had the ability to control the avid yearnings for confrontation of their machines. I leave them to their gentle coo-ings and lamentations of their injured partners.