An important safety tip from Sparky, the Missouri Driver’s Guide’s State-Sanctioned Fun Mascot:

“Hey, kids! Remember: when you’re driving through a biblical flood, and you see stoplights that have been conked out by a power outage, just zooma zoom zoooooom right through the intersection like they’re green!… Except, actually, wait; that’s not what you’re supposed to do at all! What the hell is wrong with you?!”

I sat at an intersection for fifteen minutes this morning waiting to make a left turn approximately 50 yards from my office door (if I could have, I’d have just parked where I was) because the lights were out and my “community’s” solution was to barrel on through like the cross street didn’t exist. The guy in front of me sat there whimpering with his left blinker on until he couldn’t stand it anymore and took a cowardly right, perhaps in search of a functioning society somewhere down the road. After he was out of the way, I was able to make it about another twenty seconds before saying “oh, fuck this” and gunning it into the middle of traffic. One day, my inadvertent last words will almost certainly be “oh, fuck this.”