Double Vision

On the bicycle ride into work this morning, I witnessed two traffic accidents. On one ride!

Well, I only really saw the first one; it was behind me. A truck slammed on its brakes and plowed into a car stopped at the red light at 14th Avenue. Another chap oblivious to his whereabouts, plowing into traffic stopped ahead of him; another $4,000+ lost to insurance adjusters and body shop mechanics and the rest of our industries devoted to such things. By the way, this instantly created thousands more in national Gross Domestic Product.

The second wreck, well, this was the one I knew would happen someday -- very nearly a jaws-of-life wreck at the curb cut to the Department of Motor Vehicles on Broadway. I can't help think of the irony of such a thing...if irony is the correct term. That a woman would just complete and pass her traffic test, receive her license, and immediately cause an injurious wreck is just the sort of thing I expected to see, based on the insanity of how people drive around Stockton and Broadway. Daily I jocky with assholes at that intersection as they have to deal not only with a two to one lane neckdown but also with a curb cut into the county med clinic and DMV and a pesky, bothersome, slow-poke bicyclist just trying to go straight.

This lady: she did not look good, having just been t-boned, with firemen attending to her from outside her vehicle. Just another case of firemen doing everything but fighting fires, something they rarely do these days, what with all the traffic accidents they have to attend to.

Just another set of wrecks. The glass and steel have since been swept away, the skid marks are already fading away in the summer heat. Thousands more cars have already passed by without any knowledge of what occured to a few unfortunate souls this morning; the wrecks having already been lost to time and space.