Roundabout

So, what do you think about roundabouts?  I kind of like them.  Well, I like the one that is in our neighborhood anyway.  My friend that owns my favorite Italian restaurant (Sgt. Peffers) hates it.  That particular intersection was formally a six way stop.  People in a hurry were constantly not stopping or not taking their proper turn, or the overly-cautious were forever paralyzed and fucking everything up by not even taking their turn to move along.  It was always a rush hour mind-dicking and you could count on a fender-bendered every other day.  It could get pretty annoying.  I mean how hard is it to pay attention.  Get off your damn cell phone!  The rule is if you’re first to arrive at a six way stop, you’re first to go.  If you arrive at the intersection at the same time, the driver on the right has right-of-way.  It can’t be more simple, although I have a good high school friend, Al, who honestly had trouble distinguishing right from left.  I suppose that could create some confusion. The person that rectified my friend’s problem was my high school football coach.  He got tired of watching Al run into me on our end sweeps and fixed everything with a permanent marker and scribing a huge “R” and “L” on the backs of  his hands, a technique I believe Al still implements to this very day.

Anyway the roundabout was supposed to correct the traffic confusion.  But my friend Tim that owns my favorite Italian restaurant thinks there have been even more accidents since the roundabout was installed.  I guess he should know.  His restaurant is only a half a block away.  He might be right.  I can’t give you any statistical info about it.  I suppose I could do some research and get back to you, but if you think that’s going to happen you have your head up your ass.

My neighborhood roundabout is a little atypical.  Those of us in the neighborhood call it the “peanut,” because it has a figure 8 shape to it.  It sort of looks like the picture at the left, only it’s a lot bigger, and then instead of eyes and a mouth there are a bunch of plants.  Ann, one of my good friends in the neighborhood, takes care of those.  I don’t know how she keeps all that stuff looking so good.  I mean the flowers there are surrounded by concrete and they bake in the hot sun, but they always stay amazingly perky.  There really is no convenient way to supply water that I know of.   When I was driving through there one night last summer though I remember seeing some guy standing in the middle of the “peanut” urinating on the begonias.  Maybe he makes a watering visit every night.   That could be.  As well as my friends restaurant, there is a bar just down the street.  The clientele of that establishment are the fervently loyal kind is what I’ve heard.

Merry-Go-Round

Another of my neighbors who is kind of a senile old coot got one of his grandchildren all confused because he kept calling the roundabout a merry-go-round and when the little bastard found out the merry-go-round was never going to materialize, he went berserk I guess and threw the Tonka truck he was playing with through a living room window. That’s the story I got from Mr. Nostrum down the street anyway.  We all call him Mr. Nostril because he’s always sticking his nose into other peoples business.

What I really like to do is slip away and drive through the “peanut” in mid-morning or mid-afternoon when traffic is minimal.  With no one to interfere, I often cruise around and around several times.  It reminds me of driving curved roads in the mountains.  I love driving in the mountains.  Not a fancy interstate through the mountains though.  I like a nice curvy mountain road with lots of hairpin turns and switchbacks, the kind that scare the shit out of my wife.  For that provision it’s hard to beat the Bighorn mountains just west of my hometown of Sheridan Wyoming, and the Snowy Range in southeastern Wyoming works out nicely too, but I only get out there once a year or so.  So I just have to make do with the “peanut.”  If you’re ever in town, I’ll hang a  fresh pine-sented air freshener from my rear view mirror, and  while we listen to the long version of John Denver’s “Rocky Mountin High” I will show you how I put my SUV through its paces swerving back and forth through my neighborhood roundabout.  It will be fun.