Pedestrians prohibited

There are a lot of signs that seem to exist only to encourage the exact things they're supposed to prevent. Until I noticed the "Pedestrians and bicycles prohibited" sign at the entrance to 490-West near my house, I had never thought about sprinting down an on-ramp in my sneakers and track pants, "merging" behind a truck, and galloping alongside the cars. But seeing that as a pedestrian I was "prohibited" from doing so made me want to try. I've been going to the gym regularly all month—maybe I could do it. 

I'm still proud the time I stole a "Not responsible for personal property" sign from a coatroom in high school. At 17 the irony was just too much for me to pass up. Is that the same thing as wanting to run down a highway amongst the cars because a sign tells you not to? I'm not sure. Anyway, I know that in the past whenever I ever saw someone walking down the side of a highway, I always thought, "What happened to that poor bastard's car?" not "Why didn't that idiot read the sign at the on-ramp? No pedestrians allowed!" Now I know better. He's just another bold soul, a rule-breaker like me. 

But also, speed is relative. Allison and I saw Mad Max: Fury Road at the dollar theater in Henrietta last night (literally a dollar per ticket on Tuesdays, a whopping two dollars per ticket otherwise), and on the drive home I realized that after watching high-speed car chases for two hours straight, I no longer had a good sense of how fast I was actually going. There was almost no traffic on the road, and in my adrenaline-enhanced state, 40 mph felt like 80. I was suffering from movie-induced "velocitization," Allison pointed out, like when you spend six hours driving on an expressway and afterward anything under 50 feels like a crawl. Except that now it was happening in reverse. I hit the brakes WAY WAY too early for a red light, and Allison had a good laugh as I decelerated from 35 to about 5 mph with hundreds of feet to spare. "It feels like I'm flying," I insisted. At the next intersection, I overcompensated and tried to accelerate through a yellow light, to Allison's horror this time, because once again I was too far away and probably wouldn't have made it.

In the future, I will have to remember Jolene is not a War Rig! 

Jolene.

War Rig.