Parking Lots and Ship Wrecks

Wow. The Nocember doldrums were a little more severe than I had anticipated. I set blogging sail when the gales of Nocember came early. I might have cracked up, or I might have hit a deep writer's block. But if I'd put 15 more blogs behind me, I wouldn't be making pointless allusions to "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

Then again, maybe I would. It's kind of fun. There I was, cast upon the shoals of too little sleep and too much to do. The big blog they call Gitche Gumee never gives up inspiration to the tired and cranky.

Or maybe people have just run out of new ways to annoy me. Maybe I've built up a tolerance to stupidity. Maybe I'm mellowing.

Ask the Princess. We met a car going the wrong way up a parking lot aisle the other day and I was uncharacteristically gracious. I didn't stake out the middle of the lane, stop and glare at him while traffic backed up behind me. I thought about it, but I didn't do it. No, I pulled to the right and crept past him, looking down at his puny little 2-door, which I could have squashed like up bug if I had chosen to.

Ditto for the second moron I met while I was driving down -- the correct direction -- the next aisle. She was totally oblivious to the fact that she was this far away from becoming my hood ornament. I usually only cut slack to one person per day.

I mean, Hello, people! That giant arrow painted on the road? It's pointing the opposite direction you are going. All these parked cars? They are parked going the opposite direction you are going. All the cars you are meeting in this extremely narrow lane? They're all going the opposite way you are. Yes, there's a chance they're all wrong and you are right. But you forgot one thing. I'm one of them, and I'm never wrong. Even when I'm not right.

To be fair, I met these idiots while driving through the parking lot of the Coralville HyVee, without a doubt the most screwed up parking lot on the face of the earth. I met moron number two in the mysterious, off-pattern "out" aisle, which ends at -- in a stroke of shear genius -- the "in" aisle for the attached strip mall lot.

You would think the entire strip mall could adopt a uniform, alternating "up, down, up, down" pattern of parking aisle, beginning on one end and "up, down, up, down"-ing all the way to the other end. But NOOOO! Some sick, parking lot painting, psychopath went and threw in one extra, single-sided "down" row -- just to mess with people's minds!

This is the same parking lot pervert that put in a random stop sign at the other end of the lot so that the occasional person exiting the drive-thru dry cleaners can have a clear shot at messing up the main in-out traffic flow. The strategy here, I believe, is to make more work for the dry cleaner. Typically if you stop at this stop sign you run the risk of being rear ended. Not all the skid marks left here are on the road, if you know what I mean.

I think if Gordon Lightfoot had dug a little deeper, he may have found the captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald was following shipping lanes set up by the same person who designed this parking lot.