The Curious Incident of the Butts in the Road

I know you must think I'm some little old lady with a driving phobia, what with all the roadway oddities I grouse about. Perhaps you picture me as Tweety's Grandma.

Or imagine me hunkered down behind the wheel of a 1958 Studebaker, peering between the dashboard and the top of the steering wheel.

Maybe I'm really concentrating on maneuvering my vehicle through perilous territory, my sweet little Tweety on my lap.

Or maybe what I THINK is sweet little Tweety is nothing more than a spot of bird doo doo on the windshield.

I assure you, I am not in such a road-hazardous condition. I merely attempt to pilot my large SUV from home to work and back again each day, along the two-lane blacktop of rural Missouri. But there are days, my friends, when Common Sense is a neglected toddler who slips out the back door to run barefooted down the street to the carnival at the city park, where she tugs on shirttails and begs for cotton candy.

Today I turned onto a new stretch of concrete road behind the high school of a rival school district. There, on the pavement, sat four middle-school-aged boys, legs crossed, facing the woods that separated them from a trailer park, oblivious to traffic whizzing by at the legal speed of 30 mph.

W. T. F. ?

They were not on the shoulder. They were not in the grass of the very wide right-of-way. Their derrieres were smack dab on where the white line would be if the state of Missouri threw caution to the wind and actually painted lines on the sides of our roads down here in the hinterlands.

Of course I mouthed them and gave them my best disapproving teacher look. One glanced over his shoulder insolently. And smirked.

At that moment, Hick, master of the inopportune phone call, rang me up to tell me that he ate chicken livers for lunch. Oh. And that he would be staying late at work for a plant inspection with the fire marshal. Let's hope he didn't pull a Coyote Ugly faux pas and squirt him in the face like Violet, who was really tricked into it by Rachel the New York biatch, who taught her the chant, "Heck no! H2O!" just before the fire marshal ordered a glass of water.

I ranted to Hick about the road butt, and he said to call the police. I said that was kind of stupid, it's not like there was an emergency, and anyway, the county would have to send a car, and who knows how far away they were at the moment, and I didn't want be on record for calling in a false report in case somebody was getting his head bashed in elsewhere, and really needed that patrolman. Hick said to call 311, the non-emergency reporting number, and that it was city jurisdiction, not county.

Still. I was driving. I did not want to look down dumbly to try and find the numbers on my smart phone. If I see the road-butt boys again, I will pull over and call.

They were probably smoking a doobie.