Only in Albion...

...could I be driving to the bank, on M99, a two lane highway that comes through the old business district in town. As I pull out onto this street in the afternoon, the traffic's pretty heavy. There's an SUV next to me, a car in front that turns left, and my lane is finally open as I pull up next to a pickup right as we come to a red light.

Or rather, I TRY to pull up next to it. I've been watching it for the last couple blocks from a few cars back, and the driver can't seem to decide whether he wants the right lane or the center lane that I've been trying to drive in...so he's just driving right on the dotted line, taking up 1/2 of both lanes.

It's a 30-year old Ford pick-up truck, rusted out fenders, rusted bumpers...but the truly striking thing is that apparently the rear suspension began going out on this thing about fifteen years ago, and the owner's decided it really isn't worth fixing, instead he's just drivin'. So with a load of junk on the back of it, the back bumper on the driver's side is about six inches off the ground. That's the ONLY corner of the truck that's sagging like that. And...the driver's blug-blug-blugging along at about 12 miles an hour as we both come up to the red light.

He doesn't give a crap, so, hey, what the heck, neither do I. I pull up to the intersection in my lane -- it is MY LANE, after all -- and I squeeze right in there next to him, so that my passenger's side door is about eight inches from the extra-wide mirror he has sticking out from the side of his truck like a boat oar.

The sign on the door of the pickup? What business owns this stellar piece of transportation, this sterling example of American innovation?

"SPEEDY HAULIN'"

Riiigghhht...



And let me add a P.S to this post that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with what you've just read but just heard on Comedy Central, I thought it was hilarious:

"I don't know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie-Roll Tootsie pop, but it takes twelve-thousand four hundred sixty eight licks to get to the center of an I-Phone..." --- Stephen Colbert