I got three hours sleep today.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had to appear for the dreaded drivers license renewal at the PA “Motor Vehicle Services Center”, which is closed Mondays and closes every day at 4:15pm. Isn’t that convenient for people that work.

The four highlights of my experience were:

• arriving and voicing my irritation for the line of people that extended from the service desk inside, through the available space inside, out the door, and down the sidewalk and past the Mail Room (an authorized UPS shipping facility with a superhot customer service girl with the strangest name I’ve ever known) and saying out loud to the amusement of the other agitated customers, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
• watching the motion-detected electric door opening and closing two thousand times as the line proceeded inside to be serviced by a single, unexpectedly pleasant individual handling service requests and giving out thin paper tickets sequentializing those seeking mugshots.
• walking around, wishing I wasn’t there and having a random guy pass, take a look at my awesome Killola ‘shattered’ shirt and saying “NICE SHIRT!”
• listening to another customer talking to his family and relating to his complaint of it taking too long and that PA is the worst state in the nation for service at the DMV.

I was not amused with my half hour wasted, but he was a commercial licensee and needed to recertify.  They drove 45 minutes and had been waiting for six hours.  Mark my words:  One day, someone will go DMV and replace an expression.

The anti-highlights were the two hundred people there who did not speak a word of English, one of them with a cute little baby girl who desperately needed not only a diaper change, but a parent change. Isn’t the definition of ultimate failure as a parent, to impose upon the most important thing to ever exist in your life, such a disadvantage as not speaking the predominant language of the country in which you live?

I’ve been talking to a Blondie fan in Brazil who learned English because of Blondie, so she could meet other fans and communicate and have more personal choices.  She’s more literate in English than most of the people I’ve encountered in waiting rooms in the last three years.  Now there’s someone I respect.  No wonder the economy is in the toilet.

Back to today:

At the traffic light in Kenhorst, I finally parted company with a 40-in-a-45-zone driver clogging a train of cars.
Entering the left turn lane and looking through aligned windows, I had the privilege of discovering the source of the impaired driving:
She had a cigarette in her left hand, and was texting with her right hand on a cell phone held midway between eyes and windshield.
Left palm on the wheel, right hand on the keyboard, no eyes on the road.  WTF?  Prison is my recommendation.
And prison for everyone who thinks that’s not more impaired than a .07 BAC, which is now just shy of a felony.  The only reason it isn’t is it generates more cash per year than could be stuffed into the volume of my house.

My skin is disintegrating from my infection of no-longer-dormant chicken pox virus that I had 39 or 40 years ago.  eeeek!