When I drive, I drive with my brights on

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My commute is through a deserted desert wilderness. Speeds are generally high and the roads have just enough wave to them that you can never be entirely sure you can see all of oncoming traffic. And so passing has this delicious element of danger. Tastes like iron filings. Yum!

Anyway, because of the desert, I, even in daylight, tend to put my lights on.

Skip ahead to my mechanical abilities:

Besides my lack thereof, there is also the fact that whenever my beloved Lapper loses a headlight, it is the dead of winter. And so I am changing a headlight with numbed fingers. Thereby losing screws and springs and nuts into the guts of the automobile, never to be recovered.

The result is that now, one headlight points up into space, a little to the right of the car. The other’s not exactly right on either.

And so in order to see at night, I have to use my brights.

I have electrical problems anyway and so my “brights” are still duller than most people’s dims. The brights have been on nonstop for two years now and only one person has flashed me. They were obviously insane.

The only people ever to be bothered by my headlights are truckers I’m passing—as the one headlight shoots directly into their cab. Poor truckers.

So I have my brights on. And I usually have them on day and night.

But the Lapper’s getting a break this week. Lady Steed, the Big O and I are going to LA in the Taurus tonight. I have a seminar the next two days and the other two get to go to the zoo and a train museum. They’ll have fun, but I’ll get the better food.

More on why they don’t get good food when we get back.

In the meantime, read this post over and over.