This goes out to you Green-SUV-Man

I hate to bring up the topic of driving again, but in three weeks I will not be able to drive anymore so I have to live it up while I can.

Once a doctor has earned his or her medical degree he or she may not just practice medicine for the rest of his or her life unquestioned. Also back in the day only men could be doctors and I wouldn’t have to keep writing “his or her”. Shit, am I off track already? What I’m getting at is that all doctors must continually prove that they are competent to practice medicine through various classes and tests.

There is an obvious reason for this – doctors are directly responsible for people’s lives. If a doctor loses touch with the proper means of conducting his or her medical practice than patients are essentially being put directly in harms way by seeking help.

Now, if we insist on keeping doctors in check throughout their careers, why do we simply allow people to take single driving tests as means of proving that they are capable to drive for their entire lives? After all, every time you get behind the wheel you are not only taking your own life into your hands, but the lives of everyone else on the road at that time (not to mention pedestrians). Statistics say that 1 person dies every 13 minutes from a car accident in the United States. Compare that to how many people die as a direct result of medical malpractice*. Starting to see where I’m going?

Now this post is not just going out to the asshole in the green Ford SUV, license plate 25JL70, who plowed through a red light at the intersection of Kellogg and North Pleasant Street at approximately 3:53 pm yesterday, almost hitting me at full speed as I made a left turn. No, no, this is going out to everyone. It’s a request meant to benefit the safety of the public. It is imperative that we continually test the competency of our nation’s drivers.

Experts agree that the man in the green SUV was most likely this prick.

But how would we test such a subjective matter? (Although in case of the above asshole it was totally subjective. Red lights STILL mean stop, jackass. Some things never change.) We could subject people to an annual driving test, but the original driving test is already a joke. No, this is no job for the government. This is a job for vigilante justice!

We need a public forum on asshole drivers. In this modern age of the internets such a thing would be possible even in the smallest of towns and the largest of cities. We need witnesses to report jackass maneuvers (for an update on what qualifies a jackass maneuver see: Right of What in our archive – May 4, 2007). Reported cars will then be free game for tire slashings, window bashings, target practice, and, in more urban locations, pigeon roosting.

Now you might be thinking: Isn’t vigilante justice bad for society as a whole? Well I’ve got something to say to you: No. No it’s not.

*I’m misusing statistics but you can go fuck yourself.

Lessons I've Learned From Harry Potter 7

So just like the rest of all the youthful denizens of this fine protoliterate generation, I've finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It's a bittersweet thing; naturally, I've wanted to know what happens to little Harold and his gang of thieves ever since they left the Shire, or whatever, but now that the series has officially ended, I can't help but find myself untethered to reality, cut away from my only source of entertainment, enlightenment, and hope in this miserable muggle world of mine. So in a mostly futile effort to milk the series for a little more than it may have ever been worth, I'm going to try to extract a few life lesssons that will bear relevance long after the word Horcrux ceases to mean anything to us and J.K. Rowling finally drowns in her swimming-pool-sized vault of gold.

This is an artist's representation of J.K. Rowling's hidden vault, evidently featuring a crude facsimile of Scrooge McDuck.

Lesson #1: Dropping out of school to live in the woods is a perfectly acceptable idea if some old guy that the government dispises tells you that it's your destiny.

Timothy Leary and Albus Dumbledore have more in common than their ruggedly handsome looks.

A lot of kids these days get bombarded with that dogmatic slogan, "Just get your degree!" to the point where they're left in a stupor that resembles the zombies from Resident Evil 4 (that is, they can still run, climb ladders, wield weapons, and mumble in Spanish, but they lack higher brain function and are effectively controlled by insectoid blood parasites under the command of a religious fanatic bent on world domination, which, as we all know, is just a metaphor for contemporary American society).

Speaks for itself, really.

I think Rowling has finally decided to use her fame to some positive social end by encouraging us youngsters to loosen our shackles of conformity and take some risks with the course of our lives. Maybe we won't get to seek out and destroy Horcruxes, but think of this way: maybe we will.

Lesson #2: Kids should drink liquor to make them feel better about tragedy. In the chapter "A Fallen Warrior", Harry and the other squirts all share in the venerated cathartic ritual of imbibing controlled substances. And it makes them feel better. Especially Hermione, who later that chapter disappears with Ron and is overheard yelling "Engorgio! Engorgio!" at the top of her lungs. The important thing to remember here is that our Muggle tragedies will likely never be as severe as Harry Potter's; he's the Chosen One, and we're just boring Americans with such a preponderance of privilege and shortcuts to success that we actually interpret laziness and low ambition as iconoclastic forms of rebellion. Our tragedies are a little more subtle, and so our occasions for drinking liquor are many. For instance, getting into an argument with anyone; feeling lonely; having it be late and dark at the same time; being in college; hearing someone say something ambiguously gay in the Lord of the Rings films; or, most tragic of all tragedies, having leftover liquor.

Lesson #3: Sometimes teenagers really are righteous. Remember the first time you Sparknote'd The Catcher in the Rye, and you thought Holden was an awesome character who saw everything clearly? You ever go back to it, years later, and read it with just a few more years of experience, only to realize that Holden is a hypocrticial, unreasonable, condescending jerk who overthinks everything and will only remain unhappy due to his own deficiencies, and not society's? It has to make you sick. Luckily, J.K. Rowling is a much more sophisticated and responsible writer than J.D. Salinger, and she has fashioned a story and a central character who turns out to be right about everything, except the things he's wrong about, which he learns of just in time to be right about them again. In a few years we can read this again (but of course we won't; we'll be on to the next craze) and find a Harry that is just as righteous as ever, and we'll be able to take heart knowing that if our hero could have been right about everything even when most of the world was against him, chances are good that we're right too about our own theories.

Mark David Chapman pictured here bearing an uncanny resemblance to the much more insidious Jared Leto.

This is what makes the Potter series truly great: moral clarity. Gray area? No thank you. Next thing you know you'll be trying to convince me that the Democrats aren't perfect. And then I'd have to throw you in prison, force you to endure conditions more safe and sanitary than 75% of the world population's, and then reintegrate you into society in a minimum-wage job at a small business that still earns you more than your employer, whom your children, after going to their prestigious universities on full scholarship (since working-class scholars are so hot right now), will regard with earnest, elitist contempt, both for being the slave-driver oppressor-of-the-people business-owner, and for being uneducated and not having time to read the New York Times or learn about Fair Trade coffee, and hopefully in the end, these little brats of yours will finish their disseration on The Is-Ought Failures of Ayn Rand's Objectivism and land a plum professorship at a small liberal arts school in New England where they can have a Christmas bonus higher than the salary of most of their town's residents and somehow live under the delusion that they are exempt from the vices of capitalism because they are entrenched in academia, and whenever the guilty pangs of truth start hurting them as they realize that, no, not everyone can "get away" to Nantucket when things just get "too much", they'll find refuge in lip-service, mostly about poverty rates among minorites and human rights violations in countries they would never dare invest in, let alone visit.

I totally forgot my point, but here's a picture of Hermione. Say something nice.

Well I know hell, damn and bi-

I occasionally wonder what it would be like to go back to elementary school. It’s not that I have any particular craving to relive the days of innocence lost. It’s not that I want to find comfort in a simpler life. No, if it were for one of these noble and beautiful desires you would all be very confused about the Eli you know (the real Eli that is, not the Asian one. He inhabits a reality which transcends confusion.)

My reason for wanting to go back is of course the direct product of one of my basest and most ridiculous grudges. My sole inspirtation for wanting to return lies in that monstrous beast, that bestial monster - - cursive script.

I sometimes wonder how many worksheets I filled with “aaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbb cccccccccc etc etc etc.” How many times did I copy out ridiculous phrases like “A Bastard Child Died Early Friday, Grieving Horrified Indians Joined Klingons Mourning New Offenses. Proposals Questioned Rights Shown To Underage Villains Wielding Xylophones Yesterday. ‘Zounds!?”

Of course were it in print, these tasks would have been childishly simple. But no, cursive was the name of the game. And every day I would come home with aching wrists, strained eyes and a broken heart.

Why the hell didn’t any of us raise our voices in protest? Oh how I longed to take my Introduction to Cursive worksheet and scrawl across it in crude red ink: “ffffffffff uuuuuuuuuu cccccccccc kkkkkkkkkk – how’s that for curse-ive, teacher bitch?” But alas I did no such thing. I simply sat quietly and swallowed the tripe I was fed about how this new style of writing, which pumped nothing but hatred and despair from its cold, black, metaphorical heart, would one day be useful to me in the real world.

The real kick in the ass is, of course, that I have not once in my post-sixth-grade-life used, seen, or even publicly recognized the existence of cursive (the smartasses among you will point out that I have just acknowledged it by writing this article, but as far as I’m concerned you just imagined this article and I still adamantly deny the existence of any such script). When it really comes down to it, handwriting in general was largely replaced by the newly widespread invention of computers. My pain and suffering were for naught. Although I did build up some wrist muscles a couple years earlier than I otherwise would have. That last sentence, aside from being a fragment, is entirely unnecessary and largely irrelevant.

I suppose I can’t blame my teachers for the torture* they put me through. After all, no one would have guessed that computers would make formal handwriting utterly obsolete. I mean, back in that day computers were just room-sized contraptions that could do simple math and operated on “electricity,” a bizarre form of energy which could not possibly have been discovered earlier than 1988, and even that’s pushing it. Yet sometimes I wish I could go back. If only… If only…

*Yes, I meant that. It’s worse than water boarding.