Soon this won't happen

Two drivers use their cell phones after a minor car accident in a parking lot.

I saw a fender bender in a parking lot yesterday. The kind that happens thousands of times a day all over the world: Two drivers backing out, looking at the sides to make sure there were no pedestrians in the way. And crunch. 
In this case, the women pulled out their cell phones. They looked like modern gunslingers and as I was leaving the shopping center a police car was heading their way. Many don't know this, but when you have a minor accident with no injuries in a parking lot, both drivers are considered equally at fault. At least, this is true in my home state of Pennsylvania. 
One day this won't happen because cars will have safety features to prevent it. Sensors in the back and front will hit the brakes. Many new cars have this feature already, of course, and cameras in the back give good views of dangers. (Everyone around my age, sixty-one, loves those cameras because it relieves their stiffening necks of motions best done by owls.) 

Mine's on the left

It made me sad to see the car on the right. Imagine being too poor to be able to buy a car with four doors and an automatic transmission and sits so close to the ground! And it's named Lotus, after an obsolete spreadsheet program. 
Being the kind person that I am, I put a dollar bill in the car's windshield wiper. Anything to help those less fortunate than I.

Too close

Two deer in the Loser's back yard.

Last night, during a short highway drive, the Complete and Total Loser came just feet from hitting a deer as it ran across the road from the Loser's left to right. The Loser had a hard time believing he didn't hit it, it was so close, and drove for several minutes afterward with a stupid, slack-jawed look on his unattractive face. 
Today, the Loser saw a dead cat on another road, the victim of a car. It made him think about how and why it tugged at his heartstrings—it was probably someone's pet—yet it had no more or less personality than a deer. The Loser can see personality differences in the deer that enter his back yard. Some are bolder than others, some of the young ones are more playful than their peers.

The second skunk

The Duchess of Cambridge exits a car.

The Complete and Total Loser caught a second skunk Saturday night and let it go Sunday morning. (It's the raccoons in the attic he's after and he thinks—hopes—he's got all of them.)
Hours after this, while the Loser was outside working around the yard, the thought popped into his head that when non-domesticated animals see humans leaving cars they think we're escaping from them.

A trapped skunk waits to be release.

A Complete and Total Loser Rule - 12

When driving on back streets, go no more than five miles over the speed limit. You'll hit fewer animals and annoy fewer people. When on highways or large roads, match the speed of 80 percent of the drivers. Be patient with cyclists; you're the one using the gas and spoiling the environment, and all you have to do is sit there and move your hands and feet a little. Treat driving as you would any other sport and do nothing but drive when behind the wheel. You do not want a lifetime of searing guilt over having killed someone just so you can see if someone responded to your text of call. Such things can wait. If another person is driving badly, assume that it may be the worst day of their life and do not become angry.

The Loser Gets it Where He Can

The sad thing about being the Complete and Total Loser is that he does have an ego, however bashed and reduced. At the same time, he also has a brain, so he knows that just because he's in a car he is not better than, nor does he have more rights than, pedestrians or cyclists.
So how does he get his tiny ego stroked and fed? From dumb stuff, of course.
Today had a good example. Outside, cold, crossing a street in a shopping mall parking lot. The sign was on the Loser's side. As he approached the intersection a car reached it, too. The Loser, in an adventure cartoon Masters-of-the-Universe-type voice heard only by him, says, "You will stop for pedestrian crossing," without slowing down a step. The car stops as if at his command, and the Loser, standing a little taller now, walks into the store.

The Loser Drives a Car

The Complete and Total Loser has owned cars. He got his first just before his senior year in college, a ten-year-old 1971 Ford Torino. Not a Gran Torino like in the Clint Eastwood movie (that was a '72) but similar in most ways. They were always pea green. It was a monster, the Complete and Total Loser's first car. Four doors, a V-8 engine that took regular gas, which was still at the pumps in '81. Friends once tuned it up with nothing more than some simple tools, a timing light, eight spark plugs and new filters. They charged only for parts, enjoying the easy access the old engine granted.
His second, and last car, was a used 1990 Toyota Tercel he needed for his job in 1995. Horrible. They made half of them with carburetors, half with fuel injection systems. The Loser had the former. It had nothing but problems and he sold it for $100 a few years ago.
While he's never been able to afford good cars, he drives them sometimes when he housesits and he isn't a bad driver. This is because knowing he's a loser he drives carefully, eschews cellphone use, learns to operate radio buttons without looking, keeps his speed with the majority of traffic's, wears his seat belt. In the early 80s, in the Torino, he blanked at a traffic light and just missed hitting a couple on a motorcycle. The Loser can't imagine how he could have ever enjoyed a sunset, a child's laugh, a good joke if he had permanently injured -- or worse -- innocent people through his stupid carelessness. He hasn't let it happen again.
He has figured out road rage. Everything he sees written about it talks of the general decline in civility, busy, impatient, angry, selfish people. All true, to a degree, but what the Loser sees them leaving out is important: The traffic never stops. In his early years of driving, in the late 70s, suburban roads were largely empty by eight and in the wee hours you could, as he did, see if you make a common three-mile drive at night without turning on your headlights. Fun! The traffic would get bad sometimes, but there would be relief.
Now, it's different. The Loser's former home turf is ringed by roads connecting larger roads that office workers, working for companies that long fled the city and its high wage tax, use to get to their condominiums. The night roads teem with parents driving their over-scheduled offspring home from play rehearsals, sports practice, study sessions, music classes. Later the legions of service workers with shifts ending at night hie home from jobs in restaurants, supermarkets, community centers. The number of cars, many of them far longer and at vision blocking heights, has ballooned while the increase in paved roads has risen only slightly over the last 30 years.
When the Loser pulls out of his old driveway now even at midnight on a weekday he has to look both ways lest he be broadsided by someone zipping along while talking on a cell phone.
Earlier this decade, an old friend of the family's was walking her dog at night, around eight. She was killed by a car as she did. They never found out who did it. The Loser has proposed that it could have easily been a college student in an SUV, a little tipsy, music blaring, cellphone in hand, who thought only a pothole or debris had been hit. TV news didn't pick up the story and college students don't read the local papers.
The dog was fine.