The Dangers of Driving

This month I've been behind the wheel of a car quite a bit (mostly driving to Bowling Green and back to Cincinnati three different times), and doing all of that driving has reminded me of what a ridiculously dangerous thing driving in a car is. I've seen a Road Rage incident, two cars completely engulfed in flames, and multiple accidents. Cars are dangerous!

I just looked it up, and there were 40,200 auto fatalities in the United States last year! Compare that to a little more than 8,000 gun deaths in 2014 (the nearest year I could find stats for). I'm not suggesting that guns aren't dangerous, or that we don't need gun control legislation (I think they are, and I think we do), but cars kill five times as many people as guns. And keep in mind that killing things is what guns are designed to do. Cars are just supposed to get us from place to place.

If there were ANYTHING else in our lives that killed so many people, we'd be outraged. If microwave ovens killed 40,000 people a year through slow radiation poison, we'd all yank them out of our houses immediately. If cell phones gave brain tumors to 40,000 people a year, we'd all learn to do without. Heck, the news is filled with stories about the opioid crisis, but drug overdoses only kill 15,000 people a year! But most of us get behind the wheel of a car and just blithely go on about our lives, never considering that getting into a car is the decision that is more likely to violently kill us than just about any other decision we will make.

When people talk about the future of driverless cars, they often bemoan the loss of freedom of driving one's own car. And what about getting your driver's license when you turn 15 or 16? That's a right of passage!

Yeah, but it's not like it's been a right of passage for the entire existence of humankind. There's no story of Jesus getting his temps and not having gas money but filling the tank up with just a gallon of blessed gas. Nothing like that. We've been driving en masse for just about 100 years, maybe four or five generations. That's it. And it's been an incredibly dangerous time. I look forward to the days of driverless cars, when human-driven vehicles are the exception, not the rule. I look forward to the day when I talk to my grandchildren, and the conversation goes something like this:

"Grandaddy, did people really used to drive their own cars?"

"That's right," I'd say. "We did."

"And they drove as fast as computers drive now?"

"Sometimes faster, if they were late for work or something."

"Wow. And did 40,000 people a year really die because people were driving themselves and trying to maneuver those speeds with their human reactions?"

"Yes, people died every day on the roads."

"And you guys were just okay with that?"

"Well, we weren't okay so much as we didn't think there was anything much that we could do about it."

"Why would you think that?"

"We were just dumb, I guess..."

The Clarity of Retirement

In my last entry, I made my first post to this blog in more than five years. Today, I thought I'd mention something about a major change that's occurred over those five years: I retired from my job as technology director of the Erlanger-Elsmere School District.

My last official day of work was June 30 (which in Kentucky K-12 education is the end of the fiscal year), but I wanted to be available for my replacement, so I rigged my vacation days last year so that my last day of work was June 1. That way, if she had any major questions for the first month that she was on the job, she could call and wouldn't have to feel like she was interrupting my retirement or causing me to violate the rules of my retirement (To prevent employees from "double dipping" by "retiring" from their job on one day and then being immediately re-hired the next, the state of Kentucky requires a 90 day break of employment between one job and the next, and they're serious about it--retirees are warned by some to not set foot on campus of a school district during those 90 days!). So including my "vacation" in June, I've been jobless for almost five months now.

I have a lot to say about my retirement, but today I only want to mention one thing: As I was walking our dog a couple of days ago, it occurred to me that retirement was providing some clarity between the things I wanted to do when I was working and the things I SAID I wanted to do when I was working.

I often would say to myself, "I really want to _______________, but I'm too busy to do that now. When I retire, I'll definitely do that."  At different times that blank was filled in with many different things:

• Play the piano daily
• Write a novel
• Get off of caffeine
• (conversely) Become a real coffee snob
• Eat right
• Work daily in the yard to take care of the overgrown areas
• Volunteer for [ONE OF MULTIPLE GROUPS]
• Travel
• Stay up late and become a night person
• Spend more time in deep, meaningful conversation with my wife
• Read a good book every day
• Sleep in as long as I wanted every day
• Enroll in college and take some classes...just for fun

Now, five months into retirement, it's become apparent to me that there are some things on that list that I really did want to do, and some things that I was just saying that I wanted to do. I have been playing the piano daily, but I'm no closer to volunteering for one of many organizations than I was when I was working. Even though I'm getting more sleep than I used to, I still get up early (It's pretty ingrained in me at this point), and I'm drinking as much caffeine as ever. And while I had fantasies about travelling the country, so far the only place I've gone is to Bowling Green, Kentucky and back a few times to see my older daughter at Western Kentucky University, and to Frankfort to see my brothers and sisters. Lisa and I had talked about going on an extended, two or three week vacation this month when the museum closed for the season (Oh, we're back living at the museum, which is another change that's occurred over the last five years), but I sat down one day and worked out an itinerary that took us all over the country, and when I thought about the hours of back ache in a car and nights in a hotel and all of the touristy things we'd do, I almost got sick. 

So I can thank retirement for making a little clearer to me the differences between the things that I want to do and the things that I want to want to do. 

I'm Back!

So it's been five and a half years, but I'm starting this thing back up again. Why now? Because I plan--over the next six months or so--to write a novel, and I want to begin each morning writing. However, I wake up a little rusty in my head each morning, so I'm going to use this blog as a way of scraping off that rust. Or at least, waiting for the coffee to kick in.

That said, I can't imagine that much of what I write here is going to be worth reading. I'm not aiming NEARLY that high. And I HOPE that I don't write very long entries. I'm mostly looking at this blog the same way that a professional athlete looks at the stretches and the warm ups that he or she does before the athletic contest actually begins. With that in mind, if you received this blog post in your email this morning, that means that you're one of the few people who subscribed to this blog 5 1/2 or more years ago. You may want to UNsubscribe. That is, unless you WANT to see something as uninteresting as this each morning.

I won't write every day (I don't think), and I won't post these blog posts to Facebook every day, though I might occasionally if I think I'm saying something interesting. So those are the ground rules.

And that's all I plan to write today.