The Curse of 7 Gods

     I hate 1-way streets with a passion.  Mostly just American 1-way streets.  I admit that there must be some kind of logic to them.  That’s the end of my paragraph.

     So here’s the story, we moved to Baltimore.  I just arrived a few days ago and I was driving to and from our storage unit this afternoon.  I’ve done alright route-finding so far: not perfectly but I've never really gotten lost, just off by a street or two sometimes, and that’s easy to correct.  Nevertheless, I blew the dust off my phone’s GPS and set it up just to make sure I didn’t end up driving into no man’s land—Baltimore has its scarier parts, even by my standards.  And thus the adventure began.

      I should have realized from the beginning what I was getting myself into when the GPS told me to turn the wrong way down a 1-way street.  I simply adjusted and went to the next street and got right back on track.  The GPS then took a good 30 seconds to a minute to recalibrate itself—this is a long time when you’re on the road looking for a turn a couple blocks away from you.  This happened twice within a short distance from our temporary apartment.

     After the initial hang-ups I figured we were just fine, the GPS and me.  And we were until we got across town.  This time the I got directions to drive through a dead-end, over the sidewalk and hang a right at the fire hydrant about 20 feet in front of me.  I decided I should maybe stop instead.  Fortunately I was in the neighborhood of my future apartment—it’s a big pretzel-shaped series of roads that, despite the fact that they all seem to intersect, you can’t actually turn onto any of them.  In other words, all the roads are 1-way and lead to the center of the pretzel where traffic has been stopped since the dawn of man.  Once you drive through a few times, it’s not so bad.  By the time I got out of there and onto a better route, the GPS had just recalibrated again.  Really.

     At this point I just decided to bag it and work through Google Maps on my phone.  No incidents after that but I also didn’t have the bonus of the sexy, robotic female voice of undetermined age, ethnicity, accent or emotional state.  I say no incident but I mean no incident related to Google Maps or my phone.  On my way back home I couldn’t find the mini-highway that takes me to my neighborhood.  I knew the name of the street that I wanted (the mini-highway), plus the name of a couple optional streets in case I couldn’t find the one I really wanted.  I found none of them.  Better yet, I found myself in a right-hand lane that disappeared into a curb (literally), fought my way into the center lane (literally. Ok, maybe not really fought), and went straight through the light.  Had there been any kind of signage I would have just run over the curb and slammed into a building because I found myself going down a 1-way street the wrong way.

     This brings me back to my original statement: I hate 1-way streets with a passion.  I might have liked them a little more had I even seen a sign.  I don’t much like the placement of “do not enter” signs in America either—half underneath a tree, 30 yards (not meters) before the intersection, or turned to face the other side of the street even though they're all bloody 1-way streets in the first place going my direction of traffic.  To not belabor the point further than what I’ve been doing since the beginning of this post, I was on the 1-way street going the wrong way.  Fortunately, the local loiterers shouted directions to me from halfway down the block (“you son of a ******, it’s a 1-way ****** street!”).  This gracious act helped me quickly identify my problem.  Having only received the curse of upwards of a half-dozen deities that I’d never heard of before, I ducked into the next street I could find where a woman was staring at me open-mouthed, unable to finish opening her car door, so dumb-stricken she was (note the somewhat archaic syntax and morphology of that last Inflectional Phrase) at seeing what I had done.

     I let out a good belly-laugh and a har-har-har as I came around the next corner and before allowing myself to feel guilty and upset at the whole scene, as per my sensitive nature.  The belly laugh was the funnest part.