Have you ever been in traffic at a stoplight, listening to your favorite Dave Matthews tune, and some idiot pulls next to you, windows down, huge booming bass thumping mightily from speakers surely containing some kind of mutant woofers and tweeters?

You sit there, Matthews shouted down to a whisper, your car shaking like a vibrating bed from one of those cheap hotels. A cluttered thought tries to emerge from your bruised brain.

You try to capture the thought, a will-o-wisp, floating gently out of reach.

Finally, through the din, the thought coalesces, and you take hold of it, and wonder....

....just wonder,

...if he really wants to hear the song better ....

Why doesn't he just put his damned windows up??!!!!!

On that note, we're going to have a little quiz today, and pick out the award winners for The Most Obnoxious Drivers awards.

Yayyyy!!!! (Clap, clap, clap!)

Now, if you recognize yourself in any of these, you live in a glass house. So what we (the rest of us) would like you to do, is to pick up a rock, ..... take careful aim, .... and whack yourself between your own eyes!

(Smack!)

Yaaayyyyy!!!!

(This is the applause from considerate people who are forced to share the same roads with you).

However, I doubt if any bad drivers would read anything I'd write. They're all out there reading their tickets, juggling their court dates and driving with their knees.

So, without any further adieu, here are the award categories for The Most Obnoxious Drivers:

Category One: Those drivers who flick cigarette butts out the window, rather than use the ashtray that comes installed in most cars, including the Yugo!

Category Two: People who don't wave to acknowledge the courtesy of someone who lets them in, at the risk of really pissing off everybody behind, more than half of whom are armed.

Category Three: People who pull off a side street in front of you, .... while you're doing the speed limit (okay, five to ten miles over the limit.) ...., forcing you to slam on your brakes ... and there's nobody in sight behind you ...., so they could have waited two seconds.... then, half a mile later, force you to brake again when they turn off.

Category Four: People, or sub-humans with thick eyebrows who part their hairy backs down the middle, who wait until the last second to merge, passing as many people as they can, rather than taking their turn in line behind people who earned the right to go first.

Category Five: Someone who races you for the merge, sprinting up to twenty miles over the speed limit. And you let him, thinking to yourself, "Fine, at least he won't hold me up." And when he gets in front, he slows down to under the speed limit!

Category Six: All those people who will not let you in, when you are in a parking lot, and trying to pull onto a busy street, next to a light, where cars are slowing down anyway, so what's the big deal because it's not going to make them lose more than two seconds of their lousy worthless lives anyway.

Time to vote: (Please bear with us as we count the special, butterfly ballots we got for a discount from the State of Florida.)

Okay, voting's over.

I'll bet you're excited. You can't wait.

And, I'll bet you're wondering what the lucky winner is going to win. We'll tell you in a minute while we count all seven votes.

And the winner is....... Drum roll ......... Drum roll continues ........ Now the drum roll starts getting quieter as the drummer realizes he will need to end the song ......... almost done .......drum, drum, drum.......

Whoa,

We have a surprise winner. A write-in winner. Wow!

The winner of the Most Obnoxious Driver award is....

The Inappropriate Polite Guy!

You know this guy. As you're pulling up to a light that has just turned green, and you count your blessings that the timing is perfect and you'll get there just as traffic surges forward again. Then, the guy in front of you suddenly brakes to let some guy coming from the opposite direction turn left into the nearby White Hen Pantry.

Unfortunately, this guy, knowing he shouldn't be going, doesn't notice the guy in front of you holding up everybody, because he's trying to remember what he's supposed to get since his wife added a fourth item to the things he's supposed to pick up and he forgot to make a list, so he hesitates. Then your guy realizes his error, and lurches forward, just as the convenience store guy decides he'd better go.

So they both go at once, and slam on their brakes in alarm, and they do this once or twice more, as your underwear begins to twist and bunch.

Finally, the turning guy bursts through, just as the traffic light makes a serious mood swing from green to yellow.

Then the polite guy shoots through the yellow, and you're left sitting at red.

Which matches the color of your face.

(Oh, the winner receives a year's supply of road-killed skunks, whipped at their heads like frisbees by gas mask-wearing good drivers.)