Increasingly, I've been spinning round and round as if I'm stuck on a wheel and can't get off, trapped by a lack of clear direction and weighed down by a sense I'll be there with no end in sight.
And just to be clear, this is not a mid-life crisis. Chronologically, I'd only be eligible for one of those if I planned to live to be 120, so if there is much specificity to the constraints, I wouldn't qualify.
Actually, I was just trying to get some ice cream. So, at the end of the day, this isn't an existential crisis. It is about rotaries. Or maybe roundabouts? or traffic circles? I get the impressions the names all mean something a little different, but for Northwest Arkansas drivers, they all mean about the same thing -- going round and round. I'll just all them rotaries for simplicity.
I'm not sure I like rotaries. I'm not sure I dislike them, either. It's just that I really don't understand them. In a very non-existential way.
In and of itself, that's not a bad thing. Not being an expert in these sorts of things means I don't have to have answers. I just get to have complaints. Which seems totally fair to me.
On the list of complaints I might have about our roads, one I can't have is that we're not trying. I mean, there are so many things we're doing with roads these days in an attempt to make up for the fact that we've outgrown most of them.
We (and by "we" I mean highway crews and actual construction people; the other "we" just get to pay for it) have spent lots of years and lots of money widening the interstate to six lanes only to discover it really needed to be eight, with service roads and better ramps. Didn't get to play with that new toy long, did we?
So we're trying. Points for that. It's just that it seems we've landed on a bit of a default setting when it comes to traffic issues. When in doubt, just put in a rotary.
I know I've mentioned (which is a nice word for "whined about") rotaries before. And I was more than willing to determine that dead horse had been sufficiently beaten. But I happen to live in a part of Rogers where the powers that be have decided the "more" in "more is better" is more rotary.
Should have gone with cowbells. OK, that's an obscure reference to a Saturday Night Live skit. If you have to explain a joke ...
In fairness to rotaries (which probably don't take a lot of offense, anyway), they're not the oddest thing happening in my area. The powers that be have also decided to do some funky accordion stuff with the roads, widening and then narrowing them and then widening them again, all within the same block or so. If you can explain that, rotaries make perfect sense.
And they seem to be popping up all over. Which is odd but sort of fine, since when it comes to actual execution, the concept seems easy enough. Get in the rotary and keep tuning left. Sort of like NASCAR, except on a tighter track though with no actual reduction in speed.
The plentiful signs will tell you where to get out. That is, if you can slow down long enough to read the signs and sort through the directions, which is a little tough to do while, you know, driving.
Helps to have a navigator. Which I say knowing that's absolutely not true, mostly because, in my personal experience, the navigator is likely as confused as the driver without the benefit of having an actual functioning steering wheel. All of which can make for some interesting conversation.
And some of that conversation tends to run toward questioning the whole concept of throwing a bunch of cars into a circle and hoping centrifugal force works well enough to spin some of them out. Or on just exactly who thought of these originally and who approved them into being (apparently folks in Cape Cod in the early 1900s, so motorists have been confused for more than 100 years now. About rotaries, I mean).
Now in fairness, they do seem to work. And by that I mean motorists have figured them out well enough that most of us don't enter a rotary and start spinning around while screaming. At least not that much, and mostly to ourselves.
But in a sense rotaries are very much like a mid-life crisis: You aren't really sure what you're doing or why you're there. All you know is you don't understand it. And the only way out is to keep moving forward.