the optional white line

I know that it's cliche to complain about this, but it seems only fair to mention that New Jersey drivers are unlike anything I have ever experienced before.

Ever. Even in New York.

I kid you not.

Did you know the dotted white lines dividing the lanes in freeways are there for suggestion only? That the yellow lines that theoretically divide This Way lanes from That Way lanes are optional? And so are lights? That intersections are experiments in particle physics? And that if you don't take a corner at 40 miles an hour, you aren't living?

Bizarrely, these people do not use the horn. Ever. I've heard more angry drivers outside Kindergartens. Little ghost suicidals, zipping along the cocaine tracks of New Jersey roads ... I think they survive by accident, like doped up fruit flies.

Doped up little fruit flies, mainlining pomellos. Bizarrely, I think being such bad drivers makes them good drivers; their own faults are so bad, they grow to expect them in other people, and compensate accordingly. On Sunday I had to swerve across five lanes of freeway in under ten feet in order to get to my hotel. Not a single horn. Not a single screech of brakes. Not a single accident.

Man, New Jersey drivers. It boggles the mind.