Chaotic Not Random

I hate turning left. It's embarrassing and degrading and I avoid it as much as possible. Whenever I approach an intersection and have to turn left, I experience crippling physical and emotional trauma. I start sweating and my scalp tingles and the hairs on my arms stand on end. I twitch and whimper involuntarily. I start to breathe in shallow gasps. My bowels loosen. If I have an erection, it goes limp for at least the rest of the afternoon.

Turning right is no problem. It's kind of fun, actually. You stop, you let a couple of cars go by, and you make the turn, blending into traffic nice and smooth, just like Mr. Strathman taught you in driver's ed. If you do it wrong, you'll die, so every time I successfully execute a right turn it's like I've cheated Death a little. Isn't that thrilling? Sometimes I picture the Grim Reaper all mad, banging his scythe on the ground and saying, "Ooooooo!" like Boss Hogg used to in The Dukes of Hazzard. "Oh ho, you thought you had me that time, didn't you G-Reap?" I say, grinning and bouncing up and down in my seat with my little willy standing up stiff and tall as if Daisy Duke was riding shotgun.

Turning left is different. It takes a long time. You sit and you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait for the traffic to clear, and cars stack up behind you, and then there's a gap in traffic that you think might be big enough, so you jig your car ahead a little, but then it becomes obvious that the gap is nowhere big enough to make it across so you slam on the brakes, and if you have a pretty girl in the car she says, "You could have made it," real snotty-like and bitchy-like and no-way-are-you-getting-in-my-pants-now-like, and so you're out in the middle of the intersection with a cement mixer idling off to the right, and you start thinking what if my engine stalls right here, and the light changes, and the cement mixer rolls over me and crushes my nonvital organs, and you see yourself writhing in agony and choking to death on your own blood while firemen try to extract you from the wreckage and one of them says, "I'm afraid this is going to hurt a bit, son," and he starts sawing your foot off at the ankle where it got pinned under the steering column, and you get distracted and miss the next gap, which was more than big enough to make the turn, and the people in the cars behind you honk and yell and make rude gestures and rev their engines in an intimidating fashion, and at that point maybe you just get out of your car and run away down the median and move to a different state and start calling yourself "Kilgore Trout."

I hate it when I'm waiting in a left turn lane and the green arrow comes on and the guy in front doesn't go right away. If you're first in line in the left turn lane, you have awesome powers and hence awesome responsibilities, like Spider-Man. Jesus put you there for a reason, man. He put you there so you could go immediately when that green arrow comes, even if there are kindergartners in the crosswalk. If you're second in line in the left-turn lane, Jesus put you there so you could tailgate the first guy all the way through the turn. Green arrows are a precious resource because they make turning left just as easy and fun as turning right. Some people say, "Oh, relax, there will be another green arrow." But how do they know? Maybe we'll run out of green arrows someday and won't those people feel stupid!

When I become President of Denver, I will make it so you can always go from Point A to Point 2 without turning left. Some people will say, "No, that's impossible," and I'll say, "People also used to think it was impossible to lift 15,000 pounds with just your mind," and then everyone will have to shut up because this one guy did that once, although I can't remember his name.