cul-de-sac

I live on a cul-de-sac in a suburb and as we suburban residents know, cul-de-sacs are valued because they don't go anywhere except to the houses that are on them, so they're not supposed to have random traffic - strangers driving through at all hours, for example. Only the people who live on them have any business being on them, except for people who visit them, so you generally have a good peaceful experience and your kids can go ride their bikes on them, for example, without you worrying about somebody coming along too fast not watching where they're going.

But the last couple of nights we've had this problem on our cul-de-sac - dozens of waymos have come and lined up on our street in the middle of the night. I didn't even know what a waymo was, but I looked out my window a couple of times in the middle of the night, and there they were, little white cars, apparently self-driving, lined up out there, running but not going anywhere. What the heck? Why would they all come to our cul-de-sac and just get stuck in the middle of the night? This happened a couple of nights in a row and pretty soon I was beginning to worry that it was a problem. What if I wanted to go somewhere and the street was all clogged with these little white cars? I didn't know quite what to do.

I'm a writer and I do my best thinking in the middle of the night, around two or three a.m., and if I'm in the middle of something I sometimes come out into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee so I can keep going a couple more hours on whatever I'm doing. So I was out there in the kitchen this one night and I look out the window and there they are, a half-dozen waymos, little white cars, all lined up in the street outside our house, with one of them almost directly in my line of sight like he's just hovering in front of our house. And none of them was going anywhere, they were all stuck, just hovering. For some reason I got mad, like we were all being stalked or something. I should have been able to reason my way out of it. They were driverless, it's not like any one of them had any intent whatsoever. The company just made some kind of mistake and they all ended up down here, I'm sure somebody somewhere could fix this mistake. In fact I'd mentioned it to a neighbor yesterday and he said he was going to call in and see if they couldn't fix it, but obviously if he'd called, they hadn't fixed it and here they were again, the following night, six or seven of them, all lined up, clogging the street, not going anywhere, making me feel like they were stalking me and breaking my train of thought, keeping me from finishing my novel.

My coffee was done so I put my half-and-half in it and prepared to go back to writing, but now I couldn't write because I was too steamed up about these stalking waymos out on our cul-de-sac. So I went and grabbed a hammer. One side of me was going to just take that hammer and do some damage to one of the waymos that was directly outside of our house. Now I'm not actually a violent guy so it's possible I just wanted to brandish it and threaten it, and hope that maybe they'd get the idea and just get out of there. What would be the point of actually smashing it? As I was walking out there I was thinking, this is actually a little absurd, having a violent confrontation with a waymo, but that's what was about to happen, and I'm stumbling out of my house in my pajamas at three in the morning, with my coffee in one hand and my hammer in the other, and walking right up to the waymo that's directly outside of my house. Maybe I should just offer it the cup of coffee, I thought to myself, and spare it the damage that I would cause by smashing it. And I also thought, if I got a big enough swing on the hammer, I would spill the coffee, and that would be bad too, what would be the point of that? But the hammer was there because I was mad. What was he doing stalking me at three in the morning? I wanted him to know this was completely inappropriate.

I got out there and got directly in front of the driver's side window, and sure enough, it was driverless. There wasn't a soul in the car. It was just a car, and it was running, and it wasn't going anywhere. All of a sudden I felt some kind of sympathy for it. It didn't know why it was here, what it was doing, who I was, what was going to happen. It was like we were both in the same space at the same time, totally confused, on a street that didn't go anywhere, wide awake in the middle of the night. I decided not to smash it in with the hammer, but I didn't offer it any coffee either. I figured I'd just drink that coffee myself, and I did, although I didn't do any more writing that night.

They had another bizarre problem with those waymos in our city: they kept driving into floods. We had a lot of rain in the following days, and there were places where anyone with any sense would just turn around and go the other way. It seems to me that was something my parents taught me: if you don't know how deep the water is, don't try to go through it. But the waymos had no clue about that and would drive straight into the water, even at this one place where the water was carrying them away. It was tragic and I wondered if that one waymo, that I was acquainted with, was one of the ones that had done that. There was no way of knowing, and besides, it was just a car, there was no use mourning its death even if that was true. But I often mourned the death of my own cars, which somehow I thought always did have a soul and which were loyal to me personally. When they died or got totaled in an accident I kind of wished them well in the next life, whether that life would be as a streetlight or some other inanimate object. If these things have any awareness at all, they should know better than to come down and stalk me in my cul-de-sac in the middle of the night. And if they don't know, somebody should teach them.