Once upon a time, in ( a galaxy far, far away) the distant past, I would be content to do a trip in five hours if Mapquest told me that the estimated driving time for that trip was four and a half hours. Those days are no more. They have disappeared. Gone poof, like a magician’s rabbit. These days, I set out on a trip with the express aim of beating Mapquest’s estimated time. And I usually do. Except when driving to Maryland from New Jersey. There I meet my bete noir, the Delaware Memorial Bridge

The Delaware Memorial Bridge hates me. Apparently it believes that I burnt down its farm and stole its sheep. Or maybe I stole its farm and burnt its sheep. You may think that this is an baseless anthropomorphization. If you do think so, hit yourself about the head and shoulders repeatedly. I have my reasons.

These then are my reasons. Tons of people, millions of them apparently, use the bridge to cross the Delaware. I know people who have used it on multiple occasions without any problems. I am not one of them. (It would be strange if at this point in the post I claimed to be one of them. There would be this lead up to the blood feud that I and the Bridge have and it would fizzle out with me saying, “But, I’ve never had a problem with that Bridge. That Bridge for all its faults has not pissed me off.” Anticlimactic!)

No, definitely not one of them. To our left we have the “Never had a problem with the Bridge” group. That group consists of most of humanity. To our right we have the “Hated by the Bridge” group. Me. Just me. All on my lonesome. Holding a sign saying, “I’ve been caught in a traffic jam whenever I’ve tried to cross that Bridge.”

And it’s true. A mile from the bridge everything is fine. Traffic flowing along at a steady clip, and the moment I get to the Bridge, traffic slows to a crawl. Three of the four lanes on the bridge will be shut down. And traffic volume multiplies just to fuck things up even more. And I’m sure that all that is a special production just for me. A few thousand cars and their android drivers stored away for them to spring on me at the right moment, and sensors to detect my arrival and shut the lanes of traffic down.

It is clear to me that the Bridge has a malevolent personality. It sits there twirling its mustache and evilly grinning at me as it plots to have me waste pointless eons crossing it at five miles an hour.

So yeah. I was late.