Traffic, Death.

It's no secret that traffic deaths are quite common in the United States. Whether it be brutal head on collisions with assorted creatures/other vehicles, or your average 10-car pileup. Americans sure do love meeting their grisly end out on the open road. And thanks to recent technological developments, it seems as though folks across this country's clogged highways will be dropping dead in record numbers.

Now I know what you're thinking. "I saw a special on the news, um about exhaust, and they uh said that, like our, uh lungs-." Stop. Yes. I saw it too. It was informative and alarming. I am without question 93% more terrified of exhaust than I ever have been in my life. But it won't be the exhaust. Not right now anyway. You must be thinking "road rage!” or maybe "that dickhead in the Audi doing 78 in the breakdown lane!” and your thinking would be wrong again and again. For there is another hidden demon out there that none of you have considered and It's waiting to kill you, your significant other, and your daughter/son/pet, perhaps all at once or one by one. Depending on its mood of course.

That killer is a killer amongst killers. It is a murderous marauder of mayhem. That killer is the plague we so playfully refer to as; mass ritual suicide.

What? No. I haven't seen the music video for Everybody Hurts in at least five years. I promise. Just give me a minute to explain.

A few years back Apple Computers blessed the world with a device known as the I Pod. It's promise, to store hours and hours of digital music in the palm of your hand. It's effect? Single handedly ruining the art of the DJ and rendering many things in the physical world useless, insulting, and offensive.

What the hell does this have to do with traffic? Fair question.

Not long after the I Pod became a societal staple another invention started to gain momentum; Satellite radio. At this point Satan, the lord of darkness, enemy of mankind, and all around bringer of not so rad times, decided there was money to be made. Hence he and a few wily developers pushed to the forefront an older piece of technology that was once reserved for three pirate radio nerds locked in a Delaware basement. I am referring to the FM transmitter.

Now FM transmitters have been around forever, but their quality in times past generally ran the gambit from "useless piece of shit" to "I think I can hear the bass". However, with the rise of the I Pod and Satellite radio came a massive demand from scores of tech savvy suburbanites for a new way to get an external audio source to play through their car stereo (that didn't involve wires, which generally are considered to be very 1998). So hundreds of developers in turn flooded the market with these new, ultra portable, sleek transmitters that actually worked... most of them anyway.

Which brings us to mass suicide.

Picture the next time you're locked in an endless stretch of congestion. Rising heat, choking exhaust, demonic children screaming from mini-van to mini-van. For most people that would be enough, I'm convinced of this as I've almost come close to seppuku several times while wasting away in traffic, and I'm pretty sane.

And if I had to bet, I'd say on an average day you'd porbably more than likely than me to waltz on down to Jonestown guzzling Berryblast and Strychnine all the while.

Picture the heat, the exhaust, and the demon children but now ALSO throw in some asshole blasting Toby Keith from his H2. Imagine him yelling "yeehaw" and "fuck the middle east" every fourteen seconds while slapping the side of his truck with childlike glee. That sounds pretty bad doesn't it? I'll bet you're just itching for that industrial sized bottle of Tylenol PM in your glove compartment, but it's not over. Oh no. Because to top it all off that low number FM station that you love (you know, the one with a weak but still audible signal, maybe NPR?) has now been violently overthrown by the red state ramblings of your friend in the Hummer's custom I Pod play list and his shit-eating FM transmitter.

And at that point, you and maybe three or four hundred other motorists across the country will undoubtedly say "I had a good run, but to hell with this."