Suckatomato (Sacramento), the Capital of California has now, according to several national magazines and newspapers, been cited as one of the worst (if not the worst) cities in America for what are euphemistically called ‘bad drivers.’ My own experiences on our roads and local highways verify this dubious distinction.

This morning at 8AM, a beautiful, clear and sunny Saturday, I decided to take my much-loved Porsche out of its protective bunker (read: garage) for its weekly ‘freshen-up’ drive of about 10 miles or so. Since we’re only two blocks from a major interstate (Highway I-5), it’s an easy accession, and usually there’s little traffic to hassle with on early weekend mornings.

Normally, I do this on Sundays, since I figure that from 8 AM to about 10AM, the only people on that highway are a small handful of interstate trucks and a few sporadic church-goers (who tend to not be risk-takers on the road and generally drive at reasonable speeds, being in no hurry to meet God yet). Since I also observe speed-limits (within reason) and am an extremely careful and alert driver (no matter what I’m driving), such drives in my little vintage Porsche are usually quite pacific and enjoyable. The whole purpose of such jaunts is, of course, to keep the engine, tranny and mechanicals fresh and problem-free. Automobiles, like most machines, are not fond of sitting idly around and not being exercised...ditto for us Homo saps who need to keep our bodies and muscles conditioned and in a good state of physical fitness to remain healthy.

At such optimal times, the other major ‘problem motorists’ (distracted drivers, kids bombing around joyriding, and stoners from the ‘other’ side of town) are usually still all in bed, shaking off Friday night hangovers and not yet high on ETOH or Mary-Jane or whatever their drug of choice is.

In short, perfect Porsche conditions for someone who just wants to put a few miles on his ‘baby’ at reasonably sane highway speeds (read: 75 in a 70 MPH Max zone) that won’t needlessly attract the local California Highway Patrol’s latest class of CHP Academy graduates (now that the ‘defund police’ movement has lost much of its steam, they are again out in force on our highways, hereabouts).

Well, it was a beautiful morning, as I said. Ambient air temp was about 55-60 F, no wind, calm, clear and sunny and the 10-mile run on I-5 was delightfully unremarkable, incident-wise. I could concentrate on the pure joy of piloting my nimble and responsive little German road machine the way it seems to enjoy being driven most...with driver mystically merging with machine and the two of us becoming one single and fully attuned bio-symbiotic mechanical entity.

Ask anyone who operates a high-performance aircraft or car and they will all confirm that at such moments, pleasure and proprioceptic enjoyment are maximal. You need only to allocate only a small percentage of your sensory awareness to fending off motorized dimbulbs, drugged-out or drunk motorists, and the totally clueless who couldn’t avoid a brick wall coming at them if their lives depended upon it. The remaining part of your brain is free to merge mind-heart and soul with your mechanical horse and then it's all ‘ride’em cowboy...’

The 10 miles of my usual road-course thus were spent in this heightened state of mechanical euphoria, so when I hit the highway off ramp at the end of my run, I felt so bloody elated that I decided to drive up to the neighborhood coffee house I frequent (‘VENUS’...yeah, I know...it’s a weird name, but it’s run by the female members of a local family that operates other coffee joints in this festering cesshole of a state capital), park in a protected spot and have my usual cappuccino.

I also wanted to get a croissant for my grrrryl, since we finished this AM’s early walk without stopping to fulfill that contractual stipulation in her ‘family pup contract’ (about the croissant: it’s at the bottom of that hypothetical document, in teeny-tiny small print that would make any eagle-eyed lawyer mess his shorts with purest legalese joy).

After pulling up into the ‘sweet spot’ parking space directly in front of VENUS that shields me on the right-side from door bashers, I undid my 4-point, race-type restraints, removed my driving gloves and Ray-Bans, and ostentatiously (as befitting a Porsche owner) exited the car with the elan of Steve McQueen exiting Porsche 917 #20 at LeMans.

It was then that I noticed seated at an outdoor table directly in front of VENUS were a younger man (Caucasian, in his mid-30s) and a very nice looking, younger Japanese-American woman (similar age); they had watched me pull up and were beaming broadly, signaling non-verbally that they approved of my bright yellow little Porsche at first sight. Naturally, this recognition gave me a warm, cozy glow, knowing that at least someone else appreciated what a gorgeous little machine I had! [Porsche people’s egos tend to swell up enormously at such rare moments, just like certain parts of the male anatomy.)

Eric (that was his name) and his friend had a little black male pup with them named Norbert, so I stopped to pet the little guy and we three chatted for a few minutes before I went in. Turns out Eric has a Volkswagen Vanagon, so we were obviously muy simpático concerning automobiles and briefly talked over mutual VW/Porsche “intersectional” commonalities.

I finally entered VENUS and got my croissant and the capp. When I came out (they have only a single barista and they were still ‘breaking her in’, so the lines was slooooow), they had left, so I sat down at their vacated table (right in front of my Porsche) and sucked caffeine for a while, before getting back in ‘Jezibel’ (my Porsche's name) and driving the several blocks back home, still enjoying a mellow post-drive mood.

As I pulled up our street from the nearby avenue feeder our residential lane adjoins, I continued down the street to our house, which is about 2/3rds of the way along it, on the left.

As ALWAYS, I was driving slowly (about 10 MPH) and carefully watching out for others pulling out onto the street or making sudden moves. I was about 100 feet from our driveway when very suddenly some idiot in a late model sedan obliviously backed up onto the street, directly to my right, from where his car had been hidden from my view by another car.

It all happened so fast that even had I been ‘guarding’ my brake pedal, I would have been unable to a safely avoid this completely clueless idiot (a woman, I think)...had she not recognised at the very last split second that, “Hello! There’s a car on the street directly behind me! PERHAPS I should stop!”

As close-calls go, it was indeed a squeaker! When her car came to a complete stop she was approximately an inch away from bashing in my whole right side, and frankly in that split-second I fully expected my beautiful Jezibel to sustain horrifically damaging injuries. In that split-second interval between her stopping and my panic-stricken reactive awareness, I distinctly recall having an overpowering urge to commit homicide on that luckless person. It flashed through my brain likely at about .2 tenths of a second, since that’s how long such lightning bolts of pending disaster typically take to register on the human brain (subsequent traumatic pain takes a bit longer to process).

Well, I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow description of how I felt or how I might moiderate (sic) and dismember such a colossal idiot, but suffice it to say when I finally completed the remaining, short 90-yard stretch to our garage, I was literally shaking with suppressed anger. I was also very much feeling the surge of caffeine-induced hyper-adrenalin that my cappuccino contributed to this adrenergic moment.

When I finally pulled into the garage and unharnessed myself, I got out, still seething. Across the street was my neighbor whom I have previously written about, “Outdoor Bob”, who has a perverse and  unnatural relationship with his 200 BHP, gasoline-powered leaf-blower (he typically blows imaginary leaves and dust off not just his own front lawn, but from those of his adjacent neighbors on exceptionally gusty days when the wind is in the vicinity of 30-40 mph).

Since I hadn’t had a chance to moiderate (sic) any suitable culprits after this very near-miss, I walked over to Outdoor Bob and related the near catastrophe Jezibel and I had just miraculously managed to avoid.

I must have come scross the way a local Suckatomato schizophrenic would because he immediately tried to calm me down so that I was a bit more coherent and less rattled.

That was the catalyst that provoked an ensuing 20 minutes of conversation about such things as luck, fate, divine providence, Christian theology and what have you, since Bob, as it tuns out, has suffered some very personal circumstances involving family and close friends, concerning what many would say are ‘acts of God.’

For Bob’s encounters with the vast unknown, we have many names for but little understanding of (despite the best efforts of over 2000 years of Christian teaching) such things; several he related include moments which can best be described as manifestations of what Christians call ‘the Holy Spirit’ or the departure of the human soul at the time of death.

On the day his elderly mother passed away, Bob shared with me an experience he had had at the moment of her demise. He said he had been standing in the street in front of their home about 25 yards from the front bedroom where his mother lay terminally ill, when he felt a strange sensation as if someone had lightly touched his shoulder for the briefest of moments.

Almost concurrent with that sensation, he both felt and heard a cacophonous sound best described as a “Whoosh!” It was so sudden and so powerful that it almost felt like an explosion, but in that same split-second of comprehension, he both felt and heard a tremendous blast of air, as if something had shot right by him like a bullet or large projectile. To say he was dumbfounded is understating things, as he related it all to me.

His involuntary reaction to the whoosh had been to reflexively duck his head, since it was the same sort of powerful sensation one would likely feel if a bomb dropped out of the sky, a mere nanosecond from impact.

Bob was quite shaken by this, of course, but when he mentioned this bizarre experience to a friend, later the same day, the friend in all seriousness told him that that he had been witness to a manifestation of The Holy Spirit...specifically “God” sending down some force or “heavenly messenger” to bear his mother’s soul off to wherever good people go when they die.

Now Bob is nolrmally about as rational and logical as they come, but was also brought up in the Roman Catholic Church as a child, so he interprets this incident as evidence that there is a Supreme Being (or Force), which we do not fully understand, hence most interprete as proof of the existence of “Heaven” and some higher “Heavenly purpose.”

Bob swears on his mother’s departed soul that this is all a true incident (as I have related) and despite Bob’s questionably obsessive fixations on his monster gardening implements (the leaf blower in particular), which may be dismissed as a minor point to the contrary, he is otherwise as rational 'normal' as anyone could possibly hope to be.

Bob went on to share a few more incidents of this type that have occurred to either him or members of his family and again, he swears by Blessed Saint Brigit’s emerald-hued knickers that they are absolutely factual.

Frankly, I tend to accept them at face value, since any other explanation such as nearly being hit on the head by a falling chunk of urine ejected from an airliner, or being whooshed by the near-miss of a largish meteorite, would have at least left some sort of tangible physical evidence to disprove the ‘Act of God’ theory. Bob does not, as I have already said, have a habit of exaggerating things either, so my coming over to off-load on him about ‘Jezibel’s’ miraculous escape in dodging a collision bullet this AM merely provided him with an opportunity to augment my own speculations by sharing a few of his own experiences.

I relate all this now to you, who are my audience of the moment, due to the fact that it has also made me ‘revisit’ the occurrence of my Porsche’s near catastrophe, this morning, and speculate on things like “dumb luck”, “fate”, “Kismet”, “Divine Providence” and other imponderably enigmatic speculations that simply cannot be explained away simply and rationally.

It’s almost enough to make me, a long-time “non-believer” in Divine entities, Gods and such, want to be a bit more egalitarian in my personal theology (or lack of it) but as many are aware, ours is a world that relies heavily on descriptive sensory interpretations that do not in the slightest help explain stimuli that may exceed our limited sensory abilities to perceive things, experientially.

Regardless of the title of actor Michael Caine’s famous 1966 movie, “What’s it all about, Alfie?”, there seem to be absolutely no logical explanations for circumstances and events of the sort described above. And as someone who typically won’t settle for anything less than a rational, empirical proof for things, I’ll likely be mulling all this over in both my conscious and subconscious mind for several weeks, hence. Complete with the usual ‘eyes-wide-open’ wakeups at 2:30 in the wee hours of the night, that defy an effortless return to Chronos’s somnolent realm of unconsciousness.

Similar imponderable perplexities like these described here have caused confirmed atheists like Christopher Hitchens to embrace the Christian faith on their deathbeds, oh ye of little faith!

And now, please excuse me. I need to rush right out to purchase a Saint Christopher's Medal for my Jezibel before we hit the road again! (What? Do I hear a whisper of faint laughter coming from the peanut gallery...!?).