If Arnie Sold Cars

I hate it when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up in my dreams. He's always trying to sell something. Last night it was the world's fastest car. It looked like an extra wide Ferrari that stretched to a ten foot wide disk as it reached speeds of around 600 miles per hour. It was actually a great deal and could travel from Paris to Moscow in 2 hours; Timbuktu to Cairo in 30 minutes; and Baghdad to Istanbul in 25 minutes.

I was on the verge of buying the thing since I happened to have a suitcase full of gold bars when I realized that this could mean the end to warfare as we know it and the beginning of something far worse. How could anyone be stopped when they are speeding down the highway in a blur of dust and smoke? An entire army could invade on these land-based supersonic sports cars.

I turned to the California governor and said, "No Mr. Schwarzenegger, I can't buy this right now. I must find a safe place away from these cars. They could speed into my favorite city and drop off a battalion of uniformed hitmen before anyone could say boo."

"But they are hybrid cars," he said to me in his recognizable accent. But his salesman days were over.

The only reasonable thing to do during a dream like that is to buy a remote island and hope that I'm forgotten. It turned out to be a lovely island on the Mediterranean. The fear of the super cars dissolved into a cute little memory as I dug my feet into the Italian sands and waited for the end of the world. A world now so far away...especially now that it would again take hours upon hours or even days to travel to the farthest reaches of the Earth. But that was okay with me. Maybe the best progress occurs when we slow down.

This is probably a sign that I am still not ready to get a driver's license.