I wrote this at a time when I wanted to try out citations- not sure how it will work, but lets see.

Commute

               Adrian was dead, and he knew it.  He slid into his car as fast as he could, struggling with the seat belt that always locked up when he was in a hurry.[1]   Meanwhile, the watch on his wrist ticked away, counting the seconds with terminal efficiency.  Adrian was facing some dangerous mathematical facts.  The drive to work normally took forty two minutes, but now he had thirty four minutes before his boss chewed his face off. [2]Somehow, he had to make up for lost time.

                Pulling out of the parking lot, Adrian began to flip through his CD’s, looking for the perfect inspiration.[3]  He couldn’t break a land speed record listening to just any music.  The car swerved a bit, but the children who played in the street had good reflexes, so he didn’t hit anyone.[4]  More importantly, he found the CD he had been looking for, and slid it into the player. [5]

               Now that the more important tasks were taken care of, Adrian turned attention back to the task of driving.  Calculations began to scroll through his head, as he began to map the possible routes to the highway.    The neighborhood around his apartment was an impenetrable net of stop signs, traffic lights, crossing guards, and the occasional sign warning about slow children,[6] but he didn’t have time for any of that.    He needed to get out fast, so some unconventional driving[7] and creative interpretation of traffic lights was in order.[8]  If he timed things just right, Adrian would escape the suburbs in a little over ten minutes.  At least, that is what he calculated.  Three songs later, he realized he was wrong.

               Adrian’s demise was imminent.  Despite his best efforts[9], he had a little over twenty minutes separating him from certain death.  He waited at the last stoplight of the suburb, trapped in a staring contest with the evil red eye.  The light blinked first. He took his foot off the clutch in preparation for the jump to light speed, but was instantly thwarted.  [10] A car had pulled in front of him from a side street, and was being by the worst kind of person.  An OLD person.[11] An OLD person in an OLDSMOBILE[12]  The geezer was puttering up the on ramp, accelerating at an impressive rate for someone who had lived during Prohibition.  Thirty two miles per hour… thirty four… he was at pace to make forty miles per hours by the time he hit the freeway.  Adrian, due to his upbringing and his parent’s constant reminders to respect his elders, kept their bumpers a respectful three quarters of an inch apart.   He even wished the man a good day, in the blaring Morse code of a honking horn.

               Finally, they hit the highway,[13]and Adrian swerved around the stalwart octogenarian.[14] He let his foot hit the floor, and shot off like a shot.[15]  He tore past the OLD person in the OLDSMOBILE[16], the acceleration dragging him back in his seat.  His fingers turned white as they clung to the cheap, torn leather of the steering wheel, and the car rattled so much he could barely hear the radio wail.[17] The speedometer was edging towards the triple digits, and the world seemed to stream past in slow motion. For a moment it seemed that he might make it after all.   Then he hit the semis.[18]

               The two trucks were perfectly aligned, side by side, like the wad of cholesterol that causes a heart attack.  It was certainly going to kill him.  Adrian slowed down until he was in the shadow of the behemoths, and in the shadow he stayed.  In this dark moment,[19] he started thinking about survival strategies for coming into work late, but nothing seemed plausible.  Andrew was a monster, a bloated behemoth of anger and spittle, a troll thirsting for the blood of tardy employees. Excuses were useless, pleas were ignored.  Even a good swing with a tire iron would only make him angry.  Adrian glumly looked at the clock, and saw that his time was almost done.  No more than a dozen minutes separated him from certain doom.  He was going to die due to a tractor trailer blockade, and there was nothing he could do about it.  Or was there?[20]

               Inch by inch, the truck on the left began to pull ahead.  It moved at the pace of continental drift, or glacial shift, but finally a rift appeared, and Adrian shot through.  The foot on the gas pedal nearly kissed the floor, but it was doomed romance.  Once again, traffic had slowed to a crawl.  He tried to jockey for position, but the left lane was closed, and he was rapidly running out of room.  He cut off a van,[21] and dutifully slowed down just in time to see the flashing lights.  There was an accident on the left, and even in his dire straits, Adrian took the time to check for blood on the asphalt.[22]  Nothing.  Just a pitiful little fender bender.[23]  The clock said that he had little more than five minutes to live.

               Once he was clear, Adrian made one last bid for his life.  Foot and floor were reunited, and the car shot down the asphalt.  The car shook like a Chihuahua trapped in a room with a python, and his teeth rattled in his skull.  Zeppelin was skipping in the player, but he really didn’t care.  He hit the off ramp with two minutes to go.  The stop light sentinel at the ramp’s end tried to switch on him, but it was too slow.[24]  He didn’t dare look at the clock, so he focused on the road ahead.  He could see his destination in the distance.  He could make it.[25] He aggressively negotiated the turn into the parking lot, and pulled into a space.[26] He was out of the car before the engine died; sprinting across the parking lot like his life depended on it. [27] He walked through the door, and risked a quick glance at the clock.  One minute late…

               “ADRIAN!!!”

               Andrew loomed over him, and Adrian knew he was doomed.  [28]

---

[1] His car, a VW Jetta with a loose muffler, was just a tad passive aggressive.  It always needed some kind of repair, but never let Adrian know.  Instead, it would get back at him in a million little ways, hence the stuck seatbelt. 

[2] This may seem like an over exaggeration; it’s not.

[3] His knees took over the menial task of steering.

[4] Their ball, on the other hand…

[5] Take it away, Jimmy Page.

[6] Why parents would advertise this is a mystery. 

[7] Cutting through parking lots to avoid red lights

[8] It was a reddish yellow.

[9] Twenty three traffic violations and a shell shocked crossing guard

[10] Not so fast, Captain Solo.

[11] Probably still in his fifties.

[12] It really a Chrysler, but that is not important.

[13] It’s a miracle nothing hit them.

[14] Definitely still in his fifties.

[15] Redundant, I know, but how many words can be both a verb and a noun?

[16] Still a Chrysler

[17] And she’s buying a stairway…

[18] He didn’t really hit them.  It would be more accurate to say “he came upon the semis”, but that doesn’t quite have the same dramatic flair.

[19] Literally and figuratively.

[20] No, there wasn’t.

[21] He saw a pretty birdie in the rearview mirror

[22] Don’t be like that.  You do it too.

[23] There wasn’t even an ambulance.

[24] Once again, a decided reddish yellow

[25] No he couldn’t.

[26] Actually, it was straddling two spaces.

[27] It did.

[28] They never found the body… true story.