I believe I can fly

The car in front of me has a bumper sticker which looks approx­im­ately like this:

to which my imme­di­ate, almost reflex­ive response is:

Once I recover my breath, dab at the moist corners of my eyes with a hanky and cry “Mercy!” a few times, I real­ise that the lights are green. We roll for­ward a few metres and they change again.

“Para­chut­ing,” I mut­ter admir­ingly, and allow myself a brief visit to a far-off stage, where a super­model is present­ing me with the award for Put-Down of the Century.

“Cer­tainly, it’s a bit early,” she is say­ing, “but with ninety-five years to go we just couldn’t ima­gine any­one top­ping this.” With a demur little get-out-of-here wave, I step forward.

“Never,” con­tin­ues the super­model, wav­ing the little statuette expans­ively just bey­ond my reach, “has such pithy cruelty been achieved so quickly from such a pos­i­tion of safety,” she raves. I pause. The audi­ence is begin­ning to look edgy. I reach for the statue, think­ing to retrieve the situ­ation with a short, mag­nan­im­ous speech on the sub­ject of the respons­ible use of wit.

The super­model, how­ever, can’t be stopped. “I mean, think about it,” she enthuses, to a now silent room. “Someone out there has toiled to make that bumper sticker, choos­ing the exact words that inspired this driver to make it his small mes­sage of hope to the world, and then pow! Pul­ver­ised in a second by the acid Lar­kin wit.”

People are leav­ing now. “Listen,” I try to say, “can I just—”

But the band begin to play me off, a big blar­ing brass sec­tion made up entirely of car horns.

The light is green again. I quickly change lanes, so at the next red light the sticker car and I are side by side. I roll down my window.

“Nice sticker,” I call out. The young man in sunglasses turns his head very slightly towards me, his face blank. “Your bumper sticker,” I say weakly, sud­denly wish­ing I hadn’t done this. “It’s really nice. Really.” I point to his rear bumper as an aid to com­pre­hen­sion. He looks over his shoulder, then back at me. The lights go green. He pulls away. I force out a jolly two-thumbs up, then drive on in a cold sweat. I may be humi­li­ated, I think, but my con­science is clear.

I pass him again a few streets later. He gives me the finger.