Fender Bender in Suburbia!

It's tough living on the mean streets of suburbia, Kansas.

Day in and day out, one never knows when you might get accosted by a terrifying, sociopathic gang of grey-haired mall-walkers. Or be attacked in one's home--one's own home!--by a siding salesman. Fear the crazed dog-walker who allows his dog to poop in your yard...and doesn't even pick it up! Beware the out-of-control street gangs, riding their bicycles, listening to their loud music, and wearing their hats sideways and pants hanging off their arses!

It's a jungle out there.

Life on the streets of Shawnee Mission, Kansas is hard, at its worst in grocery store parking lots where people jockey for close parking spots and compete for life-sustaining food.

Last Saturday, my wife and I'd just completed a food run. Packed up in the car and good to go, my wife started backing out of her spot. Some jackass in a truck behind her started backing out, too. My wife stopped, laid on the horn. The guy kept coming.

Bumph!

We get out. So does the vehicular would-be manslaughterer, a typically middle-aged sports fan with a beer gut tucked into a Kansas City Royals T-shirt. Very typical of the unsavory criminal element to be found in the scarier parts of suburban Kansas.

He takes a quick gander at the destruction, chuckles, says, "It was just a little bump."

In Kansas, you don't argue with people. Everyone--no matter how crazy--is allowed to carry an armory with them. All you gotta do is walk into Quik-Trip or buy bulk at Sam's Club or whatever.

Thankfully, our car appeared to be undamaged. The guy apologizes, jumps back into his big rig and takes off to perpetuate crime elsewhere before we even got a chance to exchange insurance info.

It's a big, ol' frightful world in the suburbs of Kansas, just like the Wild West all over again.

The absolute worst thing about our near-death experience? We had a witness. As my wife had laid on her horn, this woman walked toward us, watching the ensuing tragedy unfold.

Did she stop to help? Offer her witness testimony? 

Hell, no! She just laughed the whole way, shaking her head like she'd never enjoyed such hilarity, and kept on going. (The grocery store was having a big sale, after all.)

I kinda wanted to enlist the vehicular thug to run her over, but he'd already long vanished in a cloud of environmentally unsafe smoke.

All I'm saying is it's tough and scary on the well-manicured streets of suburban Kansas, absolute chaos, folks running around ignoring laws and especially, social niceties.

I'm off to Costco now to pick up a batch of guns.