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2. Traffic lights.

Back in L.A., traffic lights were the bane of my existence (well, at least they rotated elevated status with other banes). They were at the end of every single block, and not only turned red without fail just as I approached; they stayed red for what felt like centuries. They often turned a 2-mile drive into a 45-minute affair. This is why no one in Los Angeles can answer the oft-asked tourist question, "How many miles is it to (fill in the blank)?" It's a cliché that we all answer in minutes or hours. Distances in miles mean nothing in L.A., and the longer you live there, the more feeble you become at gauging actual distances, as they have no bearing upon reality. Minutes are reality. Hours are reality. Miles, like age, are just a number.

So when I learned that our new little mountain town was free of traffic lights, a palpable thrill shot through me. No more eternal damnation delays spent staring at a little red ball, hoping that the agitated meth-head driving the $200,000 Mercedes in the adjoining lane hadn't done enough of the stuff to actually whip out his .22 and blow the signal light housing, and me, to bits. Road rage is not an abstract concept down there. Assuming that each and every car on the road is concealing something handheld and made of metal that can instantly reduce you to compost is just part of daily life. Calgary was rapidly reaching that point, too.

Ahhh... the glorious countryside. Surely there could be no disadvantages to the lack of these bits of roadside punctuation, these occasional periods and semi-colons that encourage you to slow down, rest, pause, reflect and gather your thoughts before resuming the vehicular chapter of your journey. Or could there?

As you may have gathered from the first post, there's not much to do in Christina Lake. What I didn't come right out and mention is that there are far more bars per capita than grocery stores or restaurants in these here parts. And bars mean drunk rednecks at any time of day or night. It is precisely these drivers that require the very periods, commas and the rest of their ilk that comprised the very flesh of rotational bane-dom back in my days in the city. Run-on sentences in the form of endless stretches of highway can be a dangerous thing behind the wheel of an unemployed local who has spent his day mainlining cans of cheap, domestic beer, lamenting the wretched state of his life and then weaving his way home to promptly beat the hell out of the little woman.

The RCMP have enough on their plates trying to keep track of all the grow-ops. Who has the time to tail every beat-up pickup with a gun rack doing ice-skating maneuvers on the highway?

Here's another sobering thought: There's a distinct lack of public transportation (hitchhiking doesn't count) in this neck of the woods. Buses, taxis and subways come in handy when it's 2 a.m. and dozens of bloodshot, bobbing and weaving silhouettes are skulking around the bar's dimly lit parking lot trying to discern between their car keys and the dusty, unused pack of condoms they've been carrying around in earnest for the past 10 years. Really, people like this need to live in a big city. They can hail a taxi after peeling themselves off the barstool and then hit the red light district to put the Trojans to use.

Don't drink and drive, folks. This has been a public service announcement from your friends at Wild Thing.