License Plate Enlightenment
Lately, I've been enjoying a select few license plates seen on my longish daily commute. I enjoy it when some other human is clever enough to come up with a license plate that wakes me up, makes me notice it, snapping me out of my driving-induced-zombie-state where I navigating the thoroughfares on auto-pilot , lost in thoughts of day's troubles. (Come on, you know we all do it!) A few months ago, on a particularly moody mentally murky afternoon, one such license plate made me burst out laughing and drew me out my thoughts right smack into the present moment. I was not expecting to look at the car in from of me, and read "WTFLOL" . My reaction to the license plate perfectly mirrored the sentiment of the license plate. I can't say whether it was pretentious or precious, but I had a deep appreciation for it just the same. I saw another such license plate this morning. A giant Chevy Tahoe with a license plate that boasted "RAPINE". I'm not sure if it was professing a favorite hobby, or more likely slapping on a apropos label in a self-deprecating attempt to placate the owner's conscious by acknowledging his or her truck's gas consumption rates and the effect that our lust for oil has wrecked at home and abroad. I admired the driver's honesty, most people wouldn't attempt such a thing. I suppose it could have been the result of a randomly assigned string of letters and numbers, which would have made it nicely ironic, but I am highly doubtful of that. I think it was more likely to be a direct result of human thought. It's nice that people are still doing that these days!