Is it necessary to honk all the fucking time?

For those of you who are not familiar with where I live, it is a neighborhood called Takoma and it is up towards the north end of the diamond. Bubba and I live right next to the Metro which is quite nice and I can walk to the farmers market and Co-op which is great. Add in a liquor store across the street and I'm as happy as a clam.

Well I was happy until Spring hit and now everyone is out and about. And apparently unable to drive 100 feet without honking. There goes one right now.

Honking whilst in the wacky intersection outside my house is only part of the problem. That, at least, is traffic related. But just like the litter that is ubiquitous in the neighborhood as then weather warms, so are the noxious sound waves emanating from car horns.

My absolute favorite is when some big ass land yacht is sailing around the neighborhood above the speed limit and they honk at every intersection to let people know that they are not stopping and others need to get out of the way. Judging from the people who are driving, they are not late for anything of consequence, rather they are just asserting their dominance through the car and its horn. Just delightful.

My second favorite is "call and return". Baby Mama sees one of her peeps driving around. One honks and screams (very loudly) something that sounds like "Hey" with 20 syllables. The other honks back and yells something unintelligible. They then scream at each other for 1-2 minutes (still in their car) and do another honk call and return goodbye.

My third favorite is the pimp's beep. This is always a twofer. The first sin is the double parking when there are open spots all around - but why go through the bother of parking? Just park your piece of shit in the right of way and scowl at anyone who comes by. Then there is the inevitable honk to indicate to the rider (the person being picked up) that the driver has arrived and is waiting. Walking to the door is FAR too much work. If the rider is not down in under a minute, this will turn into a long series of honks interwoven with unintelligible obscenities. There are almost always children around or in the driver's car. Thus the adults are passing down the behavior through the generations. Just ducky.

The least offensive is the quick staccato "Hi" honk. This is a quick toot when you see one of your peeps on the street. This application of the horn sounds much like the cardinal - almost a quick chirp followed by a hand waving outside the window. I could do without this, but, as honking goes, this is only borderline offensive.

I only bring this up because honking has really gotten out of control up here in Takoma. It is incessant and utterly unnecessary. Even when I owned a car, the horn was used only for a very rare case of effect. Delicate Flower and I had a honking incident on Wisconsin when we were headed up to Whitetail for our ski afternoon. But then again, I have thought of the horn, much like nearly all TV, as noise pollution and try not to inflict it on others.