I don’t really know precisely what it means when you see those letters and numbers written in the top corner of a car’s back window in some sort of magic marker, but I think it means the car or the window itself is a salvage sort of situation. Which is to say that either the car or the window or both came from a junk yard.

I was considering this when the car bearing these strange markings viciously cut me off. It was a red late 90′s era Jetta. I hit my brakes, thankful to have recently installed front and rear brakes on my fixed gear around-town bike.

“Whoa!” I yelled, not having a horn, then “Asshole!”

The windows were open, thankfully. I like for drivers to hear me yelling at them when they do something fucked up. It makes me feel like I am contributing to their improved road worthiness going forward.

The tint applied to the window with the markings obscured the occupants, but not the finger flipped at me by a passenger in the back seat with longish curly hair. The finger was a dark, defiant shadow in sharp relief against the sunny roadway seen through the car.

And it was a finger that didn’t care if I died.

Obama has certainly energized a lot of people, and he’s got a command of charisma and the ability to reach out to people. He’s really amazing to watch.

He comes to us at a time when people are annoyed with the old guard and ready for change. He has the right message, the potential for groundbreaking history as our first black president and he even comes with a pro-muslim America feeling. He’s ridiculously perfect.

It’s too bad he’s still not going to win.

That’s right, I said it. Barack Obama will not win the presidential election in November 2008. I am so sure of this that I am willing to bet $100 USD on McCain. I tried to bet on some overseas betting websites but apparently they can’t accept US credit cards, so I’m hosed on that front.

I hope Obama does win, personally. He seems like a much groovier dude than McCain, for sure, and that counts for something. We can all agree that it counts for something even though we all know it absolutely shouldn’t.

Which reminds me of how we all know we were lied to to get us into a war in Iraq and no one seems to be held accountable in the slightest. No one at all is being held accountable for lying in the face of America and sending our sons and daughters to die in the sand. No one. Even though we all know who did it.

The only thing that’s happening is the guys who were involved enough to know what happened but not involved enough to be legally culpable are churning out book after book after book on the subject. If you watch the Daily Show, as I do, you’ve seen a parade of them.

Here is the climate of our times, folks. Something is horribly broken and I just do not believe that anyone inside the system can fix it.

But if it’s so broken, why not change?

Because change costs money. It hurts the people who are on top and they do not like to be hurt… least of all in their pocketbooks. I’m not saying that there’s a shrouded evil conspiracy at work. I think it’s all completely legal and above board. I just don’t think there’s going to be any change like the kind Obama is selling any time soon and it’s going to be depressing when I’m right.

Which is why I’d like to at least have an extra $100 from winning a bet on the subject.

So… any takers?