Words for My Enjoyment

To Join The Family of Dots

September 4th, 2005

It’s not that I don’t love my own family. It’s just that the Family of Dots has just really got it goin’ on.

In this History of this country there have been extremely rich families who have profited from ingenious products or smart business decisions. There was William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper maven who built his small ideas into a huge empire. There was the Rockefeller family, who made billions from oil. There was the Ford family, a true car family if there ever was one. Today, there are many who make much from a variety of items, but the most intriguing is the Family of Dots.

You know the dots I’m speaking of? You drive through them, over them and past them every day. They line the lanes of the highway, they reflect light in the nighttime hours so you can find your way — they are the family responsible for inventing highway reflector dots and they are WAY loaded.

I always imagine their house when I’ve got a few moments to day dream.

A tour through the front door takes you immediately to their Hall of Fame room — it highlights all the big discoveries and huge inventions they’ve made over the years. There’s the framed “Candy Dot Reflector” — modeled after the very first lemon candy dot and turned into a plastic yellow highway dot. There was no reflection going on then — just the start of a very lucrative business. But as you go through the room you can see all the other amazing discoveries. The reflecting dot, the unbreakable reflecting dot, the square reflecting dot for parking garage purposes. Everywhere you look, there’s more dots and more money.

They’ve even got dots affixed to the floors of their mansion, denoting which side of the hallway you should be walking on if you’re heading from the first floor to the second, to go to the bathroom.

Dinners are always quite fun. Although the conversation always invariably turns to “dots.” There’s talk about the newest in technologies — dots filled with a liquid substance that glows in the dark, dots that (upon being run over) shoot out tire-piercing spikes that punish you for backing up over dots you shouldn’t have been backing up over and dots that are currently in the lab — ready for their own star-studded premiere in the near future.

There’s also the battles between the families of dots.

Don’t think there’s just one family making a mint off the production of highway dots. There’s a few families out there making millions and desperate to make MORE if they could only figure out a way to displace their nemesai (plural for nemesis, FYI). The dot mavens spend much time over the course of their days trying to figure out a way to becoming the ONLY dot family in the world.

I drive over dots a lot (i.e., I drive by braile) which makes me think I could possibly succeed in this world. But of course, the key to getting in the world is to finding a back door. Sure, I could always wine and dine the family of dot’s young superstar debutante (she’s like Paris Hilton but a little less concerned with being in the public eye and a little more concerned with the public dye — a public organization who decides on the dye color of the highway dots)… Or I could invent a new kind of highway dot (the kind that shouts out a “hey what’s up BLUE BMW” as you drive by, making the highway driving experience much more entertaining) and push my way into the family. Some say that, just like the mob, you’ve got to knock off (or hurt) one of the other family’s members in order to be welcomed inside.

The Family of Dots is a tough racket to get into.

Sure, I could tell you their names and where they live and the size of their mansions and the names of their children and the websites that outline their newest technologies — but then I’d be putting myself back. I’d be sabotaging my own potential success within the family. I’d be pulling back the curtain on a family that most never think about, never wonder about and know nothing about.

Which, I guess I sort of just did.

Posted under Cars, Stream of Consciousness. | 10 Comments »