labor day weekend bookends

friday morning i was riding my motorcycle into work up 59. i was going over the speed limit (as usual) but i slowed down because i saw a motorcycle cop getting on from the feeder. he got on then sped up, so i followed behind him. up ahead, i then saw an ambulance with its lights on. right before the 610 exit, a car or two got between me and the cop and ambulance. then suddenly traffic stopped. fast. i had been in the fast lane so i moved over one while coming to a stop. that’s when i noticed a wrecked car — a green cavalier, i think — right in the middle of the freeway. it was still smoking. then i noticed the ambulance smoking its tires as it slid over against the divider wall. “huh,” i thought, “did the ambulance miss the wreck?” then i noticed a tire rolling down the freeway. it was the ambulance’s right front tire. evidently the ambulance and the green car were in a wreck right at that moment. the motorcycle cop had stopped and started directing traffic. the cavalier was facing back toward traffic and its front end was totally crushed…it was hard to even believe a motor could have been in there before. as i drove by, there were parts all over the road. but the driver of the car was getting out and appeared unharmed. a few hundred yards down the road, the ambulance’s front tire was in the middle lane.
last night i was on highway 6 at the light between westheimer and richmond, headed south. i was about 10 minutes from home. the light turned green and people started moving. i heard tires squealing to my left and i saw a car fly by in the center turn lane. it got past the intersection then whipped back into the regular lanes…right into all of the cars that were in front of me. it hit one, two, three cars…at least…and then came to a stop. it sat there for 5 or 10 seconds, then took off down 6. i started to follow it to try and get the license plate, but there were multiple disabled cars in front of me and by the time i got through them he was gone. i turned around and went back, where people were pulling their cars into a circuit city parking lot. fortunately, no one was seriously injured at all. about 10 minutes later a black chrysler came up and said they’d followed the guy and got his plate, then he’d stopped and they’d confronted him because he almost hit their car. when we heard sirens, the guy wrote down the plate and gave it to someone and said “sorry guys, i gotta go, i got warrants.” the ambulance and the wreckers showed up pretty fast, but the police didn’t show up for like 2 hours. the wreck happened around 10:30pm and i didn’t get home until 2am.