Bathroom Monologue: Bumper Sticker Threat Level

0: Could have any range of opinions. How many 9/11 hijackers had bumper stickers? Could be a Philosophy professor, a soccer mom or an alcoholic who is about to back into your new car. Zero bumper stickers is the unannoying and unknowable zone.

1: One? This better be good. This better be the cleverest dig at Wal-Mart I’ve ever read. If it isn’t, why are you attracting my eyes to read when they otherwise could have been glazed over as I drove in a speed-limit fugue to the sweet tunes of the soft rock station? Just because it’s short doesn’t mean it wasn’t annoying while it lasted. Choose wisely.

2: Oh no. Maybe with 1 you were just really proud of your child going to college. At two bumper stickers, your bumper is yelling at me about something. The platform has expanded to denounce abortion and a president (who isn’t even in office anymore) at the same time. You will tell me nothing essential to my driving, nor anything that will change my mind about anything, but now you’re doing it in stereo. The slope is slippery from here.

3: The threshold at which the driver leaves merely seeming annoying and becomes decisively annoying. It does not matter if you want peace in the Middle East, are proud you work at a pet shelter and have a son in the seminary. If you’re advertising all three simultaneously, I resent you (possibly because those are never the three things your bumper stickers say). The owner of three bumper stickers crosses another threshold: I now give up hope of ever reasoning you out of anything, and conversations are incredibly likely to turn into debates when I’m not looking.

4: I can no longer hope to win the debate. By no means will I think I’ve lost, but the other person is so detached from anything that she doesn’t believe that the very nature of discourse is undermined by her having a driver’s license. At four stickers, I feel dread when even imagining talking to you about whatever your bumper advertises.

5: It was possible at three and likely at four, but now there is no way you have all those bumper stickers on your bumper. The back of your car has been colonized by the pithy and the trite. Even people who are bored behind you in traffic will not read all of your messages, nor should they. Look at that. At least one of them is faded and/or peeling. You’re not keeping up the maintenance of your messages anymore, just adding more to the pile. You are the textual equivalent of the white kid who rolls through my neighborhood with rap pulsating from his closed windows.

6 and Up: No one has ever seen a car with six bumper stickers. Five stickers is when people experience the “Wall of Text” effect and any hope of anything registering, even memory of how many stickers were on the back of the car, vanishes. Ninteen bumper stickers are the same as five in every way except that I will point at the nineteen-stickered vehicle so my family can laugh at it. Even then, no one in my car will read more than five of them.