Coming soon · 288 pages · mostly true
Funny Ticket Excuses
Field notes from 300,412 miles of bad drivers, worse coffee, and the blue lights that show up in the mirror at exactly the moment you were feeling good about yourself.
- Miles logged
- 300,412
- States
- 9
- Warnings / tickets
- 4 / 5
Dell Marchetti
Funny
Ticket
Excuses
Notes from the right lane
Signage
Lines people keep
texting each other
-
The blue lights don’t make you slow down. They make you honest.
Chapter 1, page 4 -
Cruise control is a promise you make to yourself and break in Ohio.
Chapter 3, page 58 -
There are two kinds of drivers: the ones who wave, and the ones I write about.
Chapter 4, page 77 -
Nothing tests a marriage like a detour and one bar of signal.
Chapter 7, page 139 -
I’ve been pulled over in nine states. I’ve been forgiven in four.
Chapter 9, page 186 -
Mile 412 is where everybody in the car finally confesses something.
Chapter 11, page 224
“He asked if I knew why he stopped me.
I said I had a short list and a long list.”
page 61
The trooper walked up slow, the way they all do, like the walk itself is part of the paperwork. Behind him the light bar went blue, white, blue, and the whole shoulder of the highway turned into a nightclub nobody wanted to be in.
I had my hands at ten and two, which I had not done since driver’s education, and which fooled exactly no one.
“Any reason you were doing eighty-three?”
There were four reasons. Three of them were podcasts. I gave him the fourth, which was that Indiana had gone on longer than I’d planned for, and he wrote me up for eighty-three anyway, but he laughed first, and I have gotten worse deals for more money.
Weekly giveaway
What did you
tell them?
Everybody has one line they’ve used on the shoulder of a road at night, and everybody thinks theirs is the funniest one. Prove it.
- 01 Write down the excuse. Funniest one wins, but it has to be one you actually said.
- 02 One winner gets picked every Friday.
- 03 Winner gets a signed hardcover, shipped free.
Best ones may end up read aloud, in print, or in the paperback’s appendix. Names withheld on request — just say so in the excuse.
Filed
Statement received.
It’s in the pile with the rest of them. Winners are picked Friday and told by email — check the folder where good news goes to die.
Advance praise
People who read it
in one sitting
Read it at a truck stop in Effingham. The waitress asked what was so funny, so I read her page 61 out loud. She comped the pie.
Funnier than it has any business being for 200 pages, and then on page 201 it isn’t funny at all, and that’s the whole trick of the thing.
Marchetti writes about traffic the way other people write about weather: constantly, and with far too much feeling.
Still northbound
Funny Ticket Excuses
Dell’s still writing. When the book is actually for sale, this is where you’ll buy it. Not before.
Meanwhile: read page 61, or file the excuse you actually said. Chapter still titled “Roundabouts: A Failure of Nerve.”