Don’t tell anyone about this, or if you feel that you might have to, then please stop reading now. I don’t want to lose my license because of what I’m about to confess.

My driving skills have deteriorated significantly. It’s been a slow process, but the warning signs are clear. It all started with these bugs in my eyes. I forgot what the doctor called them – it was one of those medical words that no normal earthling can pronounce. Anyway, they are shadowy, amoeba-like things, two dimensional and translucent. They play this little game where, when I look left, they scramble back to the right and hide behind my right temple. I look right, and zip, there they go back left.

When I look up, they dive down and out of sight into my cheek bone, and when I look down, they shoot back up into my forehead. So very evasive, these slippery creatures.

What’s worse, they’ve been getting bolder, and they have recruited more of their ilk to taunt me. Sometimes I have visions of swarms of locusts darkening the sky – a very bad omen!

There are more signs of things going bad. Recently, while being rudely tailgated, I looked in the rearview mirror to behold something most frightening: A very ill-tempered young man was so close behind that I could see his face with perfect lucidity: he looked exactly like me!

Only from a long time ago when I was a whippersnapper and had a lot of hair! Whether or not it was real, I don’t know. But it sure scared the bejesus out of me.

Then there is the dilemma of four-way stop signs.

You know how when you arrive at the intersection almost the same time as someone else and you have to figure out who goes first? Well, I am rarely in a hurry these days, and to be polite I always defer to the other driver, waving him or her by. They usually wave back in appreciation, and that makes for a feel-good kind of moment. But lately I’ve been waving on more drivers after the first one – I sit there and wait for the next car so we can wave at each other and feel the warm friendliness. But all that gets ruined because the people behind me start beeping and making obscene gestures.

Backing up has become a daunting task. When I was younger, I could swivel my head rapidly 360 degrees, and there was no need to trust the confusing, inverted imagery of a rearview mirror. Now, the head only rotates like five minutes on a clock each way, and it makes a terrible creaking sound. What’s worse, the mirrors on my old truck are cracked and blurry, so the reverse thing is a very, very slow process. I wish it wasn’t true, but life is cruel sometimes. We can’t turn back time, yet we are obliged to back up our cars.

The worst of all is when I have to drive our new car. It has more knobs and buttons and switches than Rocketship 7. There’s a computer screen on the dashboard where all these cryptic messages keep popping up; sometimes there’s a message telling me to do something, and I have no idea what it’s talking about. I mean, it’s crazy when the screen tells you, in all caps, KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD when the reason my eyes are not on the road is because I’m trying to read the messages on the screen!

Again, I need to keep this a secret. The last thing I need is some cop with one of those two-foot long combination flashlight / spiked-maces pulling me over, then prying open my eyes to discover the pestilence inside my head. In my defense, I would claim that I’m very careful and never drive more than 20 miles per hour, but I don’t think they would buy it. So, mum’s the word!

Pete Howard, a musician, writer, teacher, and painter, lives in Dunkirk.