I know I seem to be either obsessed with traffic or myself, but a guy’s gotta have his priorities. Today I’m traffic alert boy.

My wife just called me. She is, as I write this entry, at a dead standstill in traffic on a feeder road to State Route 400.

She’s been there since about 7:30. It’s 8:30.

According to this article in the AJC (registration required.) some dude took a header off an overpass and is the cause of all this joy.

Atlanta has, in the past year, suffered from a virtual plague of jumpers. First there was the terribly sad instance of the dude who committed suicide after spending the day atop a crane in Buckhead. Then there were, in the space of a few weeks, two different jumpers around the downtown connector who held up traffic for unending hours. I know people who were trapped in those jams so long they switched off their vehicles and chatted up folks around them.

Apparently in amazing jams like that a strange sense of community develops briefly among those waiting for the jam to clear. People get out and get dates, kids play games, others stride up and down the lines of cars trying to find out what the hell is going on.

As I was writing this entry the snag on 400 began to clear, but it was worth noting. What’s a week in Atlanta without a dead body mysteriously clogging up a major thoroughfare? Too bad Keith Kalland passed away, and we won’t hear about the “ubiquitous dead body in the road…”