Mad as hell dept.: the Basho of honk.(The Talk of the Town)(Aaron Naparstek)

Most New Yorkers, at some point or other, have been tempted to hurl semi-solid objects at automobiles operated by drivers who lean too heavily on the horn. A few days before Christmas, Aaron Naparstek had the urge. It was around noon. He was working at home, in a third-floor apartment in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, while outside, on Clinton Street, the cars were backed up and, as usual, honking away. This stretch of Clinton, one block south of Atlantic Avenue, is often jammed, owing to the timing of various traffic lights, so it tends to be one of the city's car-horn hot spots, right up there with Broome Street and Herald Square.

"I'd reached my limit," Naparstek, who is thirty-one and works as a Web-site producer, said last week. He recalled that one car in particular, "a shitty little blue sedan," was issuing forth a single, sustained honk. After at least a minute of this, Naparstek got up from his desk and calmly walked toward the kitchen, thinking, If he's still leaning on that horn when I get back, he's going to get it.

The honker was still leaning when Naparstek threw open his window. "I want windshield," Naparstek vowed, and hurled three eggs, in quick succession, down onto the blue sedan. The first hit the trunk, the second the roof, the third the windshield, just as the driver was getting out of the car. "He was a fireplug, balding, fortyish -- a Brooklyn man of indeterminate ethnicity," Naparstek said. "He went ballistic. He yelled up at me, 'I see where you live, motherfucker! I'm coming back tonight! I'm gonna kill you!' He kept saying this, over and over. 'I'm gonna kill you!' Then the other cars started blasting their horns at him.

"After he drove away," Naparstek went on, "I realized, I am insane now. I have become the honking, and the honking has become me. I cannot throw eggs. It is bad and wrong. But I can't just do nothing, either."

That night, to calm himself, he wrote about twenty haiku about honking, which he called "honku." He made fifty printouts of each, numbered them, and, in early January, ...