Thursday, January 15, 2004

Not Road Rage, Stupid Rage

I don't have many attacks of road rage, but there are times when rage just doesn't describe what I want to get out of the car and do to someone. That's why I don't carry a gun. My brother has a concealed weapons permit and he carries a 9mm semi-automatic in a fanny pack. I don't know what he thinks he's going to do with it but I know that if I carried one around in the car, there would be a lot of driverless vehicles on I-15 and I would be languishing in prison. That said, let me repeat that I'm usually pretty patient on the road. It's just that self-defense/self-preservation mechanism that kicks in when someone does something so absolutely stupid and threatens my life. There I was, minding my own business, listening to Frank Herbert's Dune from the CD player, when this idiotic woman in her early twenties, I'm guessing by the looks of her, decides she's waited long enough and that maybe now is the time for a little Russian Roulette. She turns right from the cross street onto the street I'm on. There's just one problem...I'm there right now. There's no room for two of us even if I do like to cuddle. The only thing I could do was drive into the other lane and into oncoming traffic. I stomped on the brakes, too, but that didn't do much more than make my tires screech in pain. She couldn't have been counting on the fact that I would slow down and let her in (even though she had no right of way) because she waited until I was directly in front of her. I never honk the horn so I couldn't find the little buttons on the steering wheel, or I would have laid on my horn until I was deaf, or she was. What's with those little buttons, anyway? When I want to sound the horn, I want to pound on it till it screams, not daintily press a little button: "Excuse me, but toot toot." As it was, my tires spoke for me. I need to check for bald spots. She didn't act startled. She just pulled over to the side doing her best not to look at me. I didn't stop. If you need a reason for this, I refer you to the beginning of this post where I was talking about guns. It wouldn't have been pretty.
Look lady, I already have arrhythmia. I don't need anyone giving my heart a reason to dance around any more than it already is.

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