My Musings

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Thursday, August 07, 2003

Insight #2

In the first Insight, I wrote that the Insight entries are an insight into what kind of a person I am. However, after thinking about it I have decided that it’s not quite true. The incidents described are isolated events that do not really reflect my personality as a whole. Think of them more as failures on my part to hide the cold, cruel depths of my otherwise warm and friendly heart—a glimpse into my rarely showcased evil side.

I needed to get to Jeffrey Mansion to see if I could get a meningitis shot, so as today’s story begins I was driving north on Drexel. The Bexley residents among you will know why I chose to drive on Drexel and not some other street; for the rest of you, I will explain that Drexel has a 35 miles an hour speed limit, as opposed to the painfully slow 25 miles an hour limit present on every other north-south street in Bexley. Drexel has such a high limit because it is also the only north-south street wide enough to accommodate cars parked on each side and two cars moving in opposite directions simultaneously; the other streets are all so narrow that if there are cars parked on both sides (which there usually are) and two cars are trying to go different ways, one of them has to move over somehow to let the other pass.

So anyway, I was driving north and up ahead I saw this black SUV backing out of a driveway on the left side of the street. It wanted to go north also, which would require a backwards left turn across both the south- and northbound lanes—a slow and therefore very dangerous maneuver when done on such a busy street. Fortunately, I was far enough away that the SUV could do this. Unfortunately, some other car that was going south at the moment was not. What the SUV failed to realize when it started backing out was that if continued to do so, the southbound car would slam very expertly into its passenger side. The southbound car, on the other hand, grasped the state of affairs quite quickly and quite well, and was greatly disturbed by them, so it honked. The jarring sound froze the SUV in its tracks in the middle of the southbound lane, at which point the southbound car veered crazily around it. Had I been a hundred or so feet farther up the street, I would have been hit.

Fortunately, I was not. Unfortunately, by the time this whole episode was over—which, let me hasten to add, could not have been anything more than something like a second, and not the six or so hours it took for me, in my intolerably slow way, to explain it to you—I completely forgot how I was going to finish the sentence. But the point is, the incident with the southbound car delayed the SUV, enough so that by the time it had passed, I was already too far up the street for the SUV to complete his maneuver. Safely, anyway. It wasn’t too bad, though, because there weren’t any more cars going south, and there weren’t any cars behind me, so the SUV could just wait until I passed, and then gaily finish his maneuver. But he continued to back out. He was almost in my lane. I wanted to honk, but I always feel weird honking at people, like it’s taboo or something, so I try to avoid doing it unless it becomes absolutely necessary. And in this case, I decided that it wasn’t. I didn’t want to be mean, I had plenty of room to move around him, and by this point, how could he not see me bearing down on him?

Well, I don’t know, but somehow, he couldn’t, and so the SUV continued to back into my lane. Now, I’m making this sound really ominous and bad, like there’s about to be a horrible accident here, but it wasn’t so. With a deft twist of the steering wheel, I glided right so as not to bite off a piece of the SUV’s bumper, passed him, and then repositioned myself in the middle of the lane. Once again, this was all in the space of a couple seconds. No harm done! The poor fella was probably just tired and not paying attention. Hey, happens to all of us. No big deal, right? But something strange had happened.

The SUV had honked at me.

Yes—he honked at me! While I was going out of my way to safely pass his stupid ass! That ungrateful fucker! Backing out into the street like he owns the whole damn world, almost gets hit, doesn’t learn his lesson, continues to back out, almost gets hit again, and you know what? I was willing to let it go! But then HE…has the GALL…to honk at ME??! When the near-accident was clearly HIS fault because he’s a stupid, dumbass, spineless, worthless, BLIND piece of shit??

Excuse me. As you can see, I was rather unsettled. But, once again, I was perfectly content to let things be and drive on, to let my anger dwindle away and run its natural course, and wait until the SUV and I (hopefully) parted ways forever at Broad Street. HOWEVER, another strange thing happened. As I glanced nervously into my rearview mirror to check up on the SUV, I noticed that the bastard had not only finally finished his maneuver and going north, but that he was in fact tailgating me. Tailgating! Now, I admit, there was this one time, a long time ago, when I was driving down Drexel with other people in the car—Julie and Lila, or Lila and Marina, I forget who exactly, but something along those general lines—and I didn’t know that the speed limit was 35. I thought it was 25, so I was going a hair above 30, thinking that I was pushing it and should slow down, when in fact I was already five miles under the speed limit and thus going infuriatingly slowly, so everybody in the car got mean all of a sudden and started yelling at me viciously to speed up, and they hurt my feelings, and then, for long afterwards, and to this very day, probably for the rest of my life also, they laughed and made fun of me about it.

But I swear, the first thing I did when I saw the SUV tailgating me was check my speedometer, and let me tell you, I was going a very healthy 35, just like the signs said I should. Okay, so maybe it was possible for me to go a bit faster, but 35 isn’t exactly a snail’s pace, and the SUV didn’t have the right to tailgate me about it, especially after considering that it WAS the SPEED LIMIT, and especially not after almost crashing into me, and certainly not after honking unfairly at me! And you know what? That really set me off. I got pissed. So what I did was, I slowed down, and went 30 on purpose. A nice, calm, cool, lazy 30, when the speed limit was 35. When the guy behind me was in a hurry. And mad at me. Boy did he tailgate me then! But I kept going 30, just to piss the living shit out of that stupid bitch. Being absurdly mean to some stranger like that—it felt really good. Thus we crawled until Broad Street, where I had to turn left and the SUV didn’t, and I never saw him again.

Granted, the phrase “and I never saw him again” isn’t terribly powerful in this instance because the whole thing only happened about two and a half hours ago and we both probably have many years ahead of us during which our paths may cross, but whatever. For now I have the last laugh.

.: posted by Boris 3:47 PM

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