Thought of the Day 03.23.10

You know how when you’re driving you can sometimes just sense that the other driver is about to do something stupid and dangerous? I think it comes from just driving for so many hours and seeing things hundreds of times. Well, every so often when this happens, I have a rather disturbing response. In that brief interval between idiocy suspected and idiocy manifested, I have just enough time to imagine what it might be like to just let him cause the crash…you know, since honking a horn doesn’t really seem to have much educational effect.

Now obviously I always yield to the fool in the other car rather than to the maniacal fool inside my head. But why do I even think this way? Well, today I finally figured it out. On the road, I basically feel like I’m in a really unhealthy relationship with an abusive partner. And after years of unacceptable treatment by the aggregate entity who goes by the name, “the other driver,” I sometimes just want to deck him for endangering me and my family.

Rationally I know that this particular fool isn’t the same person as all the other fools, but in never knowing any of them personally, I think my brain just tends to think of them as one single rude, selfish, disobedient, unskilled punk who only apologizes for himself about one in a hundred times. And so I kind of want to blame this guy for all the actions of all the other guys combined.