Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Road Rage


Source
Yesterday I had the pleasure of driving 733 miles from Park City, UT, to my home in Oceanside, CA. Many of you were on the road with me and some of you really pissed me off. If I were six inches taller I’d drag you from your pickup truck and whack you in the head with the wrist brace protecting my arthritic right hand. I don’t know what candy store issued your drivers license but some of you need a little refresher course on the rules of the road.

Rule 1: If there’s a lane to your right and no one is in it, guess what? You're in the wrong lane; move over.
Rule 2: If there’s a lane to your right and everyone in it is moving faster than you, guess what? You're in the wrong lane; move over.
Rule 3: If you’re in the left hand lane and there’s a long line of cars in front of you and the vehicle spacing is already half of what it should be, tilt your head down and take look at your speedometer. Read it. See where the needle is pointing, guess what? That’s the speed limit. It doesn’t matter if I’m doing 40 or 80 mph. It doesn’t matter how far up my butt you try to drive your car. I can’t go any faster and I’m not shifting into the slow lane just because you feel entitled to an empty roadway. We all want to go faster but we can’t because we’re sharing the road with half the population of the U.S. Southwest.
Rule 4: If you're on a two-lane Interstate Highway and you see everyone ahead of you moving into the lefthand lane to pass a slow moving truck, guess what? That’s not an invitation for you to be a dickhead and sprint up the now temporarily vacant righthand lane and then try to cut me off before you rear-end a semi. You’re are going to cause an accident. Your little stunt just forces everyone else to jam on their brakes, making the entire lefthand lane surge like a slinky. If I'm in the right position I’m going to don my fire hat, too, and box your dumb ass in behind that truck. Then if you do manage to slip in behind me, I’m not passing that triple tractor trailer until you pop an aneurysm. 
Rule 5: If you violate any of rules one through four, look in your rearview mirror; no that’s not an official American Sign Language hand gesture, and yes I am screaming at you but you can’t hear me. Kellie can hear me and now she’s pissed at me because you’re a dumb ass and I have to yell at you and wake up her dog which is really her fault anyway because she’s the one who has to take so many damn vacations and it was her idea to drive all the way home in a single day despite my objections but it’s your stupidity combined with the 48 ounces of coffee I’ve had to drink since 6 p.m. to stay awake and drive for 12 hours after only 4 hours of sleep on a rock hard mattress that has really amped up my road rage to the point where I want whack you with my good hand but I can’t because like I already said I’m at least six inches shorter than you unless you’re a girl in which case I’m only an inch shorter than you but I don’t hit girls and now that I’m home it still feels like I’m moving after sitting behind the wheel for so damn long and my CVS blood pressure monitor is telling me that if I don’t calm down soon I’ll be the one with a ruptured aneurysm.
I know people drink coffee to counteract too much wine, so I wonder if wine counteracts too much coffee.  Let’s try it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dude Write
And thanks to the dudes at Dude Write for awarding me the Chairman's Choice Award. I'm not sure it's a good idea to reward bad behavior.




Dude Write
I also picked up Color Commentator recognition for a few remarks I left on The Minivan Puppet Show.

Dude Write


16 comments:

  1. Dude, that is a shoe in post for the next Dude Write! Where did shoe in come from? Anyway, that is a perfect depiction of road rage!

    ReplyDelete
  2. #5 was the longest damn run-on ranting sentence I have ever read in my life and it has boggled my mind to the point of exploosion in which my brains splatter all over the computer screen as I'm typing and my wife doesn't appreciate having to clean up the bloody mess because we are out of cleaner and it's forcing her to scrub repeatedly to the point where here heart explodes on top of the mess left by my brain and now there is double the mess all because of your never ending sentence that rants on the stupidity of drivers we all are forced to deal with every day and we all know how stupid drivers can be when they lack common courtesy or don't know how to follow the rules of the road or how they think getting to their destination is much more important than anybody else and they cause accidents because of the dumb shit and I can bet you that these are the same people you would find texting and driving while they are drinking and smoking pot and putting on makeup or shaving while they try to sing along with the loud music that prevents them from hearing any sirens from approaching emergency vehicles that are heading to the scene of an accident in which they caused!

    Whew!!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I thought I had responded to this but apparently it didn't go through. Glitchy blogger!

      I'm not saying I didn't like your run on rant. I actually enjoyed it! I think I was more like imagining it being said all in one breath and was like WOW!

      Delete
    2. The sorry wasn't an apology for my run on rant, I was apologizing for making your brain explode and creating such a mess for your wife. To avoid another ugly mess, I just responded with as few words as possible.

      Delete
  3. I seriously laughed out loud- "...I want whack you with my good hand but I can’t because like I already said I’m at least six inches shorter than you unless you’re girl in which case I’m only an inch shorter than you..."

    ReplyDelete
  4. I think you need a new mode of mode of transport. Have you tried paragliding?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Joe, I can't tell you how many times I've been in that same situation driving from Austin to Dallas (and back). It's mostly a 2 lane drive with a shit-ton (that's an actual certified measurement from the International Bureau of Weights and Measures) of semi-trucks and butt-load (also official) of selfish and clueless drivers.

    You nailed this one Joe!

    Michael A. Walker
    Defying Procrastination

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm actually quite familiar with anal units of measurement. As a teenager I worked for a brick mason who would yell down from his perch on the scaffolding that he needed a butt-load of bricks up there. When asked how many bricks there were in butt-load, he replied, "Two shit-loads." You might also be interested to know that four butt-loads equals one butt-ton. It makes you wonder how we ever came up with such an asinine system of measurement. My guess is that our prehistoric dude ancestors had much less varied diets and produced much more uniform excrement, providing a very convenient scale for measuring things. I would explain liquid measures but I don't want to get gross.

      Delete
  6. Geat stuff Joe. Sorry the commute was stressful. Did you bring any "are we there yets" I mean children? Those that will learn the "rules" and "signals" of the road from dad?

    I try to when possible drive at night. The truckers are quite friendly.

    WG

    ReplyDelete
  7. I hear you, I drove home (Indiana) from Virginia once and I made better time in the right lane because everybody else who was driving slower were all in the left lane. And I'm not exaggerating, I rarely even had to move into the left lane to pass someone in the right lane but I passed hundreds of cars in the right lane.

    I think they need to add your rules to the warning label on visors.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thanks for venting this morning for me. Now I can drive away from my driveway with my blood pressure nice and low. Foe a while....

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hehe, add another 4 hours, and that's my drive whenever I go to see my kids (starting from East Idaho).

    Next time you're on the road, make a swear jar for the trip. A quarter every time you curse. My record on that 900 mile trek is $28.75.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I think I need to turn this URL into a bumper sticker and put it on the back of my car.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I had a similar experience not long ago with some young jarheads who were on their way back to Pendleton. Had my kids not been in the car colorful and salty language would have been rolled out with reckless abandon.

    Some drivers are just peachy.

    ReplyDelete