Another post from my New Years vacation experiences...
Driving from San Diego up to the Bay Area with Mom, with her driving the middle 200 miles (from the snowboarding mountain to dinner at
the Harris Ranch, halfway through the Central Valley), was illustrative. Mom drives pretty fast; not wimpy old lady by any means (thank god), but our attitudes towards other drivers are so different. She's far more forgiving of idiocy and incompetence, basically. When I'm driving and inevitably encounter some clueless asshole, I generally wish
DIAF upon them. I don't care how fast other people drive, but it drives me crazy when they're too slow in the fast lane, or they're inconsistent. If you're in the left (fast) lane, don't go 60, then 75, then 65. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. The latter, preferably.
The mastery of the cruise control feature in automobiles continues to vex most drivers, and the two times in recent years I've had some other driver get all road ragey and frantic were both when a car was ahead of me in the left lane, it suddenly dropped from about 75 to 55 (without breaking), I had to tailgate for a moment before passing their clueless ass and returning to my pre-evasion 75 or 80MPH. That happens a lot cause people just can not fucking pay attention to what they're doing on the road, but two times in memory it's been some crazy guy (of course male, of course 20ish) snapping out of his fugue state when I nearly ran into him from behind, or passed him on the right. Young men in motor vehicles are not known for their restraint or common sense (I was certainly included in that list at that age, though I just liked to go fast, not duel with others), so the two times of record there was much exhibition of short dick syndrome with return tailgating, high engine revving as they passed, middle finger displays, etc.
I think that behavior, like most such antics, are primarily born from shame. The guys realized they had failed in their vehicle operation, but since their fragile psyches didn't allow them to internalize that and learn from it, they had to project externally. It wasn't their fault that someone passed them after they dropped from fast to slow; it was the other driver's fault for making them look bad! Must rev engine! Pass him up! Redeem shrunken manhood! Thus is the fragile male ego maintained by those for whom it is most fragile.
In the most recent case, which occurred on the drive up to LA last week, it was an Hispanic guy in a PoS Nissan Maxima with mismatched doors who was bopping along at about 70, in the fast lane. Suddenly, as he rubbernecked something invisible to anyone else on the road, he was going 45. I was far enough behind him that I was able to merge right, zip by, and then merge back left in front of him without doing more than holding the cruise control lever up long enough to bleed off about 5 MPH (having to touch the brakes on the freeway, with light traffic, means you've failed). He was annoying and an idiot, but I would have quickly forgotten him if he hadn't snapped out of his moment of not driving and floored it once I was a quarter mile ahead of him. Overtaxed sewing machine engine revving furiously, he caught up and ran right beside me on the right for a few minutes. He'd pull ahead, as if it was an achievement to exceed 70MPH, then drop back a few lengths, before pulling ahead again. I just kept going 71 the whole time, which is how fast I'd been going before I passed him, and would happily have kept going behind him, if he hadn't lost his sauce for 15 seconds and forced me to maneuver around him. Which is how this all began in the first place.
Eventually he lost interest, or his beater's engine started to red line, and he dropped back to about 65 in the #2 lane, and was soon lost in the distance behind myself and the others setting the flow of traffic pace in the #1 lane. He might have been an even bigger dick about things, but perhaps the mom-aged woman in my passenger seat gave him some common sense. Whyever he didn't act up worse, I'm sure he finished his drive seething, still pissed at that asshole in the sports car who blew past him on the right and then cut in front of him, making him look bad. (To who? He was driving alone and I'm sure he knew no one else on the road around us.)
That was the most dramatic example, but there were (as there always are) plenty of other examples of car-borne idiocy during the 5 days I was riding with Mom, on the drive up here and then moving around the Bay Area. And in most cases, I had my usual reaction; bemused despair, tinged with loathing. But whenever I verbalized my dismay, at some SUV dropping to 40 on a vanishingly-slight corner on a freeway entrance ramp, with a sarcastic comment along the lines of, "Man, driving around corners is awful scary. You've got to turn the wheel and push down on the gas pedal at the same time!" Mom would usually offer something like, "So many people are so messed up and barely able to function in life. They've got money troubles or relationship troubles or screaming kids in the backseat, and they're paying about 1% of their attention to the road. It's amazing they can stay between the dotted lines at all."
This perspective stems from her years of work as a therapist, where she finds out first hand just how fucked up people are.
Humans don't compartmentalize that much. Some angry asshole old man might beat his wife and kids, but it's not like he wouldn't beat other people too. It's just that doing that to a stranger would result in police involvement, or quite possibly the beater becoming the beatee. That sort of guy probably doesn't consciously use his car as a weapon, but the same rage-from-insecurity that fuels his violence at home makes him liable to snap at any minor automotive incident. Not to mention that he's probably lost in thought and obsessed with the private hell he's turned his life into, and is therefore much more likely to be a bad driver in the first place. Other people have other issues, but quite a few of them in those hurtling, multi-ton vehicles around you on the road are paying closer attention to any number of things than their driving. From my mom's perspective, it's amazing there aren't more accidents and incidents on the road, since she knows first hand just how messed up lots of people are.
I can understand that, and emphasize if not sympathize, but I still want them to get the hell out of my way when they putter down a straight on-ramp at 40 and then (inevitably) inconvenience others as they struggle to merge into the 65 flow of traffic. Or drive 70 on the flat, 75 downhill, and 60 uphill since they can't be bothered to use the cruise control and they're too stupid/inattentive/distracted to vary their pressure on the gas pedal when gravity intrudes.
Mom's insights didn't change my feelings towards the perpetrators of these driving sins, but it did make me a little less likely to send mental DIAF wishes. Honestly, I don't want bad things to happen to them. Not even an inconveniencing flat tire as punishment for the annoyance they've inflicted on everyone else on the road. I want magic to happen. I want them to be better, more attentive drivers, and if not, at least to know their place... in the right (slow) lane. But since that's even less likely to happen than them DIAFing, and the later gives me more consolation as I contemplate it while trapped behind a white minivan or a Volvo or a Prius who finds the fast lane as much to their liking as they find the speed limit intimidating... I suspect I'll continue to resort to it in times of stress.
Labels: driving, psychology
