Guide to Road Rage.

Cars are custom made for screaming obscenities in private. First of all, they’re cars, so their operation involves interaction with other people in cars who are also running late and screaming obscenities. Second of all, they’re little soundproof cocoons, and even if other people can see that you’re screaming, “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”, at least they and their stupid children can’t hear it. Their stupid fucking children. Go to hell, you stupid fucking children! You hear me? I want you and your little OshKosh B’Goshes to burn in Hell for all eternity! I wish that on you! Fuckers! YOU DON’T KNOW HOW GOOD YOU HAVE IT! I WISH TO GOD ALL I HAD TO DO WAS CHILL OUT IN THE BACK OF A BRAND NEW VOLKSWAGEN ROUTAN AND WATCH “MADAGASCAR 2” WHILE MY ASSHOLE OF A MOM BLOCKS TWO LANES!!!! YOUR MOM IS AN ASSHOLE. READ MY LIPS, YOU LITTLE IDIOTS. YOUR MOM IS AN ASSHOLE. I’M THE ONE PERSON IN YOUR LIFE WHO WILL EVER TELL YOU THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS.

It’s tempting. I read somewhere that the car becomes your personal space when you’re in it, so that if somebody’s on your ass, it feels like they’re on your ass, when in fact they’re a good 12 feet from your actual ass. And you say “This guy’s on my ass!” Instead of the more factually correct, “This guy is driving his car more closely than I am comfortable with to my car’s ass, otherwise known as the rear bumper, since cars don’t have asses!”

I understand this phenomenon. I really do. On a scientific level, I understand what’s happening. More importantly, I know that driving a car is an often very inefficient way to get around in a city. I know about traffic. I know that any given road can only tolerate a certain amount of traffic volume before it turns into a parking lot.

Did you know that? That any given road can only tolerate a certain amount of traffic volume before it turns into a parking lot? People seem like they don’t know that sometimes. Often when they’re impatient due to the fact that the road they’re on is currently a parking lot due to heavy traffic volume. People scream, “Why don’t all these people just GO?!!?!” As if there is some sort of human deficiency preventing everybody from simultaneously arriving at their destination. They envision 6 million cars sliding into their parking spaces at once like some gigantic vehicular ballet, and are newly disappointed whenever this majestic and wondrous impossibility fails to occur. And they blame this scarcity of occurrence on, essentially, every other living person on the face of the Earth, because they know for a fact that they’re doing their individual part to glide effortlessly into their parking space.

But people don’t really mean it when they ask, “Why don’t all these people just GO??!?” It’s a rhetorical question. Try saying, “Because any given road can only tolerate a certain amount of traffic volume before it turns into a parking lot,” to a person who has just asked that rhetorical question, and you will soon find a pair of hands tightly wrapped around your neck. They didn’t ask this question because they want to know about the relatively simple physics of fluid mechanics, interesting though they may be. They are just disappointed at how slowly their lane is moving, and would rather yell a pointless question than set their own head on fire out of frustration.

I can’t tell if yelling things you don’t mean such as stupid questions about simple physics or eternal curses on innocent 4 year olds is a good impulse or a bad impulse. It’s good in that it allows you to express a little anger in a harmless verbal way rather than a not so harmless, “I’m just going to drive on the sidewalk, and if they take me to jail I’ll be glad. Either way, I refuse to explain myself to Paula again. She’ thinks she’s queen of the world just because she wakes up at 4:30 in order to get to this stupid job.” Whether you’re right about Paula or not (you’re right about Paula), it’s a bad idea to drive on the sidewalk. But yelling is also bad because it gives you permission to be as frustrated as you want to be. It’s like, “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckFUCK! That’s it. Just this once, I’m driving on the sidewalk.”

And then you also end up saying some things you can’t believe came out of your mouth. Even if you’re just screaming about the traffic in your soundproof bubble of a car, you shouldn’t say some things out loud. Some things are just bad thoughts. And the psychology of the car turning into you when you get inside means that speaking your thoughts seems just like thinking them. But it’s still a little worse.

I said some things I regret having spoken out loud this morning. I regret thinking them too, but I regret screaming them like a baby in a car even more, because that means I let those bad thoughts be real enough to send actual motor signals to the actual muscles of my diaphragm and larynx. And that makes me a little worse of a dude than I was when I got up this morning.

To be fair, I was pretty late to work this morning and I had to drive because I was finally picking up my girlfriend’s car that I wrecked, and I had to pay for it, and she wanted it today, and the only good time to get it was before work, and the place was of course out by the airport, and of course morning traffic from the airport is bad. Of course all of this. But I’ve also had some issues with the train, and been late a couple of times in the last month, and had to profusely apologize about it, and I just didn’t want to have to deal with it again.

Two things:

1. Boo hoo hoo me. Right? Boo hoo hoo. People are starving and a bunch of Ukranians in 1941 had to choose between Hitler and Stalin, and I’m stressed out about being late to work? There’s record unemployment out there, and it’s getting worse than anybody thought. So yeah, I’m stressed about being late to work, but at least I have a work to be late to. Many others are totally fucked in that regard right now.

2. I yelled some pretty hateful words about my girlfriend this morning while I was sitting in traffic in her parents’ car on the way back from the insurance place. I wish I had not said those things. They are not true. At least not a hundred percent.

Of course when I finally got into work it wasn’t that bad. Nobody even said anything to me. Not even Paula. I thought she was going to totally ride my ass. But I called first and the boss guys are too tired from this convention to give a shit right now, and I think Paula just doesn’t want to get yelled at for not yelling at me. She doesn’t really care, as long as she doesn’t have to hear about it. Score one for Paula.

And on the screaming things at my girlfriend who wasn’t there front, in retrospect, I’m fine with it. She screamed some pretty awful things into my voicemail right after I got in that wreck with her car. So in a way, I’m the good guy here because I was just screaming things in a car alone instead of on a recording that could be used against me later for guilt points. Unless she kept a tap recorder going, I’m in the clear. And the whole car situation’s done now. She’s got it back. All I have to do is slave away for the rest of my life trying to pay off the bill. That’ll be easy now that I no longer have a reason to be late to work.

I don’t enjoy being late to work. I should get credit for that. I hate it. I wish there was some kind of “how much did you hate being late/how hard did you try to be on time” breathalyzer test, so you could just blow into a thing, and if you set off the alarm they apologize to you instead of the other way around. That would be ideal.

But that doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t really need to. Because like it (yes, in the case of this morning when I came in late and nobody said anything) or not (no, in the case of my girlfriend unsuccessfully reading my mind about wanting to go as soon as possible and therefore engaging in some unnecessary small talk with the insurance counter person that I’m convinced made me 20 minutes later than I would have been), the world doesn’t revolve around you. People rarely even notice you exist. Especially when you’re in the car. Then you’re just one of “those people” who is once again fucking up the still unfulfilled fantasy of gliding to work in a fast, efficient manner (it only marginally came true on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day).

But it’s generally good that nobody gives a shit about you. It’s just hard not to take things personally when you’re in this sealed little bubble that can travel up to 110 miles per hour without anybody being able to talk to you, and in order to hurt you in any way they’re going to have to really do something crazy like run into you on purpose or something. You just feel so safe and comfortable in there with your own thoughts and music. It’s a little like being up your own ass. Of course your raging id will rear its ugly head. You’re basically in your own personal womb. Hence the boo hoo hoo stuff.

But of course you’re not a baby and it’s not a womb. And it’s not the end of the world if you’re late for work because you wrecked your girlfriend’s car because some Syrian guy doesn’t know how to drive when it’s icy and skidded into your lane in his old rear-wheel-drive Datsun because the whole wide world revolves around you and some omnipotent figure cares about whether or not you’re on time to work and there’s some sort of lesson he’s trying to teach you that involves misplaced white hot fury over the fucking Odwella juice truck. Nope. That’s not what is happening. So maybe cut that asshole of a mom and her two Madagascar-watching kids a break.

Who knows, maybe they’re also having the worst morning ever. Even if they’re not and they’re just slightly more inconsiderate in terms of car driving habits than you are, from a scientific standpoint they’re realistically only one six millionth of the reason for your delay. That’s how traffic works. Any given road can only tolerate a certain amount of traffic volume before it turns into a parking lot. Did you know that?

Please stop strangling me.