I hate driving

I haven't been here for a while...since like August of last year. I was raised being taught, "if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all." Lately I haven't been in a nice mood. No particular reason, really. Life, for me, is pretty good. I'm happily married, financially secure, more importantly, my financial future is secure and I've got a wonderful family including 4 grand kids that I adore, although I don't see them nearly as much as I'd like. So why don't I have anything nice to say?

I try and stay away from politics. I made the mistake of posting some opinions in the past and was instantly branded a racist, and my favorite label: a hater. The next person who tells me, "don't be a hater, man" is going to need to have some teeth replaced. I'm tired of victimism (I just coined that word - that's why spell check is telling me its bogus) excuses, syndromes, illnesses, diseases and all the other things that people (mostly lawyers) come up with to try and get people off the hook for doing bad things. That doesn't leave much to talk about. Too many people use up way too much time talking about sports. I'm not much of a sports fan in general other than Major League Baseball and I'll be the first to admit that I maintain not much more than a rudimentary level knowledge of the inner workings and finer points of the game. I truly enjoy a night at the ball park even though the cost is rapidly becoming prohibitive. Someone has to keep guys like Ryan Howard making 12 million dollars a year to play a kid's game and at the rate things are going its not going to be me much longer, lest I lose that future financial security. I'm NOT a pro football fan, considering most of the players in the NFL common thugs and criminals (see: Vick, Michael). Whooops. There I go with being a hater again. What's left to talk about?

Driving. We'll talk about driving. I HATE driving. Hate it. I'm a hater, man. I'm 56 years old and got my driver's license when I was 16. I've been driving 40 years. More importantly, for most of those 40 years I was employed in jobs where driving was one of, if not THE, primary item in the job description. I was a police officer for many of those years and upon retiring from active police service I began driving trucks. Big trucks, over the road some and locally, all day every day for the better part of about 35 years I drove some vehicle on some highway some where. Maybe when you're out there every day for at least 8 hours you just get used to things. You either don't notice or pay attention to the stupid, boneheaded, ignorant shit people do or you realize if you let everyone that does those things aggravate you you'd be aggravated all day long.

I guess being off the road and not required to spend as much time driving as I used to is having a negative effect on me because it seems I can't drive more than 10 minutes any more with out some idiot doing some stupid, ignorant, boneheaded shit and pissing me off. I realize and accept that most people who are out on the roads have a specific mission or destination and many of them may have a particular time frame in which to arrive at said location, but that's just no excuse for the rampant, blatant, dangerous stuff that people are doing out there every day and this is the point of this rant - I don't believe that many of them are actually late for something legitimately important or even necessary when they do these things. They do them because driving has become a sort of microcosm for the way we treat each other in general, every day life.

Case in point (and the impetus, I suppose, for sitting here pounding the keyboard): This afternoon while driving north on Frankford Ave. here in the City of Shitadelphia, I was in the left lane and a car began to overtake me on the right. Not being totally cognizant of exactly where on Frankford Ave. I was, I failed to comprehend that the vehicle overtaking me was doing so because he (it was a male driver) was about to run out of road. The two lanes we were on were about to narrow down to one. There was a large delivery truck in front of me that I was coming up on because of the truck's slower speed and just about the time that I actually took serious notice of the car in the right lane he got barely past me and suddenly squeezed over into the left lane, causing me to brake hard and take evasive action to keep from hitting him as he managed (somehow) to make it in between me and the truck in front of me. Why did he do this? Because he knew he was running out of lane and was not content to slow slightly and merge in behind me even though it was stupidly obvious that there were NO other vehicles behind me. He would not have to wait for a line of cars to get by. NO. It was more important to him to be FIRST. He HAD to get there before I did!

What's the big deal? Why am I pissed about this enough to be sitting here hoping someone will have hung in long enough to even get to this paragraph? Its because this shit happens constantly out there. There is no give and take. No consideration for other people, other vehicles on the road. No desire, on what seems to be more and more people's parts, to want to even make an attempt to maintain any semblance of decency. We all make mistakes. We can all be distracted while driving, miss a stop sign, not see a red light soon enough or any one of a thousand little honest mistakes, but observe, the next time you're on the road just how many people speed up to pass you and then jam the brakes because they're getting off at the exit right in front of them, how many have NO intent what so ever to actually obey a yield sign when entering a highway, how many see signs advising of a lane closure miles ahead and continue to ignore them until you actually approach the closure and then they force their way over in front of other cars. Its epidemic and its disgusting and its because so many of us have just become ignorant, self centered assholes with no regard for our fellow man and then we turn on Action News and shake our heads over the latest "road rage" story.

At the moment that idiot cut me off today I was pissed off enough to want to kick his ass. I guess he was just the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, and although I seriously wanted to get out when we both had to stop at the next red light (he got real friggin' far ahead of me, eh?) and drag him from the car and kick the shit out of him as payback for every other moron on the highway who ever did something really stupid in front of me, I didn't. I came home and got a serious case of keyboard rage. After every single one of his TV shows in which its revealed that some toothless, redneck hillbilly has discovered that her live in boyfriend/cousin is really a female who's sleeping with her sister AND her father, Jerry Springer signs off with this line: "Take care of yourselves...and each other."
We just don't do that on the roads much any more and people are dying because of it.

That's the View From The Mountain. If you read all the way to this point, you must really be bored. But I thank you.