Part 2: Stop Driving us Crazy!
Part 2 of this entry includes my recommendations for improvement around driving in traffic. If you see yourself anywhere on this list, you need to seriously do better:
Know how to merge and how to yields and how they mean different things. Mea culpa on this one when my school age sons reminded me that the sign said to yield and I had inadvertently merged and cut off another car that was hidden by an infrastructure barrier. They rightfully did NOT let me off the hook and told me that if I couldn’t see because of the barrier, I should have stopped and looked before just humming along into the open lane. Ooph! That was decades ago and I’ve never done that again. So, it IS possible to change and my request for everyone is to imagine the two angelic faces of little boys in the backseat telling their loving mother she was driving like a blind zombie and potential a$$hat. I do better now and so can you.
Don’t shoot or throw projectiles at people who are driving. This should probably be at the top of the list but I have not personally experienced this myself and so I haven’t recently thought about it until writing these other suggestions. This seems obvious to me but apparently people shoot at each other in cars or because of cars with more frequency than seems reasonable. I am more familiar with less lethal, but potentially harmful projectiles. When one of my sons was a teenager, he and his buddies were caught after they threw water balloons at cars on a quiet residential street after dark. They scared the absolute crap out of a woman who rightly called the police to complain. Now my son and his buddies did not drive at that point and were neither malicious nor trouble makers. They just thought it would be surprising and funny. It wasn’t and they learned an important lesson, including community service. Stuff like that happens. But if you are maliciously throwing things at cars or shooting at cars or people in cars, seriously stop that shit. WTF.
Let people into your lane. Seriously let people into your lane. They just want to navigate like everyone else of the road and do not have a personal vendetta out to diminish your self-esteem or prevent you from going where you need to go. Don’t pretend you don’t see them; it’s your driving job to see them. Stop speeding up to prevent others from merging or avoiding some other driving blind zombie. It’s a ridiculous a$$hat move that benefits no one, so stop it.
Don’t deliberately cut people off. Sometimes others drive in your blind spot and you don’t see them and that sucks, but no one is really to blame. But if you don’t check your mirrors and check over your shoulder, pay heed to the flashing lights on your side doors that indicate you are going to cut someone off, or ignore all that and deliberately cut someone off you are either a blind zombie or a$$hat. Either way, do better. And if someone cuts you off and it appears to have been a true error, don’t make a thing about it. Just continue on and remember that everyone makes mistakes and being a deliberate a$$hat or blind zombie are definitely mistakes.
Don’t tailgate and don’t drive on a public road like you just learned to race at the Daytona driving school for testosterone nascar wannabes of all genders. You are not cool and absolutely no one is impressed by you doing that and putting others at risk. True race car drivers do not drive that way on their way to CVS, Safeway, or even the gas station. If you want to race, go to a track and stop putting the rest of us in the midst of your inflamed need for an egocentric adventure high. Go climb some rocks without a tether instead.
Final note. Around the same time my sons schooled me on the difference between merge and yield, I was driving them to school in the HOV lane of a San Francisco freeway when without warning another car came into the lane from heavy traffic. To this day I do not know how I avoided a collision, but I did and was quite shaken up thereafter. While regaining my composure, a 3-year old boy’s voice made itself clear from his car seat in the backseat of the car: “F*#!cking a$$hole!!!” Indeed! My son learned to judge other drivers in his formative years and I learned to cut back on my extreme use of expletives in stressful situations. You win some and you lose some, but that day we stayed alive and and laughed about it and that’s a happy ending we all deserve.
