You’ve been at work for nine hours. You sat at your goddamn desk the whole time doing whatever the hell it is you do for a living. You survived the pointless meetings, filling out timesheets and TPS reports, and the inane conversations with co-workers that neither of you want to participate in yet you both feel obligated to start.
You get in your car happy in the knowledge that you finally get to go home. You’ll get to cook dinner, read a little, watch some TV, exercise, and otherwise goof off. But before that happens, you know you’re going to have to deal with this:
Figure 1: MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!
If you live in any major metro area and are unfortunate enough to leave work at the height of rush hour, you are going to run into traffic and you are going to want to kill everyone within a ten mile radius. Running into traffic causes people to, for a very brief time, become students of automotive existentialism. We see the wall of brake lights and ask ourselves “why?”
I’ll goddamn motherfucking tell you why traffic is fucked up:
1.) Soccer Moms: a soccer mom is a tiny white woman who drives a Ford Expedition despite having only one or two children, and is always on the phone for no goddamn reason. She buys such a large SUV because she knows she’s a shitty driver, but instead of staying off the road or taking the bus, she prefers to cause traffic accidents anyway and insulate herself against physical harm by driving an indestructible vehicle.
Figure 2: Dangerously inconsiderate uterus-monger with her Aryan litter
If you pass by a giant SUV (that isn’t a Cadillac, because that’s us) during rush hour, you’re almost guaranteed to find it being driven by a soccer mom with a phone held against her empty head while putting on eyeshadow, doing her taxes, and reading a copy of ‘Elle’ magazine as she cluelessly runs over puppies, kittens, baby deer, and the scientist that just cured breast cancer.
2.) The Roads Scholar: this is the fucking goddamn asshole who seems to think reading a textbook, novel, or fucking newspaper is a good idea while driving. Everyone reading this has seen the fucking guy with a newspaper COMPLETELY opened to its 30″+ width on the steering wheel WHILE THE CAR IS FUCKING MOVING!!!!!
Figure 3: “Welp, at least I got to read the Style section…”
Do you really need to read the newspaper that bad, you steaming pile of wolverine shit? Is it really so hard for you to be alone with your thoughts for a few minutes instead of having to be constantly entertained by print media? Is this reliance on the ideas of others the reason you’ve hit a career plateau in your late 20s? Do us all a favor and drive your car into the side of a library.
3.) Old People: the elderly usually wait until Sunday to fuck traffic up, but every now and again they’ll come out on a weekday. When they do, it’s never pretty. This tiny old person will be pulled up with his face six inches from the steering wheel looking like he’s trying to spot a gnat on the hood. He REFUSES to drive more than 35 mph and REFUSES to get out of the passing lane.
Figure 4: My hero
I can’t be too mad at the old folks, though. There’s something heroic and even patriotic in their defiant refusal to give up their cars in spite of the overwhelming lack of sense in their continued driving. Personally, I can’t wait to be the world’s first blind 115 year old driver.
4.) Young People: with high schoolers being involved in more sports and other after school activities than ever before, more and more of them are winding up on the roads when the rest of the working public is driving home. Young drivers fall into two categories: the extremely overconfident, and the extremely underconfident.
The overconfident drivers are the ones who think driving a car in real life is like driving in a video game. You can (and must) drive as fast as you can under any conditions, and other motorists are little more than poles in their automotive slalom of death. They also try very very hard to look cool while driving. They turn the volume of their shitty Linkin Park CD all the way up, lean back as far as they can in the seat, and drive with one hand. Inevitably, they will turn a blind corner or misjudge braking distance, slamming into the back of someone’s car and causing a four hour fucking traffic jam.
Figure 5: More dangerous than the Watts Riots
While overconfident drivers are usually boys, the ranks of the underconfident drivers are filled mostly with girls. Underconfident drivers are very much like old people in that they refuse to drive over 35mph, and they’re pulled up so close to the wheel they could (and probably should) steer the car with their tits. Unlike old people, they have absolutely no clue what the fuck they’re doing. You can recognize the underconfident driver by the look of sheer terror on her face, constant and unnecessary checking of blind spots, and complete inability to parallel park.
Figure 6: Tragic Comedy
5.) Asian People: my brother claims that the ability to concentrate intensely on a single item like a laser beam that makes asians so good at academics makes them, at the same time, incredibly inept in the multi-tasking environment of driving. I’m inclined to agree with him.
Figure 7: Why bicycles were so popular in Chinese cities
This theory is backed up by The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, in that all the asians who were expert drivers were also unmitigated jackasses. If they were the typical asian overachievers or FOBs with whom we’re so familiar, FF:TD would’ve been a four minute film about a 50 car pileup in an otherwise empty parking lot featuring a bunch of confused and bespectacled asians all pretending not to be able to speak english.
6.) Stalematers: this situation happens on two-lane parkways all the fucking time. Someone who has no business in the left lane will inevitably be in the left lane. Someone goes to pass them in the right lane. Then the fucking asshole in the left lane speeds up enough not to get passed. The two continue adjusting their speed upwards until neither is willing to go any faster and they wind up hogging both lanes, side by side in an automotive stalemate at the same goddamn speed. In this infuriating game of speed limit chicken, everybody loses – especially the hundreds of angry people behind the stalematers who want to pass but physically can’t.
Figure 8: The only time Stalemating is OK
Stalemating is the reason I’ve been lobbying congress for the last ten years to let me attach a battering ram to the front of my car. So far they’ve ignored my requests. I suppose they have more important things to do, like persecuting baseball players for steroid use while the country’s fighting two wars and looking into the mouth of a recession.
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