Note the anger vein on the forehead. This is done anime-style, but it gets the point across. I was frustrated with the general retardation exhibited by the driving population in Fort Worth.
Skip ahead a few years to my early twenties. I am just out of college, have begun commuting to work, and have a fresh loathing for all humanity. I had a twenty+ minute commute which is, to some people, laughably short. For some reason, my generally pleasant demeanor devolved into a shaking rage each and every time I turned the key to start my car's engine.
Needless to say, my friends and family were wary to enter the passenger seat. I acquiesce before man and machine that I am an angry driver, and not to be trusted. Close your eyes upon embarking on any journey involving city traffic. Believe it or not, I am, for the most part, quite calm on cross-country travel (evidenced by my recent move to Massachusetts).
Speaking of cross-country travel, I have recently made a Huge Life Change and moved away from home for the first time. Instead of taking a nice, gentle step like Colorado or perhaps Illinois, I plunged directly into the heart of New England. Hello, Massachusetts, home of baffling traffic patterns and offensive driving habits.
This angry driver has met her match. As my dog's vet so succinctly put it, "There is no defensive driving, only offensive." Now, as someone who has been demonized as a horrible, angry driver, I expected nothing less than a hundred thousand clones of me out on the road every day.
What I have found, however, is a horror far worse than my wildest imagining. What you get in Massachusetts is a coagulation of what appear to be 'roided-up soccer moms, businessmen angry that they aren't getting their way like they do in the affair they're rushing back from just now, and slack-jawed retards (those are everywhere...there is no escape) all hovering around like they're playing a massively multiplayer game of Crazy Taxi mixed with a little Twisted Metal and possibly Grand Theft Auto. The structure of the roads does NOT help. For the following visual: light gray is the 3-lane, 65 mph road. The gray lines are narrow, bumpy, 25 mph off/on ramps leading to invisible merges with traffic going 55 mph or traffic which is completely stopped without warning. The green lines are trees, all of which obscure every possible inch of the data necessary to adjust one's speed to merge into the traffic ahead. Please note that this is statewide, and not just in my area.
Would you not expect people to traverse such dangerous conditions with caution and finesse? I certainly would, and that is how I started out driving. I went the speed limit, slowed for exits, and yielded to merge. Instead of fitting in with what is, logically, the way people should drive under conditions above, I was honked at, tailgated, and generally harassed. In a disturbing twist, I now look like this all the time:
...which is what I assume everyone in Fort Worth looked like every time I got on the road. Sigh.
