The personal rants and musings of a conflicted irish norwegian american of some sort.
What is it that makes us humans so fucking competitive? Is it the evolutionarily instilled instinct to fight for mates and sustenance? Does that carry over to this day fueling wars and property disputes? Making us buy all kinds of crap with the picture and colors of our favorite team? I dunno but I suspect whatever it is also feeds our desire to drive like ass holes.
You can probably see where this is going…
There is some intrinsic instinct that pushes us to see driving as a race, a competitive game in which there are winners and losers. Don’t get me wrong, I can compete and enjoy it at times. But when we are driving we are likely going to different places than the cars around us and in the end we really don’t get any particularly greater advantage in the long haul… but there in lies another problem… short sightedness.
Back to the evolutionary theory for a sec… back then we would not be worried about next week or next month, probably barely about tomorrow. We’d just be worried about the next meal or opportunity to spread our seed! (Sorry I keep coming back to thatJ). Driving like an idiot on the way to work has zero affect when we are at work but make the drive less enjoyable and more dangerous in the mean time for no benefit.
This morning I had the pleasure of see this play out on not one but TWO occasions. The first was simply the lady right on my ass through the bumper to bumper parts of I5 south. Typical for any morning but once we are south of the construction things open up a bit and we are motoring along at 60MPH (the speed limit here is 55MPH so we are achieving the ideal 5 over). The distance between my rear bumper and her front changed little between 5MPH and 60MPH. She is clearly in a hurry. But guess what, so are all the other drives on the road with us. Long story shorter at her first opportunity she pulls a few maneuvers hopping around in the lands and after a mile or two is right in front of me. Seemed like a lot of work for not a lot of gain.
That wasn’t what motivated me to write however. The thing that got me going was when I was exiting. There is this great little flyover off ramp thing that brings on lane from I5 south to meet one lane from I84 west in a short stretch of elevated and walled in two lane highway that soon splits again the right going over the Morrison Bridge and the other turning east to become SE Belmont St. (locals of course know this area well) Invariably everyone entering from the left wants to move over to the right and vice versa. It’s always a delicate dance of cars migrating through each others path. It seems to require a level of cooperation as well as a degree of non-competitiveness to successfully keep things moving. What I mean here is that sometimes the best way to get over is to slide in BEHIND the car next to you or to LET another come in front of you.
As noted above I enter this mess from I5 south heading to Belmont so I must enter, change lanes and then split off to the left. She enters from I84 west ironically in a blue Subaru wagon (same as mine but older) apparently also heading to Belmont. As the two flyovers come together then become one road with a dashed yellow line she is at about my seven o’clock position. I apply a small amount of acceleration to open up a bit a room to change over (my blinker has been on since before the merge). She promptly steps on the gas. It would seem this little stretch of road is her drag strip. I lay on a bit more gas as she is now at my nine o’clock and I realize I’M DOING IT!!! I’m racing her to the cliff like in those old greaser movies. Why? What the hell! What happened to the delicate dance? The cooperation? Realizing that my at my current course my options are 1) take an unplanned trip downtown 2) take an unplanned trip to the ER. I opt for 3) brake and slid in behind her. But this leaves me pissed off and angry… road rage is creeping in. Why am I so mad? Did I loose? Am I worse off? No. And in the end we both end up at a red light. Me behind her. I’m still steaming at this point but I’m not yelling or flipping the bird. She puts on her glasses. I start analyzing what this means because… that’s what I do. We get the green she goes her way I turn and head to work, PISSED. To add to everything the radio perfectly started playing Smashing Pumpkins Bullet With Butterfly Wings during this debacle and the chorus is kicking in my car:
“Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage”
I parked and thought for a bit… cooling off. This is the start of my day. The next song is Lasy Eye by the Silversun Pickups which mellows me out a bit… next is Waiting in Vain by Bob Marley and mellows me more. So in the end I decided to write about it. Good new blog fodder. So I guess from that perspective this mornings commute was a good thing.
