I was driving home from work the other day and as I was getting off the freeway in my truck, El Chup, a woman in a Mercedes cut me off. El Chup is a 1982 GMC 3/4 pickup truck. It’s a behemoth and it’s a bit difficult to get that thing whoaed up quickly. I didn’t panic, I’ve been driving sketchy-ass vehicles for years, this ain’t my first rodeo. I’m pretty sure I came out of the womb driving a Trans-am with aviators on and Freebird blasting from the 8-track. I locked the tires down and proceeded to scare the ever-loving shit out of everyone around me. The back end started kicking out and just as I was about to lose it, I let off the brakes, whipped the back end into shape and came gently to a stop in the lane next to the woman in the Mercedes.
I looked over at her and grinned. I’ve never really believed in giving people the middle finger. It’s so cliche now. I find it far more effective to mess with them psychologically. Nobody ever expects you to smile when they cut you off in traffic. It’s like that scene in Gran Torino where Clint Eastwood gets out of the car and says to the thugs, “Have you ever run across somebody you just shouldn’t have fucked with?” Give them that kind of smile. It works best with sunglasses on because your eyes betray your emotions. When you flash people that ‘I know something you don’t know’ smile, it worries them. You’re unpredictable in a situation where they expect a particular emotion.
So anyway, back to the story. I grinned at this woman and she glanced over at me and immediately looked straight ahead for the remainder of the light. “No harm, no foul,” I thought so, I let it go and we went through the light. A couple of traffic lights later, she wound up in front of me again and I noticed that she had a “baby on board” decal in her window.
This perturbed me. Not because I almost hit a woman with a baby in the backseat, because she sure didn’t have one “on board” currently, and even if I had hit her with El Chup it wouldn’t have been very hard anyway. Besides, babies are good for two or three drops before it scrambles their brains anyway. No, this bugged me because I couldn’t figure out why the hell she had it on there anyway. Is it supposed to make a person drive better because you have a child in the car? What if, by demonstrating your poor driving skills, you have convinced that person that you are unfit to procreate and purposely wreck you? Or is it perhaps a license for you to drive however you wish and people should watch out for you because you are a birthgiver? That’s ridiculous You’re not supposed to try to wreck people anyway. It’s a horrible nuissance. That’s like me running around the bar acting like a douche, with the only layer of protection from a severe ball kicking being a t-shirt that says “Damagable Balls on Board.” It just don’t jive, ya heard?
I don’t know. My mind wanders and perhaps I think of the implications of small things a hell of a lot more than most people. Fortunately, these stupid signs aren’t nearly as prevalent as they once were. I think it’s mostly just some stupid 80′s thing like “don’t worry be happy” where somebody stumbled into the room where a million retarded monkeys were trying to write Shakespeare on a million typewriters with 12 letter alphabets.
