Save a Life. Pay Attention.
Everything in life comes back to how much you are paying attention. I’m serious. This occurred to me yesterday after a woman in a Pontiac Bonneville made a right turn on a red light directly into my path of travel, as I was approaching at 45 miles an hour and was only about 50 feet away from her car. I was quite thankful that there were no cars in the left lane, which I made generous use of in order to avoid condemning both my car and hers to a painful afterlife in a scrapyard somewhere. Of course, as I flew past with my horn screaming for all it was worth, I noticed the old bat was too busy talking to her passenger to have even bothered to glance at oncoming traffic before pulling out into it.
I was making a right turn shortly after this occurred, so I had to pull back into the right lane. The Bonneville simpered past as I was turning, so I lit up the throttle to give them a bark of exhaust which was arguably louder than my horn. I like to think of a cacophonic eight-cylinder rev as my car’s way of delivering a personal fuck-you. The passenger in the Bonnie was looking at me as they went past, and I shook my head as I realized the boneheads both probably thought it was my fault. Look, he’s driving a surly-looking, black, loud car with big nostrils on it. Of course he was breaking the law, and it’s his fault for driving recklessly and yada yada yada oh my weakened heart tissue.
Such “lapses in concentration” (which is being generous) are rampant down here in Florida during the snowbird season. During the months of the year when our friends from northern climates visit us and our population doubles, the stupidity quotient of area drivers goes up markedly. You don’t even need a scientific analysis to know this. If you commute on the same roads at the same times every day, you absolutely will see a higher number of illegal turns, stupid maneuvers, and accidents during the season. It’s indisputable. If you happen to see a car with an out-of-state plate on it, you get as far away as possible. It’s a gut reaction, one you develop after seeing enough crumpled fenders, rubbernecking bystanders and their resulting traffic jams.
But after my Trans Am narrowly avoided checking out early yesterday evening, I realized that the entire course of your life can be changed in a split second due only to your lack of paying attention, if only for a moment. And it is moments like these, fair readers, that remind me of just how much wrath I have reserved for those special morons who apply makeup, eat their lunch, read the paper or do their office chores while behind the wheel. Every instant you take your mind off the task of driving, your eyes off the road, or your attention off every other driver out there, is an instant you risk altering the course of your future—and the futures of your fellow human beings in those other cars nearby.
Driving a car is serious business. Sure, we all do dumb things behind the wheel from time to time, but habitual offenders need to realize that they are playing roulette with their own lives with every Whopper they scarf, every paragraph of the newspaper they read, and every ounce of blush they apply to their oxygen-sucking faces behind the wheel of a 3,500 pound chunk of metal, rubber and glass.
Categorized as Rants