I’m starting to feel like being behind the wheel sometimes brings out the worst in people.

Maybe that’s because I almost got hit this evening trying to pull out of the grocery store parking lot, but stay with me here just for a moment…

It’s no secret that people tend to be over-confident about their driving abilities, and I feel like as distractions and priorities get more demanding, it just makes driving on the road with other people a fairly miserable experience because everyone only thinks about themselves and doesn’t take into account the responsibility that they could very easily fuck up the world of a complete stranger in the blink of an eye just by not focusing their full attention on actually driving their 2,000-lb death trap down the road.

Or into the parking lot driveway, in my case because that’s literally what happened tonight – I was waiting to turn out of the parking lot and this guy in a huge truck almost hit me head-on because he somehow nearly turned into the lane that I was occupying instead of aiming for the one next to me intended for traffic entering the parking lot instead of leaving it.

😡

It was just a stupid, five-minute trip to the store to get water because we were out, but in that split lapse of judgment this dude could’ve royally messed up my day because the last thing anybody needs is police reports and insurance claims and dealing with the repair shop and paying your stupid $500 deductible because of no fault insurance!

And that’s kind of why I almost wish we lived in a more dense area that was mass-transit friendly because driving is at best just a chore for me and at worst, a dangerous frustration every time I get cutoff by somebody who ignores a stop sign or doesn’t use their turn signals … which seems to be just about every time that I leave the house these days. I don’t think I’d miss driving at all if I could trade my trips on I-4 over to Disney for sitting on a train, or maybe even one of these self-driving cars or something.

There are just very few times anymore where driving is actually something that’s enjoyable to me. Maybe when we’re going over one of the bridges across the bay or driving down by the water, but I might do that once every few months whereas I get cutoff driving to the grocery store every damn week!

Maybe it’s just old age setting in, but if people would slow down and pay attention and stop driving like assholes, we’d all get there a lot quicker and a lot more safely … and in the grand scheme of things, frankly I’m more concerned about the latter. 🙁

</end road rage rant>