March 08, 2005 - 5:07 PM

Road Raging

Behold the amazing power of water! Watch as 10 feet of daily rainshowers greedily eat away at even the hardiest of pavement! Actually, I think that the pavement out here in L.A. is the macadam equivalent of coffecake (I used to love coffecake...mmmm); afterall, we would get rainstorms and snowstorms and hurricanes in Maryland, and those roads weren't full of potholes and jagged chasms that reached to the bowels of the earth after just one day of inclement weather. No, you had to beat the tar out of those roads in order to get a divot of substantial car-damaging power. You had to heat the roads and freeze the roads and smack 'em with hail and grind them up with salt and snowchains before they crumbled.

Here though, all we've had is steady rain since December, and suddenly, punji pits appear all over the roadways, as if the devils of Los Angeles are hunting the most dangerous game in their cars the old fashioned way. Next thing you know, barely-propped-up trees wil come crashing down on bikers, and hunting knives tied to saplings will spring into the flesh of pedestrians.

Everytime I take to the road, I am now weaving around potholes, trying to keep the shocks and suspension of my car from taking a beating. The squeaks and skronks coming from the front of my car indicate that I'm not doing a good enough job.

Speaking of skronks and driving, when I was on my way to Costco for work yesterday, some jackhole in an Escalade put on a display of uttter vehicular shithole brilliance. First off, let me say that I don't like the Escalade or those who drive them. Good job by Cadillac for totally revamping it's product and image- I applaud them. No longer are they the old-geezer car company. Seriously, kudos to them. But what's the point of a luxury SUV? You can't cart around all your ski or hiking equipment in it because you'll ruin the upholstery, and there isn't room for the stuff in there anyways. And it's not like you'll be offroading or 4-wheel driving it anywhere other than through suburbia or the city. It's just there to be all steroided out and pimped up. An unnecessary "status" car for the show-off rich to parade around town in. And most of the people who I've encountered driving these behomeths have been nouveau-riche young punks of the hip-hop set (c'mon, you know what I'm talking about), and I have no respect for these people.

So anyways, there's this guy driving this Escalade, and you can see that he's on his cellphone. I'm behind him with my co-worker Jon, and we approach an intersection at an underpass below the 101 where we're going to make a left to get on the highway headed West. We're in a clearly lined lane that's only for making that left-turn, and he's in the lane too, until about 20 yards from the light, when he moves over to the left as if there's a second lane to make that left turn. He's the first car at the stoplight, and we stop one car length behind him in our lane, wondering if he's going to try to move over or if we should just pull up next to him. Because, you see, THE IDIOT IS IN THE LANE FOR OPPOSING TRAFFIC! Cars coming our way have to use the lane he's in to drive past us to make their own left onto the highway headed East.

We could clearly see the confused faces of the oncoming drivers as they waited at the red traffic light, wondering what this fuckhead was doing. He seemed oblivious, still talking on his phone, making no indication that he was going to correct his situation, or even that he cared that he was in everyone's way. To make matters worse, opposing traffic had their light go green before us, so there was a bottleneck of cars trying to merge to their right to get past him. People honked and slowed down to give him "what the fuck are YOU doing?!" looks before, mercifully, we got a green turn arrow. He drove up the entrance ramp which had a stoplight at red at the end to control the flow of traffic onto the highway. What do you think he did?

That's right, he sped right through the stoplight. Jon and I marveled at the idiocy of the driver. A few miles down the highway, we were in the second lane from the right, moving past the slower traffic in the first lane, and we saw the same Escalade, guy still on phone. As we were about to pass him, he turned on his blinker and tried to merge into our lane. I dunno, maybe he wanted to see what our cars looked like if they were conjoined twins. Jon, who was driving, was calm under the circumstances, not even honking his horn, as the other driver hovered over the median line for a second before he realized that he was about to sideswipe us. He jerked ahead and completed the lane transition without so much as an apology wave.

So we trailed him to his home and beat the snot out of him. The End.

Ok, that last part didn't happen. But I sure wish it had.

Now Listening To : Catatonia- International Velvet (with the appropriate song titled "Road Rage")
Random Thought : Someone at work asked how my weekend was, and I couldn't remember what I did on Saturday. I need a memory upgrade.

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