Writerly Road Rage

I’m not by nature an aggressive person, but every now and then my writerly road rage comes out in imprecatory fantasies. Especially when I have a migraine and I’m stuck in the car.

To the city I live in that thinks it’s okay to patch a hole in the road with a steel plate whose ends don’t exactly match up with the asphalt, so that when the car’s tires hit the blunt edge of the plate, my aching brain actually bounces against my skull (okay, that might be an exaggeration)…to you, planners of road repair, I hope that you have nightmares where rusty steel plates pursue you across pot-hole covered roads.

To the fifty year old man wearing leather and spikes and some kind of World War I helmet while riding a mid-life crisis motorcycle that apparently came WITHOUT a muffler, I hope your motorcycle falls apart like Cinderella’s carriage at the stroke of midnight. And your bike/hog/chopper becomes a horse. Or, wait, a boar. An angry boar with tusks.

To the twenty year old man in the car behind us with his windows rolled down, wearing dark sunglasses even though it’s overcast, and whose car has subwoofers cranked so loud the fillings in my teeth are rattling…wait, I can’t even come up with an imprecation. Instead, I tell Cal to turn right. He says, “But we’re not going that way.”  I say, “Please turn. If that noise does not kill me, I will kill myself.” He turns right. Sadly, lunatic driver who’s trying to share his hateful music with me also turns right. (Why did he not use turn signals, so I’d know we could go straight?!?!) I feel like I’m going to cry/vomit except my head hurts too much.

By this point, it’s clear to me that I-don’t-care-about-my-fellow-man, woofer driver is really possessed by a demon…although it could be that he’s a super-secret CIA courier (which explains the sunglasses) and the noise is so he can keep his package safe because no one can get close enough to steal it without having their eardrums bleed. Nah. Demon-possessed. And I’ll send Buffy after him. I know she does vampires. But a silver stake through the heart will probably put this guy out of commission too. 

This helmet is actually from Madagascar. But you get the picture.
This image is by Rama courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.