#16 Idiot on Board

So I’m driving along the other day and I’m about to turn right—I got the green—and this car cuts in front of me. Apparently, they were turning left onto the same road I was attempting to use. Okay. I contain my anger. I’d step aside to let someone through a door first. There’s too little graciousness in this world as far as I’m concerned. Besides, if they’re in that big a hurry and that rude there’ll be an edge of carpet somewhere in cosmic karma land that’ll trip em up sooner or later. But this car is something else. She—I say she because I got enough of a glimpse to render a feminine result to my baseline gender query about crappy drivers—is barreling though traffic like a demon possessed. Or its modern equivalent, a heavy user of Sudafed derivatives. She’s cutting in and out of lanes, coming up too quickly to stoplights and the rear ends of other vehicles and slamming on her brakes, and generally driving with the wanton disregard of others that would easily get her shot on a Southern California freeway. Road rage lightening rod, this tweeker is. We both get on the freeway and the chase continues. I say chase because for all her erratic maneuverings, she always makes the wrong lane choices and ends up like all the other hotshot, hot dog, hot pile of donkey dung drivers I’ve ever seen, no further ahead than if she had stayed in one lane and cooled it. We pull off the same ramp and I get a little closer. The couple of cars between us turn off and soon I get near enough to see that there’s a little head bobbing in the back seat. There’s also what looks like the white ergonomic framework of one of those new-fangled child seats. The bobbing head looks male to me, and seems to be bouncing all over the length and breadth of the presumed back seat, and occasionally bending over his sibling’s restraint device. There, I’m sure, to torment the immobilized and harnessed one with standard big brother torture. And of course to flaunt his death-defying freedom.
At this point we’re stalled in a parking lot and my attention is drawn to the puff of smoke emerging from the driver’s window. Somehow I’m not surprised. I look over the car. It’s dirty, a piece of molding is sticking up from one window frame, the right rear taillight has red-colored tape in place of a lens and on the left hand side of the dented bumper, covered with grime, is a familiar diamond-shaped yellow sticker that says “Baby On Board.” I go from road rage to parent rage in 5 milliseconds. The dirty car I can live with. And hey, not everyone can afford a new taillight. But the combination of the smoking in the car and the crazy, rotten driving and she has the effrontery to ask me to be responsible for the safety of her child? She has the unmitigated gall to tell me to be a better and more cautious and more considerate driver? Oh Heck. Why not. I guess her kids need every break they can get.
America, ya gotta love it.