crippled rage

My friend Mitra tells me road rage is a way of life in LA. I don't do road rage - mainly because I am terrified someone is going to run me off the road and stick a gun to my head. The older I get (and yeah, I know I'm not that old) and the more mommy-ish I get (no one can doubt it really) the more scared I get. Look, I'm not discounting location as a factor, but I am an anti-road-rage individual worldwide. Usually, I just don't let it bother me when people cut me off, pull in front of me, take my parking, whatever. Its just not such a big deal in my life. In general I hold off on emotions until they go away or blow up in my face, so truthfully, the finger, the horn and the nasty looks are just not my first reaction. In the past couple of days I've actually been more upset about missing interesting parts of songs that I am trying to work through.

And I like to think that I'm a pretty good person. The other day I gave my gloves to a car guard cause it was unbelieveably cold and I'd just had a good hot meal (of which I gave him the take-aways) and I was feeling generous. And when I spotted a beggar who does backflips next to the traffic, I found him a performance job opportunity (which to my knowledge, he still has not followed up on). These are not things I need to do, and even though I'm not a strict karma believer, I still like to think that when I am down on my luck, my little guardian angels after stuffing their face with delicious chicken curry are going to swoop down and give me a few little lifts in life.

That is why I expect the Johannesburg defensive driving ritual to be a little less challenging for me right now - because driving is actually painful. Everytime I shift gears or have to make a hard right, I am physically in pain. But rather than cheat codes, I have been given the ultimate challenging course and failure is expected it seems. With my energy bar on the red, I've had 3 near accidents today. Nothing major by any means, but people cutting me off and forcing me to swerve, which just hurts. So I started thinking about revamping my road rage strategy - just until I can drive without pain. But of course then I either need to make inappropiate gestures with my left hand, which just can't move that way right now - or I need to make inappropriate gestures with my right hand, leaving my left hand to control the car. Either way, I am just as likely to get into an accident as I was prior to whatever defensive manoeuvre I just had to make.

In addition, most of the worst driving comes from taxis - who are known for their road rage and gun incidents. Now taxis in South Africa aren't like your standard NY yellow checkered or even the slightly more posh looking London cabs - they are vans. Big vans with like 15 seats that pull over across 3 lanes at the drop of a hat. And since half the vehicle needs to get out to let one person off, they spend a few minutes at the side of the road. Then they floor it across traffic back to the inside lane. And the passengers, after disembarking these death vans, usually try and cross the road through the same traffic the taxi has just pissed off. It is more hazardous than driving in snow and needless to say, the rate of pedestrians getting hit by cars in South Africa is scary.

But, on my way up to Wits to pick up my readings for the dreaded upcoming classes, I was thinking about how to safely participate in the act of road rage. And thats when I saw my absolute worst nightmare: one taxi cut another taxi off just before the Wits traffic light. Fortunately, I was stopped at the cross street, cause I probably would have been cut off and then attempted some form of my new-found rage. As it was, the offended taxi driver, honked and started shouting at the offending taxi driver. And thats when the offending taxi driving produced a cricket bat, held it outside the window of his van and then smashed the side mirror of the offended taxi driver's vehicle.

So I realised, as I drove past this scene when the light turned green for me a second later, that my fears are pretty well founded and that road rage is really not a good idea. I drove into campus, walked up to my building and got myself plenty of sympathy for my poor, buggered hand...