Where I almost Die While Driving to See My Parents

When I think road rage, I think about angry drivers shooting people with crossbows because they got cut off. It sounds absurd, but it's happened. I'm not to the point where I'm crossbowing people in the face quite yet, but I do have a fairly serious case of road annoyance. Road annoyance is caused by bad driving. For example, always driving in the left hand lane draws my ire, as well as cars constantly changing speeds. Leap frog is best left for the playground, not the hwy. People who don't signal when changing lanes or keep their brights on all the time deserve a special circle in hell. It's even worse when you are driving with someone who doesn't know the rules of the road and you feel like you need to mouth apologies to every car you pass. 

Until such a time that America invests in some heavy duty public transit, I'm just going to have to deal with bad driving and being annoyed from time to time. I suppose I should be happy that I'm capable of being annoyed right now. Had my day gone slightly differently, I might be lying in a hospital bed or dead in some morgue. 

I'm not ready to be dead quite yet. There are a lot of things I want to do like change the world for the better or finish one of those roadside burger challenges and get my picture on the wall. God help me if I go to my grave without one of those two things happening. 

Currently I'm visiting my parents who live about 400 miles away. The trip from St. Louis to Little Rock is a long and tedious one. It's one I've made a number of times and most of these drives are uneventful. The roads are straight and eventually it's all very flat. I listen to my mp3 player for the most part. Actually, most of the time I'm singing along with my mp3 player and anyone who tells you they don't sing in the car is a liar and a scoundrel. 

I was a few hours into my trip and for the 100th time that day, I started to pass another car. I wasn't thinking much of it. Unlike my transmission, passing cars is mostly automatic. For whatever reason, the car in the right hand lane neglected to check his blind spot and started to merge into my car just as I was right next to him. 

Remembering that two objects cannot occupy the same time and space, I decided to avoid being a high school physics equation. I hit the brakes, but too hard and inadvertently became a different physics equation because objects in motion tend to stay in motion.  The back of my car started fishtailing all over the hwy. I corrected (overcorrected) and corrected again. It couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds, but I managed to subdue my car and avoid injury. I neither hit the shoulder or hit another car. 

When it was all said and done, I was more shaken up than anything, not so much road rage, or even road annoyance, but more road oh-my-god-did-I-really-almost-die-there. The rest of my drive was uneventful, but I can definitely see why someone would keep a crossbow in the front seat with them.