On the road....again

Driving to work in the morning.
A delight in itself, the morning drive is always accented with the little things that make me hate everyone I see.
The people around me do not seem to realize that my day has started out badly already. I had to wake up unnaturally in the morning, for the sole purpose of going to work. I don't mind externally prompted wake-state to go somewhere fun. But work? C'mon on... And if it's winter, and cold, and raining...? Too much to bare.
I then get in my car. A common white colored sedan, that is exactly the same as any other car on the road, no matter how the car magazines try to rate them. If it was something exciting, it might have been different. Then again excitement in cars usually involves speed, and if Death is the great equalizer for people, traffic jams have the same affect on vehicles.
And so I slip into the southbound lane for my crawling-pace-ride to work. Traveling 12 kilometers in up to 45 minutes. That's 16 kilometers an hour. Good thing the limit is only 90, or I would really feel bad. In a residential zone the limit is 50. On private roads in factories or the like the limit is 30.
And I have to suffer through half that! I might as well be driving a motorized electric scooter!

So I sit there, looking stupid, trying to keep my brain from loosing its contents though the ears. I breath deep to keep myself calm, reminding myself that I'm not in any real or particular hurry to get to where I'm going.
And then the idiot in front of me stops.
I can see the lane in front of him slowly open up to two, three, then four car lengths, before he starts to move.
Why! I literally cry out.
Pack 'em in, man! Pack 'em in. Every pace of highway counts, damn it!
But he is taking his sweet time closing up that gap. If we're lucky, no one cuts in front of him. If not, then that's just so many more cars ahead of me. More stupid people between me and the blessed right turn that will take me off the main road.
Of course, concentrating on the road to make sure that these sort of gaps don't open up might take the attention away from the newspaper that the man in front of me is reading, and we wouldn't want to do that now, would we?
And then there are those that remember they have to turn right somewhere. It may be just ahead, it may be a kilometer down the road, it may be 10. The point is they remember it now, and have to change lanes. Now!
So they do.
The fact that there is an entire car, a big one, in the space where they are heading toward as they turn the wheel doesn't seem to phase them a tinny little bit. They need to be there, and that's all that matters.
I break, and honk the horn, but they don't even turn their heads. It's as if they are thinking "If I don't actually acknowledge him, then he is not really there, and it's not my problem anyhow." It's a common symptom describes by the late Douglas Adams as "Somebody Else's Problem" principle where things can actually become invisible if we make a subconscious effort to ignore them.
And there are more. There are the lane traders which actually lose ground because they always change lanes at the wrong time. And if they would not inhibit traffic by their constant movement and effects on other drivers, they would just make me laugh.
There are the phone talkers, whose eyes are literally glazed over because their mind is somewhere else completely.
There are snoozers, that fall asleep while traveling at idle-speed forward and tap the fender in front of them. Everything has got to stop. Everyone, out of the cars! Let's spend half an hour examining the bumpers for invisible damage. The bumper was barely leaned on, man! It's not a real accident. Pull over! You don't have to stay in place for the cops to see the actual scene!

I look in their eyes. All of them.
And they all look at me.
An I can suddenly tell.
There was a message that went around among all there people.
Today, we are pissing off the man in glasses, with the ginger-brown hair, in the white Ford Focus, as he heads to work.

It's not paranoia if they're really persecuting you!

But it's not just the people around me. Not even the people a long way down the road whose actions and idiocy ripple through traffic like a tidal wave on the ocean, amplified as more an more idiot-power merges with them. It's the people on the radio as well that are in on this conspiracy to start my day with the utmost misery that may be summoned. And it's not the DJs themselves. Oh, no. This goes much higher. The DJs are taught, for reasons I can only attribute to the cohorting against me, that they should speak over the lead of a song until the lyrics start. I can, I admit, see where this may be useful. Some leads are stupid. But the greatest guitar rift ever played? (And if anyone cliches "Stairway to Heaven" on me I'll smother them in their sleep.) I'm talking about "Sultans of Swing" by "Dire Straights". Everything about that song is great.
The lyrics, the solo, the beat, and of course, the lead. It holds so much promise. It's uplifting. It's simply awesome. And for a kid on the radio to talk without end on the rambling trivials of his or her mind just to fill the time between the beginning of the song to the singing part is borderline blasphemous.
But they don't have anything against the song.
It's me.
They know how I feel about all this.


But then I get to work. An I park so far away I might as well have left my car at home and walked to the office.
And there, up there in the cubicles, and open-space, and computer and labs, and meeting rooms...Up there a whole new Hell waits me. And I get there already belligerent. All set to make war.
"Oh, you're trying to get on my nerves? Don't bother. I came all prepared from home."