I just got back from a two-hour drive around downtown Dallas. It started when I needed to cross town to my barber. The highway is always bad during the day, but today it was totally stopped, so I committed to take the backstreets - a plan that always sounds great in theory and never ever works. Part of it is my own fault, because I've lived in this city as long as I've had a license and never learned half the streets, but whatever, I made it in good time (less than the highway usually takes).
I go the barber, and find out the receptionist actually scheduled me for
next Friday, and everything is booked up. Oh good, I get to spend another week looking like Al Sharpton stuck his finger in a toaster. Fine, I'm not going to die from bad hair.
I then uptown to do some light shopping for Dad's birthday. Driving back from uptown Dallas to South Dallas circa 4PM before a holiday weekend was the suicide pact. Turns out,
every highway was backed up solid due to a dark miracle of major accidents on every one. Backstreets ho. In the course of taking a hour to get across town, I confirmed three things I have long suspected.
One, the traffic light patterning of Dallas is intentionally designed to cause traffic jams. You couldn't arrange a better way to impede the efficient flow of traffic if you tried, which can only mean they did.
Two, if you try to back out of a parking space into flowing traffic, or make a U-turn on a busy road, you deserve anything that happens to you. And if you're going to take the plunge, fucking
commit to it; you're already making a huge mistake and pissing off dozens of people, don't compound the problem by chickening out halfway through.
And three, I need to calm my shit down. I don't know what it is about driving that turns me into
Lou Ferrigno, but if I so much as can't make a right turn when I want to, I transform into a frothing swerving tire-peeling monstrosity. One more person waiting for a green light to back out into traffic, and I would have gotten out and thrown cars out of my way. Thankfully, for every once of road warrior rage I inherited from my father, I also absorbed superlative driving skill and reflexes. That or I am indestructibly lucky.