It’s back-to-school time.
Which means the days of my leisurely summertime commute are over.
The morning drive is once again crowded.
And annoying as shit.
The adults are bad enough.
I mean, why do parents drive their kids to school?
Make them ride the damn bus.
Even though that’s the last thing any kid wants to get caught doing after about the eighth grade.
I sure as hell didn’t.
Still, I spent plenty of frigid, Michigan mornings standing at the bus stop, my feathered hair frozen neatly into place, because I refused to wear a hat.
I’d rather risk hypothermia than have messed-up hair, thank you.
Even worse than the swollen ranks of parents on the road at seven-thirty in the morning are the high school kids.
For starters, who are these entitled punkasses whose parents bought them cars the second they turned sixteen?
Probably the same ones who’d been driving them to school their entire lives so their asses never had to touch a puke-green, vinyl bus seat.
God forbid.
I didn’t get a car when I turned sixteen.
Yeah, my wife did.
And so’d my daughter.
But that’s beside the point.
So, you have all these kids driving themselves to school, who could, or maybe should, be riding the bus, which contributes to the traffic volume problem.
But that’s only one side of the shitty-commute coin.
The other side is the behavior of said drivers and the resulting stress it imposes upon what, only days before, had been a mostly pleasant drive.
Allow me an example.
Everyone knows about The Zipper, right?
That’s the maneuver by which two streams of traffic merge, either at an intersection or onramp, with cars in the merging streams proceeding in alternating sequence.
One car from one stream goes, then one car from the other.
One car.
We have such an intersection in our little downtown area.
It gets a lot of traffic, because it feeds the main artery out of town and into the city and to the suburbs beyond.
It also sits on one of two main routes to the high school.
So, from August until June, you find a mix of work and school commuters traversing the intersection.
And it’s a rather awkward one.
It’s triangular, with the bulk of traffic meeting at a T where the two main roads feeding the intersection combine.
Now, I don’t know if The Zipper gets taught in driver’s ed.
It’s been a few years.
But it’s intuitive.
It’s not really something you need to be taught.
If, that is, you were raised in a society that values the Rule of Law, by parents that instilled in you the correct moral values and some decent fucking manners.
The high school kid I encountered at the intersection earlier this week had not been so raised.
How do I know?
Because this little prick totally thumbed his nose at The Zipper.
Everything was moving along just fine.
There were probably thirty cars on each road approaching the intersection.
One by one, each driver on either side patiently waited his turn, gave a momentary tap on the brakes at the stop sign, and then proceeded behind the car that had just exited the adjacent lane.
When it came my turn at the stop sign, the driver of the black MDX to my right shot a quick glance in my direction to double-check that I was yielding, and then proceeded through the intersection.
I then hit the gas to fall in behind her, thereby forming another interlocking tooth in The Zipper.
At least, that’s what was supposed to have happened.
But about the time I got my two front tires beyond the stop sign, I noticed the white Nissan Maxima behind the MDX right on its back bumper, having followed it through the intersection.
As I hit the brakes to avoid a collision, I saw the kid behind the wheel, who was all of sixteen with shaggy brown hair hanging in his face, leaning forward into the steering wheel, grinning.
Grinning! that sonofabitch.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
He knew about The Zipper. And he didn’t give a shit.
Savage.
So, then there was one, long, two-car tooth in The Zipper.
Awkward.
But worse, one of the most important norms of decency that governs the safe and orderly flow of people from their homes to their offices each day had been flagrantly violated.
That was unacceptable.
And I intended to do something about it.
I shot through intersection after the kid, intent upon punishing him.
Somehow.
Ideal would have been to whip out one of those old-school, Hawaii Five-O-style sirens and put it on my dashboard.
I’d give the kid a menacing look and gesture for him to pull over.
Of course, I have no idea what would have happened then, but ten bucks says the kid would have probably pissed himself.
Or something.
But, alas, no siren.
So, I did the next best thing I could think of.
I got right on his ass.
I mean, right on his ass.
Now, I know what you’re thinking.
Real mature, there, Dan.
And not particularly safe, either.
Fair point.
But hear me out.
I’m a former Naval Aviator.
I’ve been trained to manage such situations.
In formation flying, you learn all about relative motion.
The pilot of the lead aircraft is charged with maintaining a steady platform, while the person flying wing is tasked with making whatever control inputs are necessary to hold the same position relative to lead.
And the way you do that when you’re in the wing aircraft is to pick out a couple of reference points on the lead and hold them in exactly the same relative positions.
For example, as long as the top rivet connecting the wing to the fuselage stays on a direct line extending from the canopy handle above it, you’ll be in the correct position.
So, as I’m driving behind the punk in the Maxima, I pick a spot on his trunk and line it up with the top of the raised piece of metal where my left windshield wiper arm meets the blade.
And it works beautifully.
I see the kid shooting nervous glances at me in his rearview mirror, his eyes darting back and forth.
That’s right, asshole. I see you. I know what you did.
We go on like this for about a mile.
Of course, at any moment, the kid could decide he’s had enough and jam on his brakes.
I’d immediately rear-end him, and it would be entirely my fault.
But this kid needs to learn a lesson.
We reach the point at which I have to turn right to get on the expressway.
The high school is another half mile up the road in the same direction in which we’d been traveling.
I move over into the turning lane and accelerate.
For a moment, I’m even with the kid.
I look over to give him one, final, menacing glare.
And, as I look, I see the kid’s mouth moving. He’s laughing, waving his right hand around, having a raucous conversation with someone.
That’s right, he’s on the goddamn phone.
And was likely oblivious to the punishment I’d been meting out over the course of the last mile.
He hadn’t learned a damn thing.
So, I guess it will be up to you, fellow commuters.
To teach this kid his lesson.
Hopefully, before he graduates.
And becomes the next Pharma Bro
Or disgraced Crypto financier
Or, worse:
Member of Congress.