Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Conflict Diamonds II

It wasn't really a conflict because there was no exchange of words, but it was about a nanosecond away from being a physical conflict. Yeah, a gigantorific SUV vs bike conflict, where I as the cyclist would have lost in a big way.

I had stopped at a signal where the two lane street I was on crossed over a four lane street. As I sat there, the aforementioned SUV pulled up next to me with its right turn signal on. The driver looked right at me, right in my eyes even. The light turned green and I started across while looking right at the driver who was again looking right at me, right in my eyes even. Well, doofus proceeds to bury his right foot on the accellerator pedal and then suddenly as if snapping out of some kind of evil VooDoo spell, hit the brakes. I had already started to swerve to the right to get out of this fool's way, but if he had kept his portly leadfoot buried, I might now be well on my own way to being buried. I swerved back and proceeded across the intersection, eyeballing this goon all of the way across.

I'm not sure what gets into people when they get behind the wheel, but it's obviously not a good dose of common sense and/or courtesy in many cases. Change L.A. to Orange County in the below monologue from the film Crash and there just might be an answer there.

It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.

JD

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