A maroon Isuzu SUV, to be more precise. Yeah, it�s Friday the 13th.

I�ve been feeling kind of crappy all day, kind of restless and depressed. I finally figured out it must be PMS when I found myself getting all teary-eyed over a song on the car radio, because about the only time I get all weepy over goofy shit like that is when I�m some brand of hormonally unbalanced. But that knowledge did not stop me from indulging myself in a nice pity party, as I brooded my way through the Whole Foods Market, taunted by all the high-priced goodies I�m too poor to buy right now and feeling like a victim of the universe. And even more so when I found out they were all out of the salmon rolls I was so looking forward to having for supper.

So I just bought my vitamins and left, pissy mood still intact. I spotted my filthy dark-green Cavalier from the store entrance, so I crossed the parking lot and headed that way, only to realize upon closer inspection that the car was identical to mine except that it had Florida plates. So I turned around and scanned the parking lot and spotted ANOTHER filthy dark-green Cavalier, which I also realized wasn�t mine when I got as far as the empty space next to it and noticed there was somebody else�s crap on the front seat. So I was thinking how odd it was that there would be so many identical, identically-dirty cars parked in this particular parking lot at this particular moment, and then I looked around some more and spotted my REAL car a few spaces down. And then, as I took a single step away from the car I was standing next to, a fucking idiot in an SUV quickly backed into the parking space where I was standing and ran right into the side of me. And KEPT RIGHT ON BACKING IN.

It startled me so bad I couldn�t have told you at that point if I was ok or not, but mostly I was just incredulous and furious that this dickhead had backed right into my corpulent corpus and didn�t even seem to know it. So I walked up to the driver�s door, shrieking something to the effect of �Ex-CUSE me...!!!�

And the dick started opening his door before I even finished yelling at him, and going �Oh, I�m so sorry, I didn�t see you!� And I said, �YOU JUST RAN THE FUCK INTO ME, YOU DICK!� And he seemed a little taken aback by that, and he was all like, �I�m sorry, I didn�t see you, I was backing in!� As if that makes it understandable somehow. And I snarled, �Well, that�s why you PULL in, dumbass!� And I left him sitting there with his mouth hanging open as I stalked off to my car. I got in, and found I was shaking, hard, and my back and neck felt kind of stiff, and I still couldn�t tell if I was hurt or not. And for some reason I needed to turn off the radio and then the engine so I could concentrate on figuring out whether I was injured or not. Weird. So I sat there for a few minutes, and calmed myself down, and figured out that I was probably ok, just the same old mild case of whiplash I get EVERY GODDAMN TIME some idiot runs his car into me. But I got his license plate number just in case.

Later I wondered if it was stupid to say �that�s why you pull in.� Because I meant that�s why you should pull forward into the space. I would never say �pull in� if I meant �back in�, but maybe that�s just me. I hope he knows what I meant, because he apparently needs the lesson.

The thing is, one of my most peevish pet peeves has always been people who back into parking spaces for no particular reason. Why? Because it�s the kind of fiddly, time-wasting thing people do because they have some bizarre notion stuck in their thick pudding heads that it�s a �better� way of doing things, and they�re all smug over having been smart enough to figure it out. Like... �Ooo, I�m going to save so much time in the morning, because all I�ll have to do is just pull out and go!� And it never occurs to them that they�re losing more time NOW, because it takes longer to back into a tiny space between two cars than it would to back out into the big wide-open parking lot in the morning. And meanwhile people (me!) are stuck waiting impatiently behind them while they pull off their big brilliant parking maneuver. So every time I see some yutz backing into a space, a little rant light goes off in my head, and I mutter dark oaths under my breath while wishing Very Bad Things upon the anal-retardive perpetrator of this travesty of common sense. I suppose I�ve probably worked up quite a bit of bad karma over it, actually, and maybe got bit in the ass by it tonight. But still, it proves my point, don�t you think? It oughta be the backer-inner people getting bit, by my reckoning. I should have given him a swift kick in the rear panel.

But wait! There�s more... on the way home, I called the Prince to ask him what he wanted from Portillo�s, because there was no way I felt like cooking supper at that point. Now, before you go all horrified and shake your finger at me and go �Ooooh... you shouldn�t talk on your cell phone when you drive, it�s dangerous!� let me just say that I hardly ever talk on the phone while I�m driving, and when I do I�m hyper-vigilant of what�s going on around me because I do tend to worry excessively about car safety, seeing as how I�m a magnet for OTHER people doing stupid shit in cars. So I�m driving along in the left lane of my half of a four lane road, recounting over the phone to the Prince my tale of woe regarding the truck mishap, and suddenly I�m screaming into the phone because a moron who had been driving ahead of me and had pulled into the left turn lane, suddenly changed his mind and jerked his car back into my lane just as my car was halfway past him. It happened too quickly for me to react at all, other than the scream, but apparently the goofball driver saw me at the last possible second before I would have hit him, and jerked his car back to the left and up onto the median and with only a small swerve on my part in the general direction of the car on the other side of me, it wound up being a VERY near miss. Let�s just say I was one big bundle o� raw nerves on the rest of the trip home.

So now I�m kind of stiff and sore, but basically ok. I took some ibuprofen and some kava so hopefully I won�t feel too much like crap for my all-day class tomorrow.

I guess it just wasn�t my night to be out and about. On the bright side, I did forget all about the PMS.

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Previous - Next
Last Five
Crappy job crap, weird neighbor, and someone whose baby I apparently want to have - 2006-05-08
Live from the dump - 2006-04-09
Kind of like a muzzle for your brain - 2006-03-29
...and then she fell ass-first into my cereal bowl - 2006-03-28
Playing catch-up - 2006-03-27

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