Monsoon Martin's Open Letter of Grievance to the Drivers of Baltimore - Part One
Hello, Baltimoreans. I have driven among yous for several years now. To quote Frank Costanza, “I've got a lot of problems with you people, and now you’re gonna hear about it!”
I have found the people of Charm City to be, by and large, lovely and welcoming. But the same person who will hold the door open for you at Wawa - smiling broadly - will also, once driving, cut you off and unleash a shitstorm of profanity toward you. Often, that is also done while smiling broadly.
I present to you my list of grievances, many of which rise to the level of irrational loathing, and regarding which I have been told by mental health professionals, "When something is out of your control, the thing you can control is your reaction to it."
This is a worthy goal, my pursuit of which has been, to date, an utter failure. A work in progress, I suppose.
The list:
The Weaver. This is a driver who thinks he (let's face it, almost always a male) is playing a first-person rally car video game. This driver cuts it razor-close, but is long gone once I lay on my horn and gesticulate wildly as if to say, "What the fuhhhhh??!!" (Note: often accompanied by actual words and coarser gestures to that effect.) The weaver gives no shit. He is engaged in a road race with his friends (real or imagined) and we are all NPCs.
Corollary: Road Racers. These are packs of 4-5 numbnutses who believe that they are engaged in a high-stakes contest, whose winner earns glory and a handsome prize. In reality, they are just knuckle-dragging knuckleheads in shitty cars terrorizing other drivers.
Corollary: Car Farts. Some of these addle-pated blunderbusses actually modify their cars so that they produce deafening backfires, accompanied by jarring showers of sparks. The backfires sound very much like gunfire—especially when they happen right as one of these cars passes, as happened to me. Damn near soiled my pants, I did.
Note: This is a lengthy video. But it’s cued up to the right spot. (In case it isn’t, watch from about 2:40 to 3:10.)
The Maddeningly Polite Weaver. This is a conventional weaver, but with the addition of conscientious use of turn signals. Why does this aggravate me? If you're going to be an asshole, lean all the way in. Adding turn signals to narcissistic, unhinged driving is like shoving someone down the stairs and yelling “Sorry!” as they tumble along.
The Sociopathic Double Parker. This craven douchenozzle has stopped their car in the middle of the road—and if we’re lucky, put on the hazards as an irrelevant nod to traffic decorum. This driver is particularly infuriating when there’s an open area at the curb where they could have parked without disrupting traffic. Most infurating is when a driver double parks on a one-way street (or a street only wide enough for a single lane of traffic. No one can get by, and the sociopathic double parker give zero shits.
The Shitbird who treats the middle turn lane of a busy road like it's the shitbird’s own special onramp. This happens often on roads like Reisterstown, where you typically have two lanes going each direction and a center lane to assist with left turns. The lane is there to facilitate left turns leaving the roadway—not as your own personal onramp to help you make a left turn onto the middle=lane road.
Corollary: Ding-dongs who use the middle lane as an extra travel lane to become a bonus passing lane. I’ve seen several accidents that stemmed from center turn lane misuse.
The Backer-in. Friends, this list is not in any order—but if it were, I’m sure this infraction would be near the top of the list. This spree of sociopathy is particularly infuriating when deployed in a busy, crowded parking lot. Some dingus seems to have driven past a spot, but then suddenly throws it into reverse. Now every other car behind the dingus has to wait while said dingus executes this operation.
Corollary: the dinguses who do this are very often the least skilled at driving in reverse, necessitating several passes—each accompanied by fiddling ineffectually with the side mirrors—before the car is safely ensconced.
When I see a driver back into a spot that could have easily been a pull-through, it takes a great deal of restraint not to accost them and confiscate their license.
People who don’t have any idea how to act when encountering a blinking yellow (slow down and proceed with caution, yielding to other vehicles already in the intersection) or blinking red light (treat it exactly like a stop sign).