Biking home from work, pickup truck honks at me and does that "angry pass" thing (you know where they pass you going way over the speed limit to take back that 2 seconds of driving time you stole from them). I flip him off. He flips me off. I flip him off again. He pulls over, gets out of his truck, calls me a homophobic slur and threatens to run me over. I call him a homophobic slur back (my bad y'all) and keep biking. He gets back in his truck, and I experience a moment of terror as I wait to see if he will in fact murder me over literally nothing. Fortunately, he relents and drives away.

Fuck. Why do people keep driving cars when it's clear that driving is such a miserable experience that motorists are routinely inches away from flying into a murderous rage? Why the fuck is that my fault? I'm literally the only person I know who's not contributing to the problem. I'll never own a car again. I never want to kill someone. I never want to make someone feel as scared as motorists make me feel. Why does that make me a fringe weirdo?

Like seriously, I've never met another person in my life who would even consider swearing off cars, even though a lot of them seem to understand they're bad. It's so isolating. Like, as scary as experiences like this one are, I'm way more likely to be killed in a so-called "accident" than deliberately run down. Which means every day I have to look at all my friends and family, knowing they all own cars, and think "one day someone just like you is going to kill me, and you're OK with that." And then they say shit like "stay safe out there" like if you want me to be safe stop doing the thing that's gonna kill me!

Anyway, sorry for the rant. Hope this is an OK place to post this stuff.

  • IAMOBSCENE [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Damn that sucks. People are losing it in general I think, I was leaving a grocer and walking to my car at maybe 9 PM in one of the safest zip codes in the country and some guy is parked 15yds away from me on opposite side of the aisle, only two cars on that side of the building, right next to to the cart return and starts coming around from having been putting shit in the backseat and sees me walking in what could only be construed as toward him in the vaguest possible terms. From 30ft away he starts talking and initially I thought he must be on the phone but then I process that he just threatened to fucking stab me if I get any closer, calls me "Shaggy" (??? I was wearing a hat), tells me has a knife in his pocket... Like what the fuck, I'm going to mug a guy while carrying my groceries and walking toward the only other car in the lot. It wasn't that scary overall, I was packing pepper spray and figured he must be drunk or something. I just told him to calm down and showed him it was my car over there by unlocking it and he was still yelling crap so I just laughed and reiterated how fucking safe the area is, how much of a baby he is, made a dig about how finacially secure I am... He'd clearly just bought the shitty overpriced SUV because it had a temporary license plate, so I told him he should actually try to return it, get a compact like me and invest the rest in therapy...