The art of merging

I've mentioned before that I do have some what of a superiority complex. I don't deny it, and I actually will admit it, especially when I'm behind the wheel of a car.  I've always loved to drive, even before I actually had a driver's license. I remember taking my Dad's old El Camino out for a spin, stopping by to pick up a friend, and zooming around the neighborhood. There was nothing like the freedom afforded to you when you put your foot on that gas pedal, turned up the AM radio and rolled the windows down. I never had any fear of driving, of going fast, of traveling to the unknown. It seemed as natural to me as walking.

So, for those reasons, I find it very hard to understand people who drive, but really don't know how to drive.  They don't know how to keep up with the speed limit, they don't know who has the right of way at a stop sign, especially a 4-way stop sign, they definitely can't figure out the rhythm of the round about and worst of all, they don't know how to merge onto the freeway.

Why is it that so many drivers think that the time you need to increase your speed is once you've climbed up the on ramp and are now on the freeway?  This drives me crazy.  Speed it up, people!  You should be merging with oncoming traffic at the speed that they are going.  That is why you MERGE ~ seamlessly, you don't cause everyone else to slow down or almost come to a complete stop because you can't quite figure out how if you should go faster to get in front of the oncoming car, or slowly slip in from behind.

And the art of merging also applies to the drivers that are already on the highway and driving in the slow lane.  Give the guy who is trying to merge some room.  Or make a courtesy lane change.  This really is a team sport, with all of us being on the same team, though you wouldn't know it the way most Americans treat the highway, like a war zone with every other driver being the enemy.

There is an art to driving and it is an art that needs to be practiced and perfected.  It is not something that you should be learning on the job.  It is much too important.  Driving today isn't as leisurely as it was in my childhood days, where you could ride without seat belts, hang your head out the window, or sit on the edge in the back of a pick-up truck.

No, in this day and age of faster speed limits, heavier traffic, and people in a hurry, driving has become a much more dangerous game, and one of the key moves is perfecting the art of merging.

Control Freaks

Why as humans, do we constantly question our purpose on the planet? Why is it that we have to create, build, discover, learn, explore, finish, manipulate, regulate, control and decide the roles of every living thing on earth? Did this all come from the Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, the I-Ching, and all the other religious texts? Where did we get such a superiority complex?

Other life forms just seem to be content to live in the natural world, to exist, satisfied by a good meal, a good nap, a litter of little ones to take care of, just kinda taking it easy. Then of course, there are those  issues like finding food and surviving their next "around the corner" predator, but hey, that's pretty much things we have to deal with too.  Our finding food, actually comes in the form of finding the money to afford the food, and our survival, well, we all know that our biggest predators are our very own brothers - as in humankind.

Another school shooting becomes just another news story, good for a couple of days, maybe drag it out for a week if there are enough deaths or injured. Actually, the dead and injured don't really count that much, we like to focus on the killer, the whack job, the mentally ill, the sick bastard (or sick bitch) in some cases. Write a book about it, better yet, see the movie.

You start losing faith, you start to fear sending your kids off to school, you start skipping trips to the mall, you feel nervous and scared walking in your home alone, and it doesn't even have to be dark.

No, this isn't a fire drill

I don't know the answers. But I do know, that with all the good humankind does, and I'm not discounting all the good we do, it gets overshadowed when this kind of thing happens. This post isn't about gun control, or knife control, or how too much sugar and weird chemicals can poison our bodies ~ no, I think it is simply that we're not as grand as we think we are.  We are not as evolved and civilized as we think we are.

They say in nature that an animal only kills when he needs to eat or is defending himself from another animal who needs to eat.  He doesn't usually just get pissed off and take out a few of his fellow breed or any other animal, for that matter. Unless of course, there can be rare cases of mental illness, which has happened, especially when we use them for our own entertainment, taking them out of their own habitat and enclosing them in one of ours.  Yes, I'm talking SeaWorld, with their small enclosures and forced training, tearing them away from their families; Circuses, where we make them perform and jump through hoops; and Zoos ~ nothing more than animal prisons. And we, nothing more than control freaks.

Animal cruelty on display

This morning all kinds of things are going through my head - and I'm sick of hearing about all of this gruesome behavior from my kind, as I'm sure you are.  I am pretty sure that of all the animals on the planet, we are the most messed up. And with every dreaded news story, with another tear shed in front of the TV screen, I can't tell if it is my numb mode or my survival mode that is being kicked up another notch.