I am a dickweed. That's what you called me, I believe, the time I ran bumper-to-bumper with the car ahead of me so you couldn't cut in. Or was it the time I raced you for the off-ramp? No, that was "something-face," if I'm not mistaken. You were correct both times, and on the many other occasions I went out of my way to thwart your malign intentions on the road. And while I agree that blowing you a kiss after you flipped me off was probably needlessly showy, I think we can also agree that you were a goddamn moron.
This is not the real me. I am, in almost all circumstances, a pleasant, unassertive person, well-behaved and not spoiling for trouble. But encased in an SUV's worth of Japanese steel and with my lead foot on the pedal of my moral outrage, I am, situationally (emphasis mine), a bit of a jerk. (I don't admit this with sly pride, the way some total jerks would. I am properly chagrined by it.)
Whoa. Back up. Yeah, I said moral outrage. I don't know how else to explain it. Because I have broken down my behavior at the wheel, and that's what I come up with. At first, of course, I thought it was something simpler, more primordially male: a hostile jet of competitive testosterone at the thought of being shown up. Being passed on the freeway is a blunt physical metaphor for one's anxiety at being passed—superseded—on the food chain or the corporate ladder. Our reflex is instinctive: There's no way some baseball-hatted yahoo in a Dodge Club Cab Land Barge is doing that to me!
This is not what I meant by moral outrage.
Nor do I mean the simple moral police work of disciplining shitty drivers—the way you cut someone off and think, Well, he shouldn't have been going that fast on this road anyway. I am doing society a favor by slowing him down. I'm guilty of that, too, but it's not what I'm talking about.
No, what I'm talking about amounts to this: Wipe that smirk off your face. When some driver comes barrelling up on my left, past the many cars behind me, intent on cutting into my lane just in time to make the turn instead of taking his place at the end of the line, I'll do what I can to thwart him, and take a fierce glee in it if I do. Ratf--ktion!, as Nixon used to say. Because I hate that this guy expects the line of cars to open for him; hate his smug sense that this is how life is supposed to work for him; hate his belief that his impatience and chutzpah entitles him to that postage stamp of space between me and the car ahead of me. So I'll deny it to him if I can and score another one for Dickweed Justice. There's something morally uplifting for all of us, I contend, in deflating the easy presumptions of people like that.
I'd be uncomfortable with the obvious implications of Dickweed Justice—the suggestion that, in my angry rectitude, I am actually siding with social conformity while punishing mavericks ballsy enough break free of herd behavior—if it weren't for this: everyone does it. Yahoos in trucks, soccer moms in SUVs, college students in farty econo-boxes held together by old Nine Inch Nails stickers. They aren't mavericks and I'm not budging.
There are obvious contradictions and not-so-subtle self-aggrandizements in my notion of Dickweed Justice—I especially like the way it lets me off the hook for my bad behavior while condemning everyone else's—but what can I say; I'm still working out the kinks. No great philosophy hatches fully formed. It needs to be tested again and again, and if you're on the eastern stretch of the 215 Beltway tonight, right around rush hour, feel free to lend a hand.
For now, it's probably enough to say that yes, I'm a dickweed, but it's probably your fault.