Dissecting road rage

What is it about driving a car that makes us act so darned irrationally?

I thought about this question the other day when driving on Broadway toward Kingshighway in Cape Girardeau. A young woman (she knows who she is) zoomed around me just as the road changed over to two lanes.

She paused for an instant to give me a withering look and showed me a carefully selected finger.

Whoa, there.

I had no idea what I did to deserve this. I was driving a couple of miles over the speed limit, keeping the car pointed straight ahead and minding my own business.

She floored her Pontiac Sunfire up to the stop light where she waited for the lights to change. The exhaust coming out of her muffler might as well have come out of her ears.

It was a girl who barely looked old enough to have a license, but man, was she was fired up. She spent her time at the light craning her neck backward and giving me further looks of derision and creative hand gestures.

I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.

Had this girl mistaken me for someone else?

Was she in a big hurry to see some dying relative at the hospital?

Was she just plain crazy?

When the light turned green and she was still looking at me, I fought back. I laid on my horn and motioned at her to get moving.

That meant all-out war. This perfect stranger pointed straight at me before slamming her accelerator and screeching out of my life.

Wow. Now I was fuming mad, too. How on Earth did this happen?

It got me thinking. Somebody needs to do a study of all the strange behaviors people exhibit when driving. Things they would never, ever dream of doing in ordinary public life.

These behaviors include the aforementioned road rage and its close cousin "constant-lane-switchitis." I'd also mention other favorites like meticulous nose picking sessions and top-of-the lungs karaoke to Beyonce Knowles, but those might fall in a different category.

I can't analyze it perfectly, but I'll give it a try.

When you're behind the wheel you're in kind of a strange, in-between state of mind.

You're outside, yet not quite. You're moving, but you're sitting down. You're in control, but not completely.

So you have a mixture of things going on in your head.

You're safe. But it's the same safety a zoo-goer feels when tapping on the glass in front of the mountain gorillas. No matter what happens, you think, the things behind that glass will not lay hands on me.

You also feel partially invisible. Call it the anonymity of the open road.

You can honk, scream or dig for nasal gold and be quite certain never to face the consequences. Unless, of course, you have Jerry Seinfeld's bad luck and a girlfriend catches you "midpick."

So how does all this help explain my angry young friend?

I decided that the average teenage girl probably doesn't feel like she has that much power over a lot of her life. School, home, relationships. She probably gets dumped on a lot by a lot of different people for a lot of different stuff.

So for that brief moment in that anonymous atmosphere, she took it all out on me. I was the stand-in for her teacher, father, boyfriend or whoever else.

It was a drive-by rage dump-off. And for her sake I hope it worked.

I don't recommend it, I don't really like it, but at least now I can understand it.

TJ Greaney is a staff writer for the Southeast Misosourian.