Nothing But Trouble
Moral dilemmas seem to be gripping the culture right now. How do we stop mass shootings? How do we solve racism? How do we stave off climate catastrophe? How do I live by my ideals in an increasingly complex world? Is it even possible to be the change I want to see in the world, if my entire existence is controlled by large corporations making reality-altering decisions under the protection of their purchased politicians? It’s terrifying and exhausting, and it is very bad for my particular brand of anxiety (the kind where you fret over every perceived moral failing).
Our black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking (made exponentially worse by social media) has oozed over into daily interactions. People are tense. The stakes feel impossibly high. (A man recently broke the skull of a teenager at a baseball game because the teen was wearing a hat during the singing of the National Anthem.) People are reduced to symbols: this person in line at Starbucks represents “everything wrong with America today.” And at any moment, a minor conflict could go viral or get violent, just like that.
Four years ago, I had a tiny road rage incident with a pedestrian near my house, and as insignificant as it might seem on paper, it really shook me, and it took me a while to figure out why.
It happened on my way to therapy. My therapist’s office is a zippy four minute drive from my apartment in Los Angeles. For those of you already judging me, yes, that is a 1.1 mile, 18 minute walk on mostly flat surfaces in a city known for its perfect temperatures and dangerously low levels of rainfall, and I am relatively young able-bodied woman. But even after living in New York City for 13 years, a mile on foot is just too far.
Or maybe I should rephrase that. Because I lived in New York City, a mile on foot is just too far. For over a decade, I trudged the stinky New York streets, and I’ll be damned if I have to walk to an appointment again. Don’t get me wrong. We love walking in Los Angeles. But only if it’s for leisure. For the lucky ones in Los Angeles, walking is a perk, not a necessity. (Not to be confused with hiking, an activity in which we voluntarily walk up a hill in the hopes of seeing a celebrity.) Driving is my reward for over a decade of traversing sidewalks coated in trash juice and cockroach guts. Quietly enduring LA traffic is my respite from the years of aggressive manspreading, drive-by butt-pokings at crowded intersections, and who can forget the time a guy spit on me in the subway?
So yes, obviously, I need therapy. And for the reasons described above, I need to drive to it.
To get to the main road in front of my house, I must contend with two stop signs. First, I travel a tiny distance to a stop sign at the end of my road. Then I turn left. This left turn deposits you almost immediately to a second stop sign holding you back from the whizzing 35 mph traffic on the main road. The reason I’m describing this is because I need you to visualize me in my Prius making a small turn followed instantly by a stop sign. Did you imagine it yet? Okay. So now let me ask you this: in your vision, did I look beautiful? Just kidding, I already know the answer to that (yes). More to the point: was I going fast? Of course not. Because that would be impossible. I simply didn’t have enough distance between the two stop signs to accelerate much, especially with my car in Eco Mode, which is kind of like a Debbie Downer for your gas pedal.
The point is: I was driving slow. In my estimation, I was probably going about 4 miles per hour. As I was making the turn, I saw a runner on the sidewalk approaching the intersection. He saw me and slowed slightly, doing that little trot runners do when they’re waiting at a corner and want everyone to know They Are On A Run. My brain processed this as “he sees me and is letting me pass.” I pulled up to the stop sign and passed it slightly, jutting my car out into the road so I could see oncoming traffic coming around the curve.
Suddenly, I saw the runner fully sprinting directly towards my driver’s side window - much faster than he was before. He started banging on my window, screaming. I couldn’t make out the words exactly, but he was pointing at the stop sign, which was slightly behind me. He was furious that I stopped my car a few feet past the sign.
(And yes, technically, he was correct. I will fully admit to you right now that I did not follow the letter of the law. You are supposed to come to a complete stop before the stop sign, and then you can drift out into the intersection a little if you need to see better.)
From inside my car cocoon, I pointed to the stop sign and to the road and shouted “SORRY!” and shrugged my shoulders Cathy cartoon style. This did not go over well with Running Man. He moved to the other side of my car, trying to show me how egregious my crime was, using his arms as measurement. I didn’t know what else he wanted me to do at this point. But I guess whatever I was doing only made him angrier, because then he started BANGING HIS FIST on my window. Now my heart was beating as fast as his. My face turned read as I noticed people with strollers and very thin Los Angeles bodies staring at us.
He kept punching the window. It really seemed like he wanted me to get out of the car so we could physically fight each other. Legitimately scared, my body chose the flight option. I gently let off the brakes, just to give him the ole “I’ll be moving along now you psycho!” signal. He backed away as I slowly turned out onto the main road. And it was at this point that Running Man began picking up rocks and throwing them at my car.
I spent the next three minutes of the drive loudly cussing and holding back tears. Thank God I’m on the way to therapy, I thought. She’s ready and waiting for me! Those are the best types of therapy sessions. Ones in which you burst through the door, emotions code-red, and throw your ticking time-bomb of a brain like a hot potato to the therapist, and scream “YOU FIGURE IT OUT!”
My therapist is a kind and patient woman. An hour later, I left feeling like the bomb had been diffused.
But that afternoon, the ticking returned as I kept going over what had happened with Running Man. I relayed the incident to my boyfriend and even showed him Running Man’s hand prints which were all over the dusty passenger side window. I texted my sisters. None of this made me feel better, and soon the scene kept replaying over and over. I couldn’t figure out if I was in the wrong or not, and in my brain, this sort of dilemma cannot stand. I will, sometimes for years, obsess over tiny incidents like this, clues to the ultimate mystery that I must solve: Am I good person? Or am I bad? In the height of my anxiety, there is no in between.
Having nowhere else to turn, I did the unthinkable. I took to Twitter. I don’t need to tell you that things never go well when someone “takes to Twitter.” But I took to Twitter and I took it good.
I tweeted a mini-thread venting about how this man went apeshit on my car. A few favs trickled in, releasing those endorphins I needed into my thirsty body, proof that I was, indeed, still a good person.
But then, a woman responded with: “Interactions with drivers can be terrifying to a pedestrian or cyclist. 85 pedestrians were killed by cars in Los Angeles last year.” Excuuuuuuuuse me? Who said anything about killing? She wasn’t even there, and now she’s lumping me in with statistics that probably involved high speeds and drunk SnapChatting?
Look, I get it. There’s a power differential when it comes to pedestrians and cars. I was a pedestrian for 13 years in New York. I fancied myself a runner at one point too, running on the very sidewalk where this incident took place. I’ve even been struck by a slow moving car in a parking lot. But that day, I was not the pedestrian. I was just a girl, behind the wheel of a gigantic hunk of metal, asking Los Angeles to turn right. And he was just a boy, punching a car window, kindly asking me to throw down.
I read this woman’s tweet, and I thought, You know what? Don’t engage. I took a deep breath, waited 5 seconds, and immediately proceeded to engage. I typed, “I get what you’re saying, but this was a slow speed, low stakes situation. He was not in danger of me hitting him.” And then I added, for amazing reasons that I have yet to discover, “By the way, I’ve never been in a car accident while driving or even gotten pulled over.” SEND. GAME OVER, BITCH.
Moments later, she replied, “Actually, we don’t call them *accidents* anymore. We call them crashes, as 99% of accidents are caused by driver error.” Oh dear Jesus in heaven. We. We were gonna go there. We had taken it to the place I hate most: the semantics swamp.
I searched for ammo. (A great source of ammo in any Twitter feud is your opponent’s bio. This is where you often find out that the man telling you to “jump off a building you unfunny whore” is a “Christian. Dentist. Father of two beautiful daughters.”) Her bio read: “Vegan Cycling Activist.” And with those three simple words, I deleted all my tweets to her and the entire original thread. Let’s pack it up boys, show’s over! Her bio wasn’t ammo, it was the writing on the wall. This was not an argument I wanted to be in, let alone win. To be clear: I have no problem with vegans or cyclists or activists. I just prefer to not argue on Twitter with someone whose online brand is all three of those things combined. My moral high ground is the Dead Sea compared to their Everest-level eco-friendly, ethically-sourced Twitter feed. It’s pointless.
It turned out that my attempts at validation on Twitter ended up only making the situation worse. That night, I found myself lying in bed, heart racing, rewinding the Running Man Incident, now with a bonus Chapter 2: Vegan Cycling Activist Actually Woman! I started imagining what I should have done. I should have gotten out of the car and calmed the Running Man, like how Crocodile Dundee calmed that water buffalo with a gentle hum and a hook ‘em horns hand signal.
I rolled around on my memory foam mattress, slamming my head into my pillow, trying to shut off the thoughts. (It’s incredibly appropriate that it’s called “memory foam.” Because it’s where I lie awake at night, combing through my favorite memories!)
I hit myself with a barrage of questions:
- Did I almost kill a man today?
- Isn’t this kind of how the plot of that movie “Nothing But Trouble” starring Dan Aykroyd and John Candy started? They gently rolled through a stop sign and then somehow ended up being held hostage by a psychotic judge who likes to kill people on a roller coaster he calls “The Bonestripper”? And for some reason Tupac is in it?
- What if Running Man is actually not just a Running Man but he’s a Running-HOLLYWOOD Man?
- Is Running Man a powerful comedy gatekeeper? Oh my god, he’s texting everyone in comedy right now. I’ve been blacklisted!
- Oh god. I wasn’t wearing any makeup. FUCK!
- But wait, wasn’t this guy actually kind of aggressive and scary?
- Why did he so violently overreact to someone merely blocking his path to more cardio?
- Now hang on, what about what Vegan Cycling Activist said!
- Was I overly defensive with Vegan Cycling Activist?
- Why was I so mean to that lady on Twitter?
- She is probably giving a homeless puppy a bath right now!
- Why do I hate homeless puppies?
- It’s settled. I am a bad person.
- Hmmmm. But am I? Let’s start over, from the beginning.
Let’s just say I was not doing well at this time in my life. I was depressed and fixated on all kinds of things like this, big and small, personal and impersonal. With the help of my therapist, I worked hard to live in the gray, to forgive myself and others for our faults and mistakes, to draw more livable moral boundaries and decipher the difference between unusable rage and rage that fuels real action. I learned (again and again), that social media is almost never the place to hold court for your soul.
In the years since, I have been so grateful for the work I did on my moral anxiety, because I have been able to use those lessons when confronting the cultural and political wars of today. I still struggle with it, but at least I have a toolbox at the ready. All you can do is try to be a little better, do good where you can, and try to not succumb to the non-stop purity tests that fuel the economy of social media, which inevitably bleed over to our real world scuff-ups.
And to the Running Man, wherever you are, I dare you to come to that intersection again when I’m there. You’ll see me making a stop so distinctive that if you set up a Jenga tower just on the other side, I could kiss it with my bumper and not even make it sway.
Man Body Slams Teen At Baseball Game
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