Tight Squeezes, Road Rage, and Self-Obsession

The streets are so narrow you start to wonder if you’d squeeze between cars somehow more safely if you turned your music down. Driving the residential streets of Venice Beach, like many impacted neighborhoods, is a classic communal moment where, for a brief moment, drivers get pissed, throw their hands up, and mutter something about the other car taking up the whole road. 

It’s a tight fit. 

And, the thing is, everyone thinks they are the one hugging the parked cars to their right. The assumption is that it’s always the other driver who is hogging the road. 

Here’s the spoiler: we’re all further out in the middle than we think. 

That’s the human condition, though, isn’t it? We’re self obsessed. We’re consumed by our own experience and how worried we are about clipping the side mirror on a parked car that we throw our hands up at the other driver to outsource our reason for the stress. 

We’re all taking up space in the lane we’re supposed to be sharing and sometimes it’d be nice if we looked outside of our self-obsessed perspective. There’d be less road rage anyway.