What am I Driving At?

I am spending a lot of time driving at the moment; driving to work, driving to the radio and driving a golf ball straight onto the green. Hilarious joke I think you will agree. Incidentally, I have absolutely no interest in golf.

I amuse myself with a friend on the trips to and from the radio, and with podcasts on the way to work, but I find myself bored on the way home. “Well Gilder, simply put another podcast on your iPod!” I hear you bellow. I would, of course, do this if it did not mean I would likely be out of new podcasts by midweek. So instead I make time for a little bit of silence, for thinking about silly ideas and for hate.

One of the ideas I enjoyed toying with was of mounting a wide-angle lens camera (either still or video) onto the bumper of the car that could record the journey, where the happenings around the car can be kept seen in a far more expansive scope than can be seen from behind the windscreen. My reasons for wanting to do this are far from artistic, having their roots in petty pedantry and the constant quest for what is correct. Like a scientist, except interested exclusively with the occasions where I feel I have been wronged, or individuals have acted in a particularly foolish way.

I have chronicled before my experiences with Captain Poon and his hilarious rugby jersey, but road-based idiocy isn’t usually as amusing. I am repeatedly exasperated by jaywalkers who insist on timing their reckless road-crossing to ensure they pass as close as is humanly possible to the back of my car without actually having their foot chewed up by my tyre. In this bracket also reside the people who feel it is necessary to stand on the absolute edge of the pavement as a zebra crossing, as though they have so little time to spare that they are willing to risk having their wrists broken by a passing wing-mirror.

Of course it isn’t just pedestrians that annoy me, it seems as though this week the road-faring characters have been well and truly out in style and no mistake sonny Jim! People are bombing into/out of junctions, failing to indicate at roundabouts and, my very favouritest thing of all, manically swinging an all-in-one-go U-turn in the middle of the road. I’m half expecting to see a Dukes of Hazzard style jump interrupt my commute, sending a car barrel-rolling over my bonnet, playing out the horn-blast just as the windscreens come parallel and a toothless, silver-haired geezer flashes me a thumbs up and a cheeky grin. Before landing the vehicle on its roof where it bursts into flame, the trickle of fire slowly winding itself to the petrol tank as the driver struggles furiously to escape from the seatbelt that is holding him upside down in what has become a motorized oven, and before he has time to utter an antiquated expletive the flame reaches the petrol tank sending the car into a molten inferno which I see slowly shrinking in my rear-view mirror and scream to myself “That’ll serve you, you COCK~!”

As I’m sure you will have gathered by now, I have borne witness to some damn stupid feats of driving. I attempt to only get angry in retrospect, as I feel exploding behind the wheel is likely to cause a troublesome occasion. What I certainly never do is stare directly into the rear-view mirror of the car in front, gesticulating wildly and screaming muffled obscenities. The reason behind this is that, should something go awry on the road, what I want is for everything to be in order again as fast as is humanly possible, and I don’t feel that antagonising the driver in front will achieve this aim. I have to turn right on a four-way intersection in order to make my way into work every day. The traffic is passing both ways parallel to each other, and so it is only possible for me to turn right once the traffic passing in the opposite direction has cleared, but the vast quantity of furious tools that don’t understand why I don’t simply drive headlong into oncoming traffic so as to be less of a bother to them is truly astounding. I am 100% sure, however, they are incredibly busy and on their way to do something of incredible value. Such as taking their seatbelt off and driving as fast as possible into a wall.

So I have become worried about some of the things I write here, and how they would be taken in a new context, such as if I was involved in a road accident. What impact would this blog have? It is mostly intended to be frivolous, and even this somewhat more exasperated piece is really meant to be amusing, though I’m not really certain I am achieving that at this point. This query originally occurred to me as I was driving through a 40 zone that is a notoriously dangerous strip where several people have been run over and killed. This time of year it is dark by the time I pass through this stretch on the way home, so I always pay particular attention going through there, though having never seen people walking, the main impetus for vigilance is idiotic over-takers. There is a gag about over-takers soon seeing undertakers there, but I’ll be huffed if I am going to wrestle that one out properly now.

On the side of this particular bit of road, there is a wooden fence lining the road, and standing flush to the fence are steel girders. In order to explain the slightness of gap between the fence and the girders I would say that if you tried really hard, you could fit a single emaciated idiot in there, multiple if they stood side by side. So there were between 3 and 5 emaciated idiots jammed betwixt fence and girder, and I worried as I went past that they would slide something under the car, such as a rock, a Police-style stinger strip or the sliding trapper from Ghostbusters. Thankfully they did no such thing, but I was left wondering what sort of trouble I would get into if one of them foolishly darted out into the road and I ran him/her over, whether it wouldn’t be seen as accidental because I’d written a flippant blog about running someone over. Similarly should any sort of RTA occur to me, would this blog be dug out as some sort of character evidence, even if it is 2030 and I am in my forties and I look back on the person who I was when I wrote this blog and think I/he am/is an idiot? Would I be condemned because of my feeble attempts at comedy?

I later realised it definitely wouldn’t. After all, we will all have hovercars by 2030 and so there are no tyres there for people to get chewed up by. Although they might get mutated by the radioactive waves upon which my Ford Glider zips over their heads. Although hopefully I will, by then, be the President of a huge global umbrella company named Gilder Inc. and so I will be able to manufacture my own hovercars and so I could be driving the Gilder Glider. Or I could be a super-villain and be called the Giddler.

I have to drive into Cardiff tomorrow; I am going to the Chapter Arts Centre in order to attend a comedy open spot. It will be my first time in an actual comedy bill, as all my other live forays have been in competitions or fully open mic nights, so it will be interesting to see whether my stuff is able to stand alongside the material of professional comedians in any way, or whether I truly am a self-impressed pretender. The reality is likely somewhere in the middle, but true populist drama needs the extremes, so for the sake of goading a reaction out of readers I am either a genius or utterly shit.

I am not looking forward to driving in, as I have never driven directly there before, having been a passenger and led astray by the sat-nav last time, and then trekking quite a way to reach the actual building. Hopefully it will all go well, and I will be spared death, both in reality and in metaphority.

I think when somebody dies they go to a wonderous place, and that place is called Metaphority.

That is quite enough rubbish for one day, have a nice *insert appropriate time of day here*.