Living in an area that is car focused means you are liberated by what a car can do and also bound by its limitations. At the drop of a hat I can be on a verdant road whizzing past old stone mansions and farmhouses feeling like a God on wheels. Conversely, when I'm doing errands on a weekend I'm at the mercy of the traffic surrounding me ,and I feel like a God with feet of clay. Most people adjust to this reality by being patient and making the best of it, but there are always a few bad apples who let their ugliness come out. Road rage is a weird kind of monster that seems to come out of nowhere. I try to keep an even keel but I'm not immune. In the moment after being wronged by another vehicle I feel the anger rise up in me for a brief second and become single-minded about exacting revenge before the better angels prevail. Today something different happened. In very heavy traffic I was pulling out of a parking lot to merge onto a main road and saw that the woman driving had left a gap for me to enter. I assumed she was letting me in but I creeped forward waiting...for what? An acknowledgement of some kind, I guess. A brief brush of eye contact. She gave me nothing. She had broken some sort of social contract and it felt like a betrayal. Finally I heard her shout something angrily from her car and I proceeded. She had still not made eye contact with me or changed her expression. Next to her sat and older version of herself with a similar sour countenance.