I hate it when I'm driving and the car in front of me is going slower than I want to go. I also hate it when the car behind me wants to go faster than I'm going, unless the reason I'm going so much slower than the car in back of me is that the car in front of me is just poking along, and then I just kind of feel that me and the car behind me are both in the same boat. So to speak. I hate when people pass me, and I hate it when I have to pass someone else. I hate it when there's a traffic jam and everything slows to a crawl, especially when it's really really hot and there's not even anything good on the radio. Or when it's really really cold out and there are ice patches or something, because no matter how careful you are, you just know some maniac is going to hit the ice doing sixty miles an hour and kill you. I hate when there's no traffic and a really great song comes on the radio and so you speed up a little and some state trooper pulls you over and gives you a ticket.

It's not that I hate driving. It's not even that I have unrealistic expectations, like that I should always have the right of way or that every other driver in the world should drive exactly at my pace. Because in my perfect universe I would be the only person driving and wouldn't have to worry about speed limits of rights-of-way or traffic jams. In my perfect universe I am also absolute ruler over all that exists, but that's a story for another day.

I'm not a totally selfish bastard. Like this one time I was on the highway and there was this massive traffic jam, I mean, and I was stuck literally for hours. I was really, really frustrated and angry. The guy on the radio said that there was this big wreck up ahead of me and people had even died and everything. It didn't help me not be angry, but I am a good person and I didn't get mad at the four people who were involved in the wreck. No matter how the accident happened, I figured that it was just one of those things that happens that's beyond anyone's control. I even felt bad for those four people. You see, the ones I was pissed at were the 100 million other people on the road. They're the ones who caused the traffic jam. If all of them had either stayed at home or left their houses three hours earlier, I could have cruised past the accident, nodded sympathetically to the emergency medical personnel, and been on my way.

That's the trouble with the world today. No one thinks about me, and what I need, and what they can do to make my life easier. Life would be so much simpler if everyone took a few minutes to do this every day.

Consider speed limits. When the laws were passed to set speed limits, no one considered me or how I might feel about them. It's monumentally unfair that I now have to consider them when I'm deciding how fast to drive.

People used to talk a lot about overpopulation. I don't know too much about that. But I do know that in my own daily life, I encounter way too many people. The number of people I speak to or have to answer questions for or encounter in traffic every day probably in the hundreds. Whereas the ideal number of people, for me personally, would be zero. And every day it seems we are moving further and further away from this ideal.

But I'm a dreamer, an idealist. I still envision a day when I don't have to talk to or look at anyone except those that I choose to see or speak to. It's my dream. Just call me a cock-eyed optimist.