A finger is a terrible thing to waste

Last week, I made someone on the road so angry with me they almost crashed into the median while violently giving me the finger. It is one of my proudest moments.

On the way home from my last class of 2008, I was driving along the NJ Parkway when someone came zooming up behind me. He stopped just short of my bumper and began flashing his bright lights at me. Now normally I move out of the left lane when I have gotten past the slow-moving car I wanted to pass, but with this numbskull doing his best to make me curse his name, I decided to have some fun. The Parkway at this point has three lanes, so I slowed down to go the exact speed as the car next to me. As the doofus behind me started swerving in and out between the two lanes, I began a maniacal laugh, knowing he could not get around us. After a few seconds of this, he tried to go into the right-most lane, but couldn't get over there either. He came back behind me, flashing his lights again, but I continued to shadow the car in the next lane. He eventually got back in the right lane and passed the car in the middle lane; at this point I sped up and blocked his path into the left lane as he looked desperately for an opening. I laughed a bit more, but by this time I started to grow tired of this - it had been going for over a minute, and it was hard work driving someone this crazy.

So I gave up and let him get in front of me. As he drove by me, he gave me the bird. But this was no ordinary middle finger experience. He had rolled his window down and stuck his hand out the window, pumping his arm back and forth in a most violent way. He continued this as he drove by me, got in my lane in front of me and drove off. As he drove off, his arm violently pumping with that one finger reaching skyward, he failed to notice the slight bend in the road, and his car veered out of the lane and towards the large wall separating the Parkway. He just managed to turn his car - using one arm of course - before ramming into the concrete. And of course, this made me wonder what I would have done had he crashed. Am I morally obligated to help a man who badly injures himself while shouting some of the most vile obscenities available at me? A question for the ages.

On board with a scary loud shouter

I'm now into month six of working in the city, and until today I had never felt scared. Sure, I had had situations that seemed odd, but nothing like what happened on the subway this morning. After the last stop before mine, a large man interrupted the calm commute by shouting at a unknown, horribly scared and quiet anonymous person in the corner of my car. Most of it made sense in that I couldn't make out complete sentences, but I heard phrases like "... you former law student ..." and "... won't get out of MY seat ..." But what scared me was when I heard him say something about "the end" and I noticed that he had a large suitcase.

This was when he started walking to my side of the car. It was funny, later, as I thought about it afterwords, that at this moment, as the large man, unabashedly shouting at something who was not saying anything, walked down the car, the heads of everyone who had been looking at him suddenly and violently shot down, eyes on the floor, like something out of a Rockette's show for the head. This, you might say, is when I really got scared.

As he got closer, he started saying more nonsensical things like "... as the white man says ..." and "... Jesus himself ..." (I don't think he was implying that Jesus was the white man.) But then he said the greatest thing which only added to my fear then (but which, had I heard it 10 years ago, would have been my senior quote in high school): "... talkin' 'bout a check. The next check you get is going to be in Hell. And they don't cash checks there."

You can see how, at the time, I might see these as the last words of a suicide bomber. As soon as I saw the first hint of Spring St, I stood up and walked to the door, crowding the man standing in front of me, eager like never before to get out of the subway.