Late summer, early fall.

<A snippet in the life of Ben>

I was driving to the climbing gym.  I do this pretty regularly, but this time I was listening to country music, had the top down, and was generally in a good mood.  So when the car in front of me was driving slowly, I didn’t really worry about it.  I wasn’t in a rush,

The driver behind me wasn’t of the same opinion.  A few blasts of his horn, while flashing his high beams and driving close enough to my bumper that he could have driven into the back seat, made that abundantly clear.

But I’m in a good mood… why should I worry?  So I kept pace, maybe (definitely) even slowed down a little more, and kept driving.

Then, in a narrow road with a double-yellow line, the driver behind me tries to overtake me.  Honking the whole way.

I don’t appreciate this, and put the full 305 horsepower of the Mustang to use, making it abundantly clear that he is NOT getting around me… at least without doing a truly ridiculous speed.

(Note that this is in no way an admission of speeding on any road; instead, I simply accelerated to the “standard” driving speed rather quickly).

So he falls behind me, and I go back to normal driving.  After which he tries to overtake me again.

This time, I don’t need to do anything; we’re actually already at the lights, so there’s nowhere for him to go… except to pull up beside me, and roll down his window, it seems.

I was not expecting this.

I wasn’t surprised at his screaming though.  I calmly replied that the driver ahead of me was going slowly, so what could I have done?  That did not satiate him.

So instead, I turned up the music.  Country, I believe it was Brad Paisley or something.  Quite a lot of twang.  Many trucks, girls leaving, and dogs drinking good old fashioned Budweiser.  You know the stuff.

And he looked confused, stared at me, looked away, and drove off.