1-1-06 Driving
In the film "Repo Man", the repo garage maintenance man says, "I don't drive. I don't wanna drive... The more you drive, the less intelligent you get."
Based on my experience, having been driving since I was sixteen (over four decades ago), we probably lose about one point of IQ for every 100,000 miles that we drive. This probably brings me down to around 140, at this point.
I've noticed the decrease. It preys upon my sense of self-worth, and gives me nightmares at night. But now I understand how it works.
It's not actually the driving, itself, that eats away at your cognitive abilities or intelligence level. It's the phenomena attached to driving situations where reaction, rather than reasoned response, takes place.
Driving is an acquired taste. It takes years of practice just to come up to a level where you might feel safe enough in heavy traffic on the interstate to take your eyes off the road long enough to glance at the speedometer. But a false comfort level obviously sets in with most people long before that. It did with me, anyway.
I hadn't even gotten out of my teens before I had a sense of comfort behind the wheel. I took all sorts of dangerous chances all the time. In my first car, I got distracted by a girl in the front seat with me, and the next thing I knew I had driven into a couple of those cement roadside markers they used to have. I was really surprised at how easily they broke away, and the minimal damage they did to the front of the car.
A few months later, I was distracted yet again by a girl in the front seat with me, and I ended up rear-ending a '65 ford sedan that was stopped to make a left turn. I hit the guy at around 35 mph, badly damaging the front of my car, but hardly damaging the ford at all. The girl in the front seat got a small bruise on her knee, but nobody else got injured at all. (Today, with all the safety measures that have been incorporated since that time, we both would've gotten face burns from the airbags and the goddamn seatbelt harness would've crushed my cigarettes. The damage to both cars would've been much more extensive and expensive, as well. More about safety measures later...)
After that, I had a sense of caution while driving. It was a sort of tensing up that I did, whenever behind the wheel. I concentrated on my level of alertness to what was going on around me. It was a driving pattern that I stayed with for many years.
The reaction patterns I developed were enough to save me from many accidents, but my driving habits tended to fall into a classic set of testosterone induced game playing attitudes on the road. I viewed cars in front of me as barriers that I had to get past, and I tended to handle intersections with the view that I always have the right of way, unless eye contact is made.
Although we hardly had any slightest sense of the term for many years, "road rage" was always a routine part of the driving experience until the past decade or so, when it was finally given a name. People apparently understood that the road rage behavior pattern was a very real possibility each day, and we all tended to be as intentionally unintrusive to other drivers' "territory" and implicit rights to their inertia. You did have a sense that there were consequences to any stupid trespasses into other drivers' "space".
It was more like the old west, actually. I mean, when most people carried guns, people were a lot more polite. The same was true before we called it "road rage" on the roads and highways. Back then, it was the proper response to having some bone-head piss you off. And it usually didn't last, either. Once anyone went into attack mode, the message was abundantly clear that the move made that pissed them off was a real transgression.
But somewhere along the line, the rules of the road changed. We got confused about it, and today we have people running up and down the roads and highways on varying sets of rules.
One apparent rule of the road brings us back to all the safety measures that have been incorporated into cars over the years. This is the "Volvo" rule, which says that since the person bought a Volvo, touted as the car you're most likely not to get hurt in if you get into an accident, it follows that you don't have to worry about getting into an accident. The Volvo rule accelerates the loss of intelligence from driving.
Of course, non-Volvo drivers rarely realize that Volvo drivers operate under this belief that they are driving in an alternate universe (where everything is completely safe). Consequently, you can see Volvos making some pretty weird maneuvers, causing other cars to make compensatory maneuvers that often get them into accidents. Naturally, the offending Volvos are never directly involved in the actual collisions with other cars, further adding to the uncanny sense of driving in an alternate universe where everything is completely safe. But the safety bubble of the Volvo driver can never succeed when going up against a truck.
The bigger the truck, the larger the "space" it needs to stop, swerve, or accelerate in. Most car drivers are aware of the larger space needed for a truck to accelerate, so they do whatever's necessary to get out from behind them before they get to the next hill or traffic light. But then they have no clue about the rest of the truck inertia situations, so that when the trailer overloaded with several tons of payload comes up behind a car in the middle lane that's going slower than all the rest of the traffic around them, the idiot in the car has no slightest idea of the potential for disaster looming in their rear-view mirror.
The highway affords all sorts of examples for the varied mix of apparent rules that people drive under. Some people operate under the belief that you can only pass on the left, so they stay in the left lane. Other people operate under the belief that the middle lane is the "travel lane", so they don't feel they have any obligation to pass anyone in the right lane. And everyone has their own beliefs about what the real speed limit is on the highway.
The posted speed limit is never the real speed limit, y'see...
The real speed limit is the speed that cops will put down their coffee, shift out of Park, and chase you down and give you a ticket for. Generally, this speed limit is the "flow of the traffic" speed. I mean, if 99% of the cars around you are all going 75, even though the speed limit is 65, then the cops are only going to go after the one who's bobbing back and forth between the middle lane and the left lane, doing 85 or more.
The "flow of the traffic" rule is that you remain in your place in line and just "go with the flow". For the most part, experienced commuters will be happy enough to follow this rule as long as the traffic flow stays 5 miles per hour or more over the speed limit. Of course, within this kind of traffic, there's a couple of rules, as well.
One of them is that if you have chosen the left lane to travel in, it's your absolute duty to the rest of the cars behind you to NEVER leave enough space between your car and the car in front of you for someone in the middle lane to squeeze into. It's also your duty to all the cars behind you to make every effort to keep that left lane moving faster than the middle lane, otherwise you should eat crow and find a place in the middle lane as soon as humanly possible.
Here is where we come into the realm of what I like to call "the Courtesy Clowns". The Courtesy Clowns operate in some oddly warped mindset that no traffic exists behind them. They see someone that wants to come into the traffic flow and so they LET THEM PULL OUT IN FRONT OF THEM!
Exactly opposite to the Courtesy Clowns, there are the ones who make it their mission in life to turn everyone else on the road into a Courtesy Clown. These are the ones who wait for the opportunity to pull out in front of you, with the attitude that if you don't like it, then you're "not being very courteous." And these insufferable morons will not only pull out in front of you as fast as they can, they will then go slower than the traffic flow that existed before they inserted themselves in front of you.
But there's some truly supernatural phenomena to be observed in all of this, if you care to notice it. Nine times out of ten, when some insufferable moron pulls out in front of you like that, if you follow them patiently enough for a while, you'll see that they usually get a "payback" in the exact form within a minute or two when somebody else pulls the same dumb maneuver on them. It's "instant Karma" on the highways!
And there's more supernatural phenomena, as well. If you've been driving long enough, you CAN TELL when somebody wants to invade your space, wants to change lanes and insert themselves in front of you, wants to make a left turn but never uses their turn signal, wants to pull out in front of you from a side street. You can FEEL the intended maneuver before any outward signs manifest themselves. This is when you get the urge to give your car just enough additional speed to close the gap, to make it as difficult or dangerous as possible for the other driver to do what you FEEL they want to do.
And brother, THIS is where "road rage" really lives and breathes! It's a goddammed PSYCHIC WAR out there! It's where total insanity takes over from an otherwise reasonable existance. What REALLY pisses people off on the roads and highways is this sense that one has not only had their physical space threatened, but that their intentions have somehow been picked up, as well! It's also a real kick in the head to find yourself outsmarted by anyone, having failed utterly to "pick up on it" soon enough before it happened to have done anything about it!
This is where the decreasing level of intelligence actually takes place. There you are, driving for years and going through these little dramas every day, sensing this and feeling that, and responding according to your "gut feelings" in this manner. But then when it comes to the final moment of the game, no matter who wins or loses in the final maneuver, both drivers DENY the higher level of the gamesmanship.
The mechanism by which driving can make you less intelligent is denying that this level of perception and game playing can exist at all.
If you argue for your own limitations then, sure enough, they're yours.
Based on my experience, having been driving since I was sixteen (over four decades ago), we probably lose about one point of IQ for every 100,000 miles that we drive. This probably brings me down to around 140, at this point.
I've noticed the decrease. It preys upon my sense of self-worth, and gives me nightmares at night. But now I understand how it works.
It's not actually the driving, itself, that eats away at your cognitive abilities or intelligence level. It's the phenomena attached to driving situations where reaction, rather than reasoned response, takes place.
Driving is an acquired taste. It takes years of practice just to come up to a level where you might feel safe enough in heavy traffic on the interstate to take your eyes off the road long enough to glance at the speedometer. But a false comfort level obviously sets in with most people long before that. It did with me, anyway.
I hadn't even gotten out of my teens before I had a sense of comfort behind the wheel. I took all sorts of dangerous chances all the time. In my first car, I got distracted by a girl in the front seat with me, and the next thing I knew I had driven into a couple of those cement roadside markers they used to have. I was really surprised at how easily they broke away, and the minimal damage they did to the front of the car.
A few months later, I was distracted yet again by a girl in the front seat with me, and I ended up rear-ending a '65 ford sedan that was stopped to make a left turn. I hit the guy at around 35 mph, badly damaging the front of my car, but hardly damaging the ford at all. The girl in the front seat got a small bruise on her knee, but nobody else got injured at all. (Today, with all the safety measures that have been incorporated since that time, we both would've gotten face burns from the airbags and the goddamn seatbelt harness would've crushed my cigarettes. The damage to both cars would've been much more extensive and expensive, as well. More about safety measures later...)
After that, I had a sense of caution while driving. It was a sort of tensing up that I did, whenever behind the wheel. I concentrated on my level of alertness to what was going on around me. It was a driving pattern that I stayed with for many years.
The reaction patterns I developed were enough to save me from many accidents, but my driving habits tended to fall into a classic set of testosterone induced game playing attitudes on the road. I viewed cars in front of me as barriers that I had to get past, and I tended to handle intersections with the view that I always have the right of way, unless eye contact is made.
Although we hardly had any slightest sense of the term for many years, "road rage" was always a routine part of the driving experience until the past decade or so, when it was finally given a name. People apparently understood that the road rage behavior pattern was a very real possibility each day, and we all tended to be as intentionally unintrusive to other drivers' "territory" and implicit rights to their inertia. You did have a sense that there were consequences to any stupid trespasses into other drivers' "space".
It was more like the old west, actually. I mean, when most people carried guns, people were a lot more polite. The same was true before we called it "road rage" on the roads and highways. Back then, it was the proper response to having some bone-head piss you off. And it usually didn't last, either. Once anyone went into attack mode, the message was abundantly clear that the move made that pissed them off was a real transgression.
But somewhere along the line, the rules of the road changed. We got confused about it, and today we have people running up and down the roads and highways on varying sets of rules.
One apparent rule of the road brings us back to all the safety measures that have been incorporated into cars over the years. This is the "Volvo" rule, which says that since the person bought a Volvo, touted as the car you're most likely not to get hurt in if you get into an accident, it follows that you don't have to worry about getting into an accident. The Volvo rule accelerates the loss of intelligence from driving.
Of course, non-Volvo drivers rarely realize that Volvo drivers operate under this belief that they are driving in an alternate universe (where everything is completely safe). Consequently, you can see Volvos making some pretty weird maneuvers, causing other cars to make compensatory maneuvers that often get them into accidents. Naturally, the offending Volvos are never directly involved in the actual collisions with other cars, further adding to the uncanny sense of driving in an alternate universe where everything is completely safe. But the safety bubble of the Volvo driver can never succeed when going up against a truck.
The bigger the truck, the larger the "space" it needs to stop, swerve, or accelerate in. Most car drivers are aware of the larger space needed for a truck to accelerate, so they do whatever's necessary to get out from behind them before they get to the next hill or traffic light. But then they have no clue about the rest of the truck inertia situations, so that when the trailer overloaded with several tons of payload comes up behind a car in the middle lane that's going slower than all the rest of the traffic around them, the idiot in the car has no slightest idea of the potential for disaster looming in their rear-view mirror.
The highway affords all sorts of examples for the varied mix of apparent rules that people drive under. Some people operate under the belief that you can only pass on the left, so they stay in the left lane. Other people operate under the belief that the middle lane is the "travel lane", so they don't feel they have any obligation to pass anyone in the right lane. And everyone has their own beliefs about what the real speed limit is on the highway.
The posted speed limit is never the real speed limit, y'see...
The real speed limit is the speed that cops will put down their coffee, shift out of Park, and chase you down and give you a ticket for. Generally, this speed limit is the "flow of the traffic" speed. I mean, if 99% of the cars around you are all going 75, even though the speed limit is 65, then the cops are only going to go after the one who's bobbing back and forth between the middle lane and the left lane, doing 85 or more.
The "flow of the traffic" rule is that you remain in your place in line and just "go with the flow". For the most part, experienced commuters will be happy enough to follow this rule as long as the traffic flow stays 5 miles per hour or more over the speed limit. Of course, within this kind of traffic, there's a couple of rules, as well.
One of them is that if you have chosen the left lane to travel in, it's your absolute duty to the rest of the cars behind you to NEVER leave enough space between your car and the car in front of you for someone in the middle lane to squeeze into. It's also your duty to all the cars behind you to make every effort to keep that left lane moving faster than the middle lane, otherwise you should eat crow and find a place in the middle lane as soon as humanly possible.
Here is where we come into the realm of what I like to call "the Courtesy Clowns". The Courtesy Clowns operate in some oddly warped mindset that no traffic exists behind them. They see someone that wants to come into the traffic flow and so they LET THEM PULL OUT IN FRONT OF THEM!
Exactly opposite to the Courtesy Clowns, there are the ones who make it their mission in life to turn everyone else on the road into a Courtesy Clown. These are the ones who wait for the opportunity to pull out in front of you, with the attitude that if you don't like it, then you're "not being very courteous." And these insufferable morons will not only pull out in front of you as fast as they can, they will then go slower than the traffic flow that existed before they inserted themselves in front of you.
But there's some truly supernatural phenomena to be observed in all of this, if you care to notice it. Nine times out of ten, when some insufferable moron pulls out in front of you like that, if you follow them patiently enough for a while, you'll see that they usually get a "payback" in the exact form within a minute or two when somebody else pulls the same dumb maneuver on them. It's "instant Karma" on the highways!
And there's more supernatural phenomena, as well. If you've been driving long enough, you CAN TELL when somebody wants to invade your space, wants to change lanes and insert themselves in front of you, wants to make a left turn but never uses their turn signal, wants to pull out in front of you from a side street. You can FEEL the intended maneuver before any outward signs manifest themselves. This is when you get the urge to give your car just enough additional speed to close the gap, to make it as difficult or dangerous as possible for the other driver to do what you FEEL they want to do.
And brother, THIS is where "road rage" really lives and breathes! It's a goddammed PSYCHIC WAR out there! It's where total insanity takes over from an otherwise reasonable existance. What REALLY pisses people off on the roads and highways is this sense that one has not only had their physical space threatened, but that their intentions have somehow been picked up, as well! It's also a real kick in the head to find yourself outsmarted by anyone, having failed utterly to "pick up on it" soon enough before it happened to have done anything about it!
This is where the decreasing level of intelligence actually takes place. There you are, driving for years and going through these little dramas every day, sensing this and feeling that, and responding according to your "gut feelings" in this manner. But then when it comes to the final moment of the game, no matter who wins or loses in the final maneuver, both drivers DENY the higher level of the gamesmanship.
The mechanism by which driving can make you less intelligent is denying that this level of perception and game playing can exist at all.
If you argue for your own limitations then, sure enough, they're yours.
posted by Jeff Barnard at 8:53 AM
<< Home