Brainstorming for essay 2

    So I was driving the other day, and this crazy thing happened, and on its own its not really good material for CNF I don't think, but then something else happened later, and then I thought that maybe packaged together they could make one.

    I was in ShopRite around 11 o'clock. It seems like whenever I'm there, like no matter what, its always the time that they're restocking the place. Like as soon as the clock strikes 8:00 PM, the hand trucks come out and the pallets stack up in the aisles, and its a damn hedge maze all of a sudden, replete with danger of the night crew pushing huge stacks of whatever down narrow aisles and almost running you over. It was precisely this experience that made me tie these two events of the evening together and maybe make a story out of it.

    I saw the big cart from around the corner of a stack of pallets, and I knew the guy pushing it couldn't see me, so I kind of stepped to the side of the aisle, behind a big box so I could be sure he wouldn't turn and hit me. When the guy came clear of the stack of pallets, he saw me waiting on the sideline or him to pass, and he humbly smiled and said "sorry" and maybe "thanks man" as he passed. For whatever reason, the very next thought in my head was, it couldn't have been that guy. What that meant to me was, the man I had encountered on the road earlier that night, in my hometown, the town  I grew up in, he could be anybody, anywhere around me, any of these people surrounding me right now. They all seemed like decent enough people, or at least none of them seemed like they were too awful, from how they were behaving right now. But because from what I saw of this guy, and old white guy, who looked more or less like everybody else in town, on a basic level, any one of these people could be a complete fucking lunatic asshole, and I would have no way of knowing, and he would have no way of knowing me. And I thought that was an interesting premise to work from. So I walked around the aisles a little bit more and thought some more about the people in them and how they might be a lunatic but probably weren't, but really about how I was going to make this story about driving parallel the story about cruising the aisles of the supermarket.

    I was running late, so I decided I would stop at the grocery store on the way home, rather than before I went out. I had come back to town to visit my cousin, who happened to be a the Italian Festival at the center of town with his wife and baby daughter. We strolled around and I saw people I knew from growing up. The guy who ran the municipal summer camp I used to work for was there. He'd organized the whole thing. We talked for a few minutes about our families, hugged, separated. I went back to my cousin's house, practically in town but actually right over the border in a neighboring town, with acres of woodland separating his apartment complex from the next residential address in what was technically his town. We were spending a quiet evening catching up, and decided to indulge ourselves a little and ordered cheeseburgers and fries from Stewart's. I had driven, because my cousin always insisted on buying. On the way home, we got caught behind a slow driver on a long, one lane road. He was hovering around 24 in a 25. After a few minutes, I flashed my high beams at him, hoping to suggest that he should speed up. I did it once, and I without tailgating him or hitting the horn or anything. I asked my cousin what it meant when he put his flashers on for about ten seconds and turned them off. He said that was an equivalent of "fuck you" from the driver ahead of me. So I kept driving, slowly, behind this person, on what was really the only direct route back to my coin's place. As luck would have it, after a few miles the road, which had been winding, straightened out a bit, and the only car on the other side was a couple miles away. Seeing the opportunity, I moved left to pass the slow driver in my lane. Then, much to my surprise, he sped up. A lot. And fast. I wasn't flooring my 6 cylinder honda, but it picks up pretty quick. This person was to only preventing me from being able to pass him, he was actually accelerating enough to stay half a car's length ahead of me.

    I wasn't interested in playing chicken, I just wanted to get home and eat a burger. I hit the brakes hard, and tried to get back in my lane, behind a person I now knew to be insane. But when I slowed to pull back in behind him, he slowed as well, causing me to nearly crash into the back of him. At this point, yes, I leaned on my horn liberally. But with no other recourse but to take a real long detour through the back roads of town, I stayed behind the crazy man, almost all the way home. At the next to last light before my cousin's house, one lane widened to three, two straight and one left. The crazy man slid left into the turning lane, and I stayed far on the right, leaving a lane between us. As much as I did not want to engage this crazy person, I couldn't help but to look to my left when I stopped at the light, and I was surprised again to see the man's arm extended out in my direction, offering me his middle finger. I only caught a glimpse of him because the light turned right away, and he sped through his left turn and away from us, but I didn't recognize him. He was an old white guy in a baseball cap. Or, to put it another way, he could be anyone's father or uncle or neighbor that I had grown up with or heard stories about or who golfed with my dad. And he was a dangerous asshole. We drove the remaining mile in peace and enjoyed our fried treats while the baby staggered around the living room and cried when we wouldn't give her bacon.