Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Road Rage Averted

I drove to work and thought of a story idea I had that I'll almost certainly never start. Kind of a chain reaction thing centered around road rage. I'll give you TMI for a minute...our AC is out, and Sears won't send someone until Friday to look at it.

Sidebar - Sears initially told us we couldn't have someone until July 16th. JULY 16TH!!! Our AC is new. I actually, for once in my life...because it was thousands and thousands of dollars, spent an extra thousand on a Master Service Agreement. For five years Sears gives me free maintenance and repair. We called them every day (my wife joined the fray yesterday) and got it bumped to July 12th...then July 5th...which is MUCH better, but it took 12 calls. TWELVE. For THIS...I paid those fuckers a thousand dollars. I'm so pissed off at Sears right now (this is not the first issue we've had) Anyway...

So it's hot and sticky (because we opened all the windows in the house) and I'm irritable, and the girls who come to watch Lily until the bus picks her up were late, and a friend of a friend came over to look at the AC just to see if there was anything he could do to fix it without Sears noticing and voiding the warranty. And so he said..."Come outside I want to show you something" and I hate leaving Lily alone for many reasons, not the least of which is related to THIS (click link if you wish), but I walked outside because this guy was doing me a favor and for no charge, so he showed me the thing that wasn't working that he could do nothing to fix and I thanked him and went inside.

Lily had taken my absence as tacit approval to have a potty accident on the couch...and it was the messy kind...and it's hot...and I'm frustrated...and so at the end of all that shit (literally) I'm finally in the car and the girls (just one today) are watching Lily and I'm driving to work and listening to Scars on Broadway and being at home in my anger...and I just think again about this story idea...the concept of which is that everyone is the hero from their own viewpoint and everyone else is the villain. And the idea was to take a very black and white 'incident' like a traffic accident...or something...and follow the story from different angles. 


And I thought of myself in the role of "victim" and then I thought of myself in the role of "villain"...and I could easily imagine in the frame of mind I was in...cutting someone off...or getting pissed off at BEING cut off, and driving to catch up...and flipping that person off...and things escalating (previous road rage link). And I realized...none of that shit has ANYTHING to do with me. The accident wasn't my fault (or Lily's, truth be told)...the AC wasn't the guy's fault...it's all unrelated. The only thing tying all that crap together is ME because I'm the one experiencing it, and if the story is told from MY point of view then the reader maybe understands why I was so pissed that I did something stupid...but if the story is told from the point of view of the other guy...who KNOWS what's going on in his life...same shit? Maybe. Maybe worse.


And somehow through that whole process of rationalizing it and recognizing the uselessness of it, I just...let it go. And I'm in a much better frame of mind.