2006-03-30
Welcome Home
I found my rage.
It feels like coming home to be red-faced, heaving, and cursing when for almost four solid days, I did not once sweat outside of the gym and I did not once hear the words, "fuck", "dammit", "asshole", or "fisted" come up in my inner monologue, let alone the dialogue that I have with any number of people.
Mercifully, the insanity stopped and I am back to full Russian Rage power.
How'd I get it back?
Easy.
I drove home from Phoenix at 4 pm on Tuesday. See? Literally, coming home. It feels like I came home and I got back to feeling rightened while I was coming home.
Weird.
Not really.
I guess that would be weird to a stoned college kid who is only just discovering the joy of simple, circular logic as it applies in everyday life.
Anyway.
I'm getting a new job at my current company and in my current department. Ironically, it's a job that I turned down last year and the irony is that the job itself is based on a large volume of work that I did for a single client over the course of two years.
You mean you turned down a job that a company based almost solely on what you were already doing by your own design?
Yes. Yes I did.
Why? What the hell were you thinking? Are you stupid?
Hell no, I'm not - are you? Here' what I was thinking: I'm not going to be a guinea pig; I will not be able to negotiate a gigantic raise right now; this position will either disappear or expand next year; I want to go back to my couch and sleep for awhile. That's what I was thinking when it was offered to me last year. And look how right I was, mofos.
Someone else laid the groundwork and set the expectations; I am negotiating a GIGANTIC raise; the position expanded and was re-offered to me; I no longer want to spend the majority of time on my hand-me down couch. Now quit interrupting me.
I was in our Phoenix office on Tuesday and when I got in my car at 4 PM, I found my rage and for that, I am eternally grateful, as are my doctor, my pharmacist, the makers of my anti-anixiety-take-this-in-an-emergency-doggy-mama�s-little-helper.
Tucson doesn�t have freeways and if someone actually stops puffing on the eternal joint that my beloved city smokes each legislative season to make them all very lazy and to make them all ask the question, �Why bother? That project is going to end up being a pain anyway. Dude, stop! You�re wasting pot! You have to hold the carb on that bong!�
Yeah, if my city government wasn�t essentially one big stoner, they might put a freeway in and that�s about the time that I would put in my notice and find someplace else just like Tucson only without a freeway.
I HATE freeways.
If I am going to be stuck in my car, I don�t want to be stuck with semis, embankments, billboards, and other red-faced drivers as my scenery.
And accidents.
Where there are freeways, there are huge, awful wrecks.
Wrecks like the two that I navigated on Tuesday trying to get home from my big, important day in the Phoenix office. To drive 115.6 miles, door to door, to get home, it took me three hours. Two and a half of those were spent within about 15 minutes from downtown Phoenix and I am not a speeder but by the time I broke free of the snarl and the pavement scenery, I was huffing and puffing so severely from nerves that I drove about 8,000 miles per hour to get home.
When I saw the line to get on the freeway to get to the Interstate to get back to Tucson, I felt a little sick. Then I saw all the a-holes who were weaving in and out of the line and the idiots who were causing wrecks because they are arrogant Phoenix drivers who must look down on the Tucson people like we don�t know how to drive or something.
Listen, Mister.
You can�t take advantage of me.
I live in Tucson.
And I WILL GET HOME ALIVE.
I was so irate while I was on that frigging freeway that I think I turned profanity and giving the finger into a powerful ritual dance wherein I can do or say whatever I want to and not one, single person can hear me or see me.
I gestured wildly but believe, me those big-city folks must have already seen it all because not one person acknowledged me � not when I flipped them off and not when I tried to get them to join me in solidarity against the guy in the Previa with the handicapped plate. Come on. The plate gives him PARKING privileges, not DRIVING privileges and he drove like the plate made him the official I Can Drive in Three Lanes At Once and You Can�t Do Anything About it king of the road.
And people do this every single day, twice a day without complaint.
If I had a freeway commute every day to go to work, I would easily be locked up ion a special place by now.
Seriously?
Those people are crazy, those people who get in their cars and have obviously learned some kind of Buddhist-Jedi mind trick that allows them to get in their cars each morning and each evening and still be happy about livin� the dream. They spend four hours a day in a car, looking at other cars and thinking that if they get into third gear for six whole minutes then it�s gonna be a great day. How can they possibly be happy? How is that pleasant?
I was white knuckled, hoarse from shouting the eff word repeatedly, sweaty, and dying to see something green.
Because yeah � those people who go �I could never live in the desert because I would miss the green so much!� Those losers have only been to Phoenix. Tucson is green because we have an aquifer. Straight up water in the desert.
There was not a CD I could tolerate, there was not a second of Evening Edition that I could actually hear, and there wasn�t a moment where I didn�t think to myself that every driver who was going to Tucson had BETTER be an actual Tucsonan and not one of the idiot Phoenix Freeway Stunt Doubles or I was going to pull over, stand on top of my Bitchin� Honda, and let loose an assault of profanity the likes of which the greater Phoenix area has not seen since the gold rush where miners trampled each other on the way to California.
The smart miners gave up at Tucson, pulled out a spliff, and thought to themselves, �I made it this far. Going any further is going to be a big pain. Hey! Buddy! You got a match? Cookie done took off with my last one!�
And a booming metropolis with no freeways and very little in the way of neon progress was borne.
And unto it, a girl would come from Illinois.
And she would have great ire when she had to drive on a freeway in any metropolitan area.
And in Tucson, she would feel good because she would drive, lo� not on streets of gold but with street lights and turn signals.
And Tucson would love her.
arizonasarah at 2:22 p.m.