Driving Miss Crazy

Today it took me two hours to drive 12 circuitous kilometers to work. Everyone on the road was jerking forward about as fast as a fully-loaded carabao, advancing to their destination about 30 inches every 5 minutes. I would rather have turned back home and called in sick, but as it appeared that the entire population of Quezon City was on the streets this afternoon, I figured that I would be forty by the time I managed to roll into my garage. So I stayed on course and tried to delay the onset of road rage by listening to the new Maroon 5 album while leisurely pedestrians overtook my four-wheeled vehicle. I suppressed the urge to curse all the toxic ingredients of Metro Manila traffic -- idiot drivers (both public and private), Bayani's stupid u-turns and his blue-clad minions, nonexistent traffic lights in intersections that have tangled up every day for decades, tricycles that buzz around all over the place like uninvited flies in a picnic. Adam Levine yowls "so this is goodba-a-aye" and I see an opening appear in the UP Diliman/CP Garcia intersection...quick! Pedal to the metal and I am suddenly cut off by a Toyota pickup the color of infant diarrhea. Previously suppressed road rage boils out of every facial orifice, and I tear after him like heck. That wasn't easy to do, since I was behind the wheel of an 8-year old car with a pokey 1300cc engine and I was driving with a bad ankle. But tailgate that sonofa@%&#* I did, for the next ten minutes through choked Katipunan, until I had to turn right towards Xavierville and the schmuck in the pickup went straight on to the flyover. I don't have to guess that he didn't get very far before getting stuck in a major intersection without a traffic light, which may or may not have been manned by a single traffic aide with no life insurance. I arrived safely at work a quarter tank of gas, an additional hour and two dozen cuss words later.