driving miss dangerously

… when I go driving I stay in my lane … getting cut off, it makes me insane …

The saying goes that “things get better with age” — wine, whiskey (hang on, is it just alcohol?), music (although that can skip decades at a time!)

The one area that that rule doesn’t apply to is … drum roll, please … driving!

It never surprises me that the people dawdling along in the left lane on the freeway are typically older than, say, 40. Sure, there are other stereotypically bad drivers, but I’m not going to get into that right now. I just don’t understand why your abilities become so much worse, as you gain more and more experience. I don’t think it has anything to do with declining reaction times or anything typically physical. I actually believe that it has more to do with attitude. As people get older, they get less and less tolerable of younger people doing things the same way as, or better than, them. And, if by their progressed age, they happen to be driving a big luxury car, their feeling of owning the road is even greater. They will plod along in the left lane, ignoring everything else going on around them — you just have to go around them, which is just silly.

No, I’d say that driving abilities tend to follow a curve pattern, a bit like playing pool and drinking. You get better and better the more you drink, until you reach a certain point, and from there it just falls away to nothing and you can’t even see the far pocket, less hit a ball into it! Teenage drivers are idiots, in general, and, like so many things in life, most people seem to regress when they get to a certain age.

My grandfather went to get his license back — at age 94. They gave it to him without hesitation.