Page 2 / News, Trends, Gossip and Stuff To Do : In Passing : The Ghastly Torment of a Bad Car Day
A man I know showed up at my door.
“Can you see me?” he asked.
“Is this a trick question?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
It seemed my friend had spent much of the day on the road and had come to suspect that he was no longer a denizen of the physical plane. Cars cut him off, trucks threatened to roll right over him, pedestrians jaywalked right in front of him. As if he weren’t there at all.
“It was like I was invisible. I am having a very bad visibility day,” he said. “Are those common?”
They are when you drive a Miata, which he did at the time. But many people have those days, especially now that SUVs rule.
Bad visibility days are like bell jar days--those days when so many people seem not to be listening to you that you begin to suspect that your voice is literally going no further than your own ears. Both lead to plaintive requests for reassurance (as above), Internet conspiracy theories and overconsumption of Rice Krispie treats.
But bad visibility days are also a peculiar subset of an even larger phenomenon: bad car days.
Bad car days have little to do with weather or road conditions or even traffic. A bad car day occurs without warning or explanation. Yesterday you were a confident, competent driver, who skated effortlessly over surface streets and freeways, moving with grace and accuracy between cars, making all the right turns, the clever short cuts--the Baryshnikov of the boulevard. Then suddenly, wham, the planet tilts, the moon moves into Cancer, the sky above the Bermuda Triangle roils and you cannot make it out of your own driveway without knocking down two trash cans.
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Every decision you make backfires--the freeway you hop on is a smelting pot, your cross-town surface street of choice has inexplicable chunks gouged out of it at 10-foot intervals. Every time you feint left, a sign wards you off; every time you move right, it’s a one-way street.
Blocks go by and somehow you are farther from your destination than when you began. You start to panic, and all the skills you have learned as an Angeleno drop away like provisions falling from a dangling mountain climber. You do things you know are mistakes--you get on the 405, you attempt a left onto Lankershim, you bypass the 710 figuring the 605 will be faster, you get in the left lane on Beverly. Whatever the particulars, you are now breaking your own rules, and soon you find yourself cutting people off, making dangerous diagonal moves, anything, anything to get where you are going, to make this all stop. Gasping and wild-eyed, you lean on the horn, while around you the once-familiar storefronts and houses seem taller and menacing, part of a Rod Serling-esque dimension.
You begin to think of things like hidden cameras, and computer tracking devices. You hear far-off laughter and the steady beat of helicopters, the whir of the mini-cam. You eat anything and everything you have in your car, including a whole box of really old Tic-Tacs.
A 20-minute trip becomes a 90-minute odyssey. At last, you fall out of your car, convinced that something extraordinary has happened, that the Martians have invaded or Dan Quayle is ahead in the polls. But no, the natural world is proceeding pretty much as it has for centuries, and you are just having a bad car day.
Mary McNamara can be reached at e-mail at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.
