I was driving to pick E up from work this afternoon when some guy in an Intrepid pulled up behind me and proceeded to tailgate me for several blocks. It was at this point that I decided to employ what I like to call passive-agressive driving. My buddy Mav likes to do this. He does a lot of driving for his work and it seems to come up most on 394 for him.

You may not be reading this in Minneapolis, so I'll do a little explaining. I'm sure other metro areas around the country have them, but we have the sane-lane here that they open up for car-poolers during rush hour. (This is our convoluted way of dealing with mass-transit needs in our fair city.) Well, inevitably at some point the sane-lane dissappears and the people in that lane have to merge over with everyone else. Well, of course, instead of merging sanely, maybe a 1/2 mile or 1/4 mile ahead of time, they all speed up to the spot where they are absolutely forced to merge with traffic. They sort of force their way in. I'm sure most of you have experienced this. It's quite annoying. Well, in these instances, Mav pulls his car halfway into the lane so they're forced to slow down right away and merge instead of skipping to the front of the line. Quite often other cars ahead of him or behind him will do the same-all the while waving and yahooing to each other.

Well, in my case I was on 79th street in Bloomington (a Minneapolis suburb) when this Intrepid pulled up on my ass. It even had one of those stupid bras on. I could see the dude's perfectly quaffed hair and reflective sunglasses in my rear view mirror. Well, I proceeded to, rather innocently, slow down to 20 mph. This annoyed the guy to no end, I could tell. I could see him shake his head. He tried to pass me on the right, but had to pull back into my lane to avoid the parked cars. Of course, the light ahead was red, so I relished taking my time. I took great satisfaction in making this guy wait just a little longer. The best thing was that his car was so damn big that he couldn't pull around me to make his right turn once we got to the light. He had to wait, just like the rest of us.

Some day I want to do a faux ad for Adbusters about a car called the Insipid. It would have some well-dressed young person briefly talking about how their car was a big part of their identity, etc. Like a fashion accessory. How they felt that their shitty American-made car reflected their personality and their values. You know, the really glossy-type ads you see in major magazines that are, well, insipid.