It isn’t usually good for anyone to use absolutes in conversation. It is ineffective in arguments and, basically, does no good in any conversation. Accusations like, “You always…” or “I never…” are rarely true and are not constructive in any disagreement or complaint about another or another situation.
Also using exaggerations—gross or otherwise—cannot help to make a point or find resolution.
That being said, I want to ask: Why the f*#k are there always 10,000 cars at the gas station when I want to get gas?!! I’m not exaggerating! Maybe 20,000! And it takes forever for me to jockey into position with line-cutters and otherwise rude people who believe it is their entitlement to cut someone off just to save themselves five minutes at the expense of another.
I think I was doing much better when my daily concern was where I would find something to eat and wondering how I would keep dry and/or out of the wind. I was very grateful for each morsel or kindness from a friend, family member or stranger. But now that I am back in the “working” world—with deadlines and pressures and commutes and gas prices and jerks in line—I feel like it may be a test to see how spiritually and/or peacefully progressed I am.
Take for example, the jagoffs who use the shoulder of the road to cut past everyone else who is waiting, moderately patiently, for two lanes of traffic to merge down to one. This has been the case for decades in the town in which I now find myself living. The overpass is finally being widened, but until they complete it, traffic has been exponentially more backed-up each morning and evening. Meanwhile, these excuses for humanity think they are entitled to dash through the cones delineating the closed-off lane, race along the shoulder to the right, kicking up dirt and rocks on the rest of the cars, then cut into the first gas station or convenience store they come to at the end of the construction, drive around back and exit on the other side; entering traffic as if they just made a purchase and didn’t really just cut past 50 cars!!
I can take a reading on how well my spiritual progress is going by my internal response to these Children of God. Most times I can take a breath and know that they will stand before Him and have to explain, in the Light of Truth, why they were deliberately inconsiderate to their fellow man. Or they get to relive the event in a hundred Karmic occasions from the other side—the waiting in line side. (And am I doing that right now in this line?)
Many times I do well in realizing we are all going our own way, doing the best we can, and everything will balance itself out. Other times I wish I could speed up and catch up to them and politely kick them in their dick until they have trouble reaching the gas pedal for the rest of the week. Or I pray that God would bless the rest of their commute with sunshine, beautiful scenery and explosive diarrhea.
Of course I know you can’t pray to Him for such things. God doesn’t provide anything but love, and praying to Him for ill to befall another only hurts the self.
I learned this the hard way in October, 2004. That was the year that the Yankees led the Redsox three-games-to-none in a best-of-four A.L. Championship series. I had been hoping that they would not meet in that series as I felt the Yanks could not beat the Sox in a seven-game-series that season. But, when the Yanks handled them easily in the first three games, actually scoring 19 runs in game three, I felt like the cat who swallowed the canary and was so grateful I’d been wrong.
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But I wasn’t. In what will go down in history as the greatest comeback ever for Redsox fans, and the worst humiliating, demoralizing, dehumanizing defeat for Yankees fans the world over, the Redsox came back in the end of game four and won. Then they proceeded to win the next three games and advance to the World Series, where they beat the Cardinals for their first championship in 86 years.
The morning following the game-four loss, I told everyone at my then office, that it was over for the Yankees. I had been saying that there was no way we could win a seven-game series against them and it was now nothing more than an agonizing march to inevitability over the next three games.
People laughed and said that the odds were so far in the Yankees favor, that I need not worry. No one had ever come back from being down 3-zip to win. I told them that this would be the first year it would happen. They laughed and I dreaded what I knew was the inevitable.
I did discover that I was holding out a glimmer of hope as I prayed to God that Curt Schilling’s injured ankle, Achilles tendon or whatever it was that was injured and bleeding on his sock, would explode and blow microscopic pieces of bone shards up his ass so they would never all be removed and his ass would hurt each morning for the rest of his life (and we would win the game).
God did not answer my prayer. I knew he wouldn’t. But I was desperate.
Sometimes I feel the same way about all of the people who pass merging traffic back-ups by driving on the shoulder to pass. Many times the hexes I conjure in my mind are more horrible than I am willing to admit to you. And, actually, I think they hurt me more than the person who is being a dick. So I try, as best I can, to take a deep breath and let it go.
And that brings me back to the 30,000 cars at the gas station each time I stop for gas. It isn’t so much the 35-to-40,000 cars I have to wait for. It’s that every single time I wait (and wait and wait and wait) for my turn at the pump, the instant I am finished, there are five to ten open pumps! What the bleep?!?!? How in the heck does this happen?! Every single time!!!??!!??
50,000 cars in line when I get there, then, when I am finished, none!!!
Every time!
No exaggeration!
I can’t figure it out. Any ideas?