Alter Ego

My face ignited as I pounded the steering wheel with clenched fists, bellowing “YOU ARSEHOLE!!!” at the 4×4 in front. Roadside, smartly dressed office workers were pointing, shaking their heads, and giggling at my flailing limbs. I was behaving like the Incredible Hulk after 10 tarry Espressos, and my Monday morning commute was descending into a fairground freak show.

I’m blessed with a mellow disposition, but any encounter with a moronic driver goads my alter ego (road rage man) into meltdown – I transform into a pasty Ben Hur, hurtling through the streets of Perth in an air-conditioned chariot. So as part of my driving anger management therapy  (an American euphemism for how to stop being a dick head behind the wheel) I jotted down Perth’s most irritating asphalt junkies:

Bogans [aka Chavs/Neds]
Mullet-wearing simpletons that drive pimped-up Utes. There’s a minimum wage retard that lives downstairs from me. He drives a garish Ute – it’s Lilly-pink, tyres as thick as an elephant’s cock and boasts 4 dilated, rumbling exhaust pipes. Driving it, he looks like a gay Mad Max. This urban amoeba roars past my bedroom window at 5am…every morning. Sometimes I wish Ebay sold bazookas.

Pensioners
Senile dwarfs with skin that is somewhere between sun-dried tomato and leather rag. These urn-dodgers crawl along the highway with the speed of a crippled tortoise, leaving a trail of fish oil capsules in their wake. Stuck behind them, a 5-minute journey can become an arse-numbing odyssey. Wrinkly old timers should be in the house watching “Murder She Wrote”, guzzling industrial strength sherry.

The School Run
It’s 3.15pm, and you’re stuck behind a BMW that’s triple parked outside a private school. You reach for your wooden club. In front of the school gates, a gaggle of dolled-up hags pose and gossip in the sun. These well kept housewives are growing old ungracefully – man-made, rock-hard diddies; taut, Satsuma coloured faces; gaudy jewellery dangling from their skinny frames. It’s like living in a parallel universe where Joan Rivers is a fashion icon.

SUV owners
Male drivers who buy the biggest vehicle possible to compensate for their puny 2-incher. Try reversing out beside one, or turning across one at a junction – you have the visibility of a mole. Why don’t they just buy a second hand road train and be done with it. Guys get some therapy or a rubber stunt cock. But don’t use an SUV to banish the trauma of cowering in the showers, at high school, with a baldy chipolata between your legs.

OK, so I’m a grumpy ex-pat whose stress levels are disproportionate to my tranquil surroundings. Maybe some sunshine and Little Creatures (the local piss) will shepherd my angry alter ego into the shadows. Until then, you may witness a blaze of incandescent rage streaking across Perth as Road Rage man goes about his business…