Nein! Hagel!

I may be a little overly sensitive when it comes to my car. Let me explain. No, in the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, let me sum up.

I had to buy a new car. My old Corsica was quite sound in a mechanical sense, aside from a bit of ticking from the CV joints and an undamped sensation when going over bumps because (I imagine) its struts are shot. But it starts well, runs well, and passes emissions inspection without any problem. It has two main defects. One is an occasional computer malfunction where the computer seems to forget some key piece of data and the car won't idle. Turn it off, turn it all the way off, and try it again, and it works fine. Weird. It's kind of like Windows in that respect. ("Ah, shut'er down and reboot, why doncha!") Oh, and it leaks a bit of oil from the front valve cover, but what's a few drops on the driveway among friends?

The other problem is that it looks like utter hell. It looks like it might have served with Montgomery at El Alamein. Sun-bleached paint, sun-rotted upholstery, no headliner... Both gas struts on the rear hatch quit working, so if I want to get something out of the back, I have to balance the fifty-pound door on the top of my head, further aggravating the tiny knot I contracted in 1988 from the door of an Aeroflot airliner and has never been quite right...

I'm digressing. The point is my car looked terrible, and finally my friends and family brought enough peer pressure to bear on me and I bought a Hyundai Elantra. Nice car, or so I think anyway. At least everything works and my head doesn't hit the roof that often, a problem that nags me in most cars.

I generally go home by exiting the city to the north and going cross-country on a fairly desolate state highway. It's only 25 miles or so, but it feels like the back side of nowhere. Consequently, speed limits are high, and nobody crosses that stretch of highway at less than 70 MPH. So I was zipping along, winding through the hills, and it began to rain. Hard. Big drops the size of goiters, the kind of drops that seem to explode when they hit.

All of a sudden I was gripped by the fear that it was going to hail on my new car. This is not something that one normally fears in Arizona. On the scale of unlikely natural disasters, hail lies just below avalanche, nuclear holocaust and asteroid impact. But such was my anxiety that I slowed down to a modest 40 MPH to lessen the damage any hail might cause.

Here's something about Arizona drivers: rain makes them go faster. They already drive plenty fast as it is, but add a little rain and suddenly they all think they're Dale Jr. or something. So I've slowed down because of the rain, the wet highway and the potential for hail impacts (the sky was green, after all) and all of a sudden here's this bozo in a green Ford perched on my rear bumper, flashing her lights and having a mild conniption fit. While yammering on a cell phone, I might point out. I figure she must have had at least four arms: one to hold the wheel, one to hold the phone, one to flash the headlights, and one for her wild spastic conniption fit.

Nothing on Earth - literally nothing - irritates me as much as being tailgated. I don't much mind what people do so long as they don't endanger me, but tailgating me endangers me, and it drives me nuts. I often wish I had a box of overripe tomatoes in my car for just such occasions...

But I digress. I pull off into the right lane so Ms. Thing can pass me, only she doesn't. She loiters off my left rear quarter panel as though held there by my raw animal magnetism. Only when she sees that my lane is coming to an end in a few hundred feet does she punch the throttle, and by then it's too late. She forces me off onto the paved shoulder while she continues to have a conniption and continues to yammer on her cell phone, and I'm driving on the buzz-strip so my teeth are vibrating and altogether unknown dimensions are opening around me. I'm seeing Roman legions and talking elephants and Chinese funeral processions and God knows what all because of the vibration.

I think what cheesed me about this was its source. I'm used to being tailgated and run off the road by huge Dodge pickups driven by guys who wear their hats backwards and imagine that having a Hemi qualifies them for special treatment. I'm not so used to being driven off the road by tiny women in green sedans.

I seem to have strayed off my original topic, but so what?