Driving and Texas

Friday night Maddie had a weird request: she said something on the order of "I know this's irrational, and I know that Mildred (my motorcycle) needs to be turned over, but would you take the minivan to the Zen center tomorrow instead? I've just got a really bad feeling about it." This might seem like a weird request, and it seemed to me at the time. But, if there's one thing I've learned since moving to the DFW metroplex, it's who this country's worse drivers are. I've driven everywhere from New England to California, and I can say, hands down, that while Texas drivers are extremely courteous and polite, that they're finely counter-balanced en-masse by Dallas drivers, who are the most selfish, disrespectful, "I'm getting mine now" drivers I've ever encountered anywhere. Sure, Boston drivers are rude and reckless. Granted. Yeah, D.C. drivers will cut you off in a red-hot minute. Absolutely. It's true that Rhode-Island drivers think stop-signs are optional. And Los Angeles drivers pass from the right and never account for a less-than-perfect road surface. All true. But I've never seen the sheer numbers of people literally aiming their cars right at other cars, running them off the road, just so they can shift lanes on an access road. And Dallas drivers are even worse on the freeways. There aren't many places I've been where the quality of freeway engineering is so bad, with uneven surfaces, inconsistent inter-lane heights, multiply-decreasing-radius off-ramps, etc., but in most other areas where the roadway engineering & inspection was as clearly bribery-managed as Dallas's must surely be, the drivers are more cautious, not less. Here, instead, it's as if they collectively said "in for a penny, in for a pound".
So it was no surprise whatsoever when the teenager driving a big F-150 on Highway 30 Saturday in the passing lane wasn't phased in the least when, minding his own business in heavy stop-and-go construction traffic, driving perfectly normally, I clipped his rear-end with Mildred and went down next to him. And you know what's nice about Texas? In California, the driver would have not only had my driver's license#, phone number, insurance, etc., but would have asked for a DNA-sample and copy of my family lineage just to be safe; this kid, though, after his friend picked the broken bits out of his rear-right tail-lens assembly, was much more concerned with whether my bike was going to run and if I was OK than the fact that I'd damaged his truck, and, in fact, wouldn't let me give him my phone number, etc., in spite of the fact that I'd done $70-100 damage to his truck at no fault of his own. While Texas seems to hold its own with California on the availability of cluelessly myopic jerks who don't realize they're being offensive-it never occurring to them that your terms and theirs might not coincide (the hate-filled, homophobic "y'all seemed so grounded I just assumed you had to be from Texas--how could you be from California?" nitwit couple we met last night, of the sort who give Texas such a bad reputation in California, included), Texas is way out in the lead on the amount of just plain nice people.
Now if they'd just fix their uneven, wobble-inducing inter-lanes so you can ride around the stripe instead of having to duck into the lanes while splitting....