You aren’t safe anymore even when people are merging onto the freeway from the front, where you can see them.  In fact, it might be preferable to just close your eyes.

There are an astonishing number of people out there today who, rather than finding a gap in traffic, somehow manage instead to lock themselves onto a collision course.

I’m not talking about just misguidedly trying to get ahead of you when they don’t actually have the speed.  If you slow down to let these people in, they’ll slow right down with you.  Speeding up to get ahead of them doesn’t work any better:  they tromp on their own gas with a vengeance.

The net effect is to target you with the tenacity of a heat-seeking missile.

All you can do is watch them coming up the onramp (Uh-oh, on a collision course…ULP!  Still on a collision course…Getting closer now…Getting really close now…) until at the last possible second before running out of paved surface, they make just enough of an adjustment to their speed to miss you by six inches or so.

Oddly, the people who place themselves in such imminent and recurring danger don’t seem to be the ones walking around shell-shocked.  The combat fatigue seems more typically to afflict all the rest of us, who have to try to somehow avoid killing them.