Jessie: Back in New Hampshire after a pleasurable weekend on the coast of Maine.
I don’t know how things customarily are where you live, but in northern New England, people have generally behaved behind the wheel of a moving vehicle.
We understand potholes, black ice, and tourists with appalling manners they’ve brought from back home. Most of us seem to have mastered time management sufficiently so as to not hurtle down the roads at break-neck speed because we are chronically late. We generally understand that leaving enough stopping distance and observing the rules pertaining to school buses are signs of .
At least, that has been the way for most of my life. But I am beginning to worry that we are in the end times and that the social fabric is unnervingly frayed. It all comes down to traffic lights. I am not much of a yeller. I am emphatic, opinionated, and inclined to talk with my hands, but I almost never raise my voice, except when it comes to traffic lights.
For the past couple of years, every single time I am out and about in my car, I encounter at least one, and often several, drivers who seem to feel that red lights do not apply to them. They brazenly turn left against traffic that should be able to be oncoming. They blow through great whacking wide intersections. They don’t ever look ashamed. Not that they need to; I am ashamed them.
I used to fear they didn’t have a mother during their formative years. I often considered that they must have been having a stroke. I wondered if it was a rarely discussed symptom of Long Covid. Now, after watching the problem increase to such a scale that I consider it an epidemic, I just scream and yell and make remarks that would make a pirate clutch his pearls.
Which brings me to fiction. Whenever I am concerned that I might run out of ideas for finishing people off on the page I think of those drivers. When I need to imagine the sort of people who operate so blithely outside of the common good as to murder I think of those drivers. When I need to dredge up an understanding of the sort of furious passion that leads to the crimes portrayed in a murder mystery I cast my mind back to a recent jaunt in the car and instantly find that I am ready to sit down to work. The best part is that in my books, unlike in real life, the bad guys get their comeuppance no matter how unraveled society seems to have gotten to be!
Readers, are traffic lights still sacrosanct where you live? Is there something else in the world that turns you into a raging volcano? Writers, is your work cathartic?