Coming home last night from work in the still-light late afternoon I opted to go the “long way” east across Jefferson to pay my annual spring visit to the Exposition Park Rose Garden, then up Figueroa to 2nd to Glendale around Echo Park Lake and home via Sunset.
Everything was awesome, up until I was northbound on Fig approaching 4th and the latest in the endless stream of inbred motorists dickwads — this one in a full-sized silver pick-up — passes less than two feet from me and lays on his horn despite having room to pass me without the honk and also to move to the left.
Here he is in mid-pass from my sunglasses cam, close enough not only to scare the crap out of me with or without the horn, but also close enough for me in the truck’s wake to get a solid whiff of the skunkweed emanating from the closed cab.
In the next frame, you’ll see he’s further up the block, prepping to make a right turn on 4th and either oblivious to or not interested in my loud and heated invitation for him to stop and let me physically demonstrate my disdain upon his head and ass until he apologized for being a self-entititle cromag with no respect for anyone but his drug dealer.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. In the next frame I’ve arrived at 4th and I’ve wisely decided that the dipshit isn’t worth chasing down, much less the prison time I’d incur from stomping a hole through his stomach. So I stay on Fig and give the truck a dismissive wave and shake of the head as I pass. Trouble is those two fixie riders on the sidewalk you see there? They see me wave and for some stoopid reason they think I’m dissing them.
Of course I don’t know this until I get up between 3rd and 2nd streets and pull off to the side of the road, seething and half-hoping the truck might be coming back onto Figueroa from 3rd. This doesn’t happen, but in short order the two fixies pass me and the second guy makes a deliberate effort to dismissively wave at me and shake his head as he goes by, like so.
At first I’m all WTF, but since I’m not the dimmest bulb on the chandlier I figure they must’ve thought I was insulting them as I passed them at 4th and they were returning the favor. So, when traffic cleared I get in the left lane for my turn on to 2nd and catch up with them at the intersection, where I seek confirmation of my theory. The guy smiles and shrugs when I ask him if they thought I’d been dissing them and so I tell him he’s got it all wrong, that I had been waving at a truck on 4th that had almost hit me, not them.
Dude didn’t look too convinced and was all “Whatever you say, man.”
I started to launch into a defensive sermon about my love for bikes and how I’d be the last sumbitch on the streetz to behave so ignorantly toward another cyclist, but I could tell it was lost on him so I just went on my way home chuckling at how only in my world can a motorist harass and disrespect me with absolutely no consequences — and in the end I’m left having to placate to some sensitive misinterpreting cyclists all because I elected to do the right thing and avoid confronting the bastard.
Sigh.
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