The dreaded i93 and how I became a supporter of the Republican cause

My shrink – my cognitive behavioral guy, wants me to take things slower with my highway driving phobia – but he is not the one hemorrhaging his life savings on $3.50 gallon gas. I need this money for my lofty retirement in the trailer park of my nightmares. I need to try newer and harder targets. I don’t have time to keep hitting the same targets to reduce anxiety, which is really very minimally effective. My shrink tries to impress upon me that while driving on the highway I am safe – that I am creating the fear. But this is pure bullshit. It’s very unsafe. I drive a fucking 2000 Toyata Corrolla. It handles like shit. It is made for durability, not driving. A strong gust of wind will make that car wobble at 55 m.p.h. It’s disconcerting. Very. You have to either be a better driver than I  (and perhaps I am a shitty driver) or a fool to drive that thing much over 65 m.p.h. And then there are the fucking maniacs – especially the truck drivers who get two feet behind you, literally, to bully you into getting into the slow lane, but you can’t because you can’t even see out of your rear view mirror because they are so close that all you see is truck! I am afraid that if I ever meet one of these sociopathic, aggressive motherfuckers face-to-face, that someone is going to get very hurt, and I am going to end up very in prison.

The Connecticut drive was far less scary than I thought. i385, which runs down the state from Massachusetts is a wussy interstate with only two lanes. A joke. Yes, you must drive on a major highway -- the MassPike to get to i385, but it’s only 35 miles, and considerably less scary than i95.

Taking i95 to Providence provided a lot of fodder for driving terror, with its Route 128/i95 bottleneck and, as soon as I hit Pawtucket, Rhode Island (you, know, Pawtucket Ale – “Family Guy”) it got zooy, and increasingly zooier as I hit downtown Providence. The plan was to turn around farther down in the Providence suburb of Cranston, but my feeling was, fuck this, I’ve gone far enough, let me get the fuck out of this madhouse before I wig.

This weekend I attempted i93 North. There was the i95/i93 intersection, where the lanes go from four to three that always freaks me out, but this time, instead of staying on i95 I went on i93. While the trip to New Hampshire was 20 miles less than the Providence trip, this drive was scarier because it entailed going from one interstate to the other.

I managed to keep it together for the last 5 or ten miles of the trip. When I got off at the exit at Salem, NH, that’s when I really started getting nervous. This was New Hampshire – there was not supposed to be many people in this state, but there was a huge traffic jam on the road taking me to Walmart. I had plotted Walmart into the GPS as a piss stop before I went back. There was so much traffic. That’s when I started to get that get-me-the-fuck-out-of-here feeling. I kept going though. It took me ten minutes to drive one and half miles to Walmart.

I don’t shop at Walmart. To do so is to donate to the Republican cause. But this was tax free New Hampshire. I needed some cheap beer. I was too freaked out to go fishing around for liquor stores. Walmart was selling 30 can cases of Budweiser for $17.00. It was insanely cheap. And, since this was the “Live Free or Die” state – its motto is written right on its license plate, I didn’t even need to return the empties. It was an alcoholic’s paradise. (Beer isn’t even allowed to be sold in Massachusetts outside of liquor stores because the liquor store lobby successfully persuaded the moron voters to preserve their monopoly in a ballot initiative.) The only reason why I didn’t buy ten cases of beer instead of only one was because I knew that I would drink myself into oblivion. Then I saw a case of Dasani water for only $4.00. Holy fuck I had to have that. I bought two. One more than I needed or probably will be able to drink in my remaining time in Boston. And then I saw these teeny Dannon Greek yogurts for only a dollar and put it in my wagon, and then I saw a whole shitload of cheap Gatorade, and I said to myself, fuck my boycott of Walmart, let someone who actually has money boycott Walmart. I need the savings. Fuck this. I wanted to buy a bathing suit. I wanted to stuff my car with as much tax-free crap from China that as I could get my greedy little mitts on, but the need to get the fuck out of that state before I completely freaked out was more powerful.

It took me a long time to get back on the highway due to all the traffic. Salem, NH is really a shopping Mecca. All the big stores are there, including Macy’s. This is all probably to cater to people in Massachusetts who don’t want to pay their 6.25 sales tax. Who can blame them? Massachusetts once had a ballot initiative to go from a flat income tax to a graduated income tax. Had the moron voters voted for it, we probably could’ve gotten rid of the regressive sales tax, which hemorrhages a lot of our money to New Hampshire and the Internet and lived off the fat of the multitude of rich assholes in Massachusetts – the same rich assholes who have our asses kicked from nine to five each week, if we are lucky enough to have a job. But, this is the U.S. – we do things backwards, even in Massachusetts, one of its most progressive states (technically a Commonwealth.)

Coming back is always ten times easier. I deliberately took a harder route coming back: i93 to 495 to 3 to i95. Four major highways in a row. It was easy coming back, but the shit had been sufficiently scared out of me going there. I needed to do some heavy drinking with my New Hampshire beer when I got back, though I did it at night, after more driving. The thought occurred to me that I should clean the empty beer bottles, but then I thought – why? – you don’t need to store them because they don’t need to be redeemed, because where I bought them, in New Hampshire, you “Live Free or Die.” So I just threw them out. What freedom! What a state!

The next target will be the i93 going into Boston from the South – the SouthEast expressway, a really scary highway. Ten miles of this is a lot harder than 40 miles on the interstate to New Hampshire. If I do not need to be scraped off the SouthEast expressway, there will not be much else to do after that, and I will probably push for graduation from therapy soon after, probably against the protests of my therapist. Fuck him. Had I listed to him I’d have spent half my life savings on gas and gone a fraction of the distance.