It doesn’t matter who you are at one time or another in your life you have made the decision to drive over the speed limit to get there a little bit quicker. I have seemingly noticed too many people who are in too much of a hurry to get wherever they are going. I wanted to present the facts of why you shouldn’t speed as they were reported to me by my Grandfather many years ago. I think about them every time I see a young person commit crazy maneuvers in traffic because their destination is seemingly more important than the safety of all of the other people on the road. I would like to talk to them like my Grandfather talked to me and simply say, if you are speeding you are an idiot.

“Everybody’s going somewhere, Riding just as fast as they can ride
I guess they’ve got a lot to do, Before they can rest assured
Their lives are justified, Pray to God for me baby
He can let me slide.” – Jackson Browne

It’s Not Everybody else’s Fault you are late

Many people feel that because they are late then their radical driving is justified and everyone else on the road should have to endure the tailgating, angry gestures and potential accidents provided by the perennially late travelers.  Now if you have to be somewhere, like work, before a certain time and it is really important to you, like important enough to drive 90 MPH or cut people off or just drive like a maniac in general. Then perhaps you should just, well I don’t know, plan on giving yourself plenty of time to get where you are going. You can’t use oversleeping as an excuse, because either you didn’t get enough sleep or didn’t plan on enough time to get ready in the morning.  You do not have the right to get into an accident because you are simply in a hurry. Your accident could cost you your life, or even worse the life of someone else that didn’t have anything to do with the fact that you were late. Plan ahead, and if you are going to be late, accept that fact and do better planning tomorrow.

How Much Time Do You Really Save?

Now comes the common sense part that always seems to escape people’s comprehension. If you are driving eighty instead of fifty, how much actual time are you saving yourself. Remember this is driving 80 not just 70, which is more likely and much more common. When you are passing six cars in a row on a two lane road because you just have to get going you should keep this in mind.  This involves a little algebra so I am sure that many of the people I have seen in the last few days will have trouble comprehending this, but please take a little time and you may just learn something and not be so much of an idiot.

Let’s say that you have a 20 minute commute to work which is pretty reasonable in this area. Just for arguments sake, there are no stop signs it is just a straight shot to work and you will be able to drive as fast and crazy as you want. If you figure it out mathematically, if you can maintain a constant speed of 80 MPH then the trip would take you fifteen minutes. If you traveled at a much safer speed of 60 MPH then the same trip is going to take you 20 minutes. So by driving like a loser and endangering your life and those of everyone around you you are at the most saving five minutes. If you get in an accident or more likely get stopped for speeding all of that time you saved is gone.

Now add in all of the other factors, like stop lights and areas where the speed limit is much lower, and you will decrease this difference, so it is likely in the end that by the time you get where you are going you have driven like a total moron and you have saved yourself a grand total of two minutes if your are lucky. I hope you think about this the next time you pull some NASCAR move on the road or shake your fist with road rage.

Physics of it all makes you an Idiot as well

When you are traveling at a higher rate of speed you are removing much of your ability to stop, turn or react to any emergency situation, like having a tire blow out or an animal run into the road or another driver is perhaps a bigger idiot than you are and is driving even more recklessly than you. the slower you go the more opportunity you will have to compensate for the unexpected. It is simple physics so it should be easily understood that moving at a slower rate of speed is safer.

As you grow older and get a little more life experience you will start to understand that the world does not revolve around you and your schedule. Hopefully you will just realize this fact in the normal flow of life, and not because something tragic has happened to you. Or you haven’t driven your car off the road or cause the death of someone else because you were just in a hurry. So please stop being an idiot and drive under control.

Five years ago, if you had told me that someone would pay me to write anything, I would have thought that you were crazy. The way that life has pushed me towards this endeavor in so many ways has been remarkable to experience and dare I say almost magical to do. Circumstances have moved me to find my voice and my passion through writing. It is not the easiest of ventures but I think that it is the one I was meant to follow at least for now.
The Problem with My Education
One of the reasons that I think I moved away from writing for so many years was that from the earliest days of my schooling I had two majour problems, I had poor penmanship and I didn’t like rules. The poor penmanship seems trite, but the educational environment I experienced made it a real issue, and I think that much of the substance of a story or the thought behind it was ever obstructed by the unwieldy and messy mode of delivery I could provide. How many times as a child can you be criticized about something before you move away from it completely? About a thousand is my guess. I am not complaining or feeling sorry for myself here, because I recognize the entire journey leads to the right destination, but this is one of the explanations that pushed me away from writing anything, ever, for anyone.

As for rules, I don’t think anyone likes them, but I like them even less when it comes to writing. If the proper formation of words and punctuation gave words their power to impress, motivate, or inspire then I would freely submit to this point, however it is not even the least bit true. The power of the written word comes from the thoughts and emotions that motivate the words. Yes I concede that I was given the rudimentary background for creating cohesive sentences, but  with that concession comes the acceptance of responsibility of our educational system, spending too much time on form and format and not enough time on appreciating and encouraging creativity and original thought.
Losing My Overly Critical voice
For much of my life, I think that whenever I wrote anything, there was a voice in my mind that always pointed out the weaknesses of that

writing. It is too sappy, too long, too intricate, too personal. You name a criticism and that voice made it. I always worried about how a word or a phrase would be read and accepted by someone else rather than if it truly expressed the thoughts that I was having. Like most people I think that often times I would deem my work foolishness and destroy it. Thousands of thoughts have met their demise in this manner, and I am not sure if it ever would have changed if I hadn’t needed money and decided to enter the world of freelance writing. People hire you to create content, usually around keywords, for their websites. For anyone who has ever investigated making money online, the creation of quality content is a huge undertaking.
I accepted a job in which I had to produce large volumes of articles quickly and under a deadline of 48 hours. At first it really brought out all of the emotions I had about writing, from following rules to writing things that I thought sucked, but being under deadline they had to be good enough. As I worked from day to day, creating written articles about every different topic you can imagine and miraculous thing began to happen, that critical voice started to disappear, the more I wrote, the less I heard from it. I think that the total emersion in writing began to make many more thoughts come to me and need to be expressed. The fear facto of what anybody else thinks of those thoughts is now a distant memory, and all I seem to need is the time to write and some thought to write about. That is a feeling of freedom and expression that I have never felt before. It is truly amazing.
Many Stories to Tell
So here I am at the beginning of a journey that I am tentatively beginning, there are many stories that I feel the need to tell, stories about my life which need to be expressed to tales of imaginary people and things that have no substance as of yet because they only exist in my mind.