The Hippy

Car: Smallest Honda ever made.
Driver: The Hippy
Conversation: Light talking--maybe four sentences spoken by me during trip.
Radio: News/Jazz?/Classical

It's cold here in California (shut up, Midwesterners, WE KNOW) so it was good that I was able to get directly into the car right as I walked up. As the second carpooler there, I was relegated to the front seat. I watched the first carpooler get in the back and was thinking of offering to move my seat forward (as is the policy), but when I got in I knew it wasn't possible. Not only did I hit my head getting in to this extremely small space, my knees were pushing against the dashboard right in that soft spot just below my kneecap. I couldn't move my legs at all during the trip. But what was I going to do? I very carefully closed the door.

The driver was an older man, maybe in his early 60s, with a long pony tail, small silver-rimmed glasses, and a long unruly goatee ("well if everyone is packed in like sardines, lets go"). He had the local public news on the radio which was fairly enjoyable, but he kept changing the volume as though he wasn't sure if we could hear it or he thought it might be too loud. When he wasn't concentrating on the radio volume or fiddling with the climate control, he was driving extremely aggressively. He alternated between extreme bursts of speed to change lanes and uncomfortably close tailgating. About half way across the bridge he changed the radio station to what some might call "Jazz," but I would have trouble calling "music." It was basically an erratic drum riff montage, with chaotic harp playing the backup, while a saxophone player practiced his chromatic scales. Lovely. They might as well have been beating on metal pipes, but the cacophony somehow fit the mans erratic, bucking style of driving.

As we pulled off the freeway in San Francisco, he made one more radio station change to classical and asked us if we would like to be dropped off further up Howard (Yes!). We got to within a block of my office and he let us out. The other carpooler looked at me briefly, but no words of commiseration were exchanged. I walked to work.