Acrylic, ink, and paper on canvas board
2023
I was on my way to work one morning when a very rude driver made a reckless maneuver into traffic. Traffic on the street had slowed to a stop and as I was preparing to stop behind a box truck, a driver in a red car pulled out of a parking lot on my right and proceeded to cut across three lanes and squeeze in between the truck and my car to get into the oncoming traffic lanes. While doing so, the driver of the red car slowed down to flip me off as he passed in front of me and then sped into traffic without looking first. He almost collided with another car as he was pulling into the lane but fortunately the driver of the other car changed lanes at the last second. I don’t know why the driver of the red car flipped me off. Maybe he was in a bad mood. Maybe he had been waiting at the exit of the parking lot for a while but didn’t have a clear path to get onto the street. Maybe he thought I wasn’t going to let him cross the street. Whatever he was thinking, it was clear to me that traffic safety was not on his mind. I wasn’t upset at the driver in the red car for very long. I thought the encounter was kind of funny. Reckless driving is not funny, but you never know what dumb decisions people will make in the heat of a moment.
I used the characters of Bart Simpson and Principal Skinner from The Simpsons TV show to help illustrate my point. Specifically, I took inspiration from the “Am I so out of touch?” meme of Principal Skinner. The original quote by Principal Skinner in the TV show is “Am I out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.” A meme was created by substituting Principal Skinner with other people who believe that they are not wrong, it is other people who are wrong. I portrayed the driver of the red car as Principal Skinner and made his speech antagonistic based on his (the driver’s) behavior that I observed. I portrayed myself as Bart Simpson in the blue car speaking Bart’s catchphrase “Don’t have a cow, man.”