Janie's got a gun

I hate traffic. Traffic and getting anywhere since moving to an actual city have now become the collective banes of my existence. I work roughly 11 miles away from where I live, and it takes me between 45 and 55 minutes to get to work.
I seriously don't know how there aren't more instances of road rage or, frankly, people just abandoning their cars and running away screaming into the woods, because that's frequently what I want to do.
I understand that it's a big city and there's going to be traffic, but often, for no reason at all, the traffic will just cease to move for like 20 minutes, and you think to yourself, "Oh, there must be an accident," and when it starts back up, no, there was no car on fire, no woman giving birth, people just stopped, and then it makes you want to, again, run into the woods and perhaps live a life among the trees and wood nymphs.
There are some days when the commute home doesn't bother me as much, because it kind of serves as an unwinding, where I can blast the radio and decompress before getting to my apartment, but those days are mostly few and far between.
Mostly, I alternate between putting a death grip on the steering wheel and talking to myself about what idiots other drivers are. It can't be healthy behavior. Perhaps I should get a meditation tape or something to listen to on the way home to undercut the bubbling, psychotic feeling that wells inside me more frequently lately.
And my commute, by Philadelphia standards, is not even that far. Some people commute up to 40 miles, and it makes me tired to even think about how long that takes them daily.
And it's entirely possible that I will be one of those "long commuters" sometime soon should the career gods ever smile on me and actually grant me a decent job, and I guess I will do what everyone else does and get used to it, although I don't imagine my ever really being used to being confined in my car for such a long period of time while people simultaneously whiz past me and plod along in front of me.
I thought about it the other day, and it really is just crazy. I mean, what are you gonna do? You have to go where a job is, and clearly, you have to get home, so you're just stuck in this insanity, and there's nothing you can do about it.
After my brief relationship with legions of cars, I now fully understand Michael Douglas' character in "Falling Down," who just abandoned his car and went on a crazy all-day shooting spree with people that annoyed him.
I'm also really thankful that I don't have a gun, because I would fear for the driver of the car who takes up two lanes with his left blinker on and inevitably decides to turn right after holding up traffic for a full five minutes.