Rented a car in Fort Myers for a drive to the coast. I happily speed along in the left lane of the interstate, a reasonable two second gap to the car in front of me. There’s a surprising amount of traffic on a Friday afternoon and the middle lane is fairly full to my right. For the most part, though, we’re all just hustling along.

Suddenly, Marion Andretti pulls up behind me in a gigantic SUV. She’s so close I can hear her gnashing her teeth that we’re not going fast enough. Any closer and she’d be bumping out of the way a whole half second faster. What is happening here?! I raise my right hand upright in view, wordlessly asking where she wants me to go and why she’s up my ass. On some level, I know I’m being something of an ass, but she’s being insane. We’re already doing 80mph in fairly heavy traffic.

If it were possible to manifest her impatience, she veers her Pathfinder through the middle and into the right lane. In retrospect, I don’t understand why she didn’t just use the shoulder as her personal lane. It took her a minute or so, but she made it ahead of me and eventually exited less than one minute before me.

I shouldn’t judge so harshly. I thought about all the times I was an impatient teen and 20+ year old darting in and out of traffic. Sitting in that drivers seat on the way to the beach, I was embarrassed about how bad a driver I was 20 years ago.

And then it happened again, with a different enormous vehicle. Right up my ass. This was a big pickup and he was pushing me. GET OUT OF THE WAY.

I moved over. The big truck pulled even with me and then gunned their engine pulsing a big cloud of black smoke directly into my windowed face. This behavior is weird. This is the behavior I associate with driving in Texas. Needlessly aggressive, sportscar-driving like behavior from folks in huge SUVs and pickups. What is happening here? Why is leisurely south Florida all Texified?

A half hour later, I’m pulling up to a stop light and I look in the rearview mirror as a young woman in a large SUV is chatting away into her cellphone. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a person actually holding a cellphone in one hand and the steering wheel in the other. Sure, I’ll chat on speaker. I’ll chat on CarPlay. I’ll chat with headphones in. But phone to temple is just begging a cop to give me a ticket. This is weird.

Not ten minutes later, as I cross a two lane bridge, I look down the causeway to see another huge truck mostly straddling both lanes like they’re an extra-wide humvee that needs extraordinary buffer from roadside IEDs. What is happening? Why am I being forced to come to a near stop to get to a barrier island so your huge pickup can occupy both lanes. I don’t get what is happening. This is exactly the aggressive, libertarian or die behavior I associate with Texas. It definitely felt foreign in Florida. But I’ve been away for 20 years, so maybe that’s just how it is now…?