Then some jackass drives out of a side street and pulls right in front of you. The pea-brain tears onto the main road like he’s heading to a fire but then slows abruptly. Your nice, leisurely pace is interrupted and you feel invaded.

The heart rate soars. Blood pours through arteries in a torrent. The body temperature does not rise, but it feels that way. You feel hot and you see red as you drive inches from the bonehead’s bumper, hoping to catch his eye in the rearview mirror. In your fury, you have invented brand-new obscene gestures.

That more people are not engaged in road-rage combat is beyond me. If I had rocket launchers rigged up on my ride, explosions would roar through the night. Aggressive lane-changers would be obliterated. Tailgaters would perish. There would be few cars and trucks left on the highways and we could all go about our way. A cool 120 over 80, baby.

But that’s just me. Lousy drivers set me to fuming like most other nuisances can’t. There are people who can tolerate traffic headaches but other issues set them off.

Take the guy on Park Street. He was young and healthy and looked like he should be playing pickup basketball somewhere. But he wasn’t dribbling and dunking, he was screaming at me from across the street.

“Liar! Liar!” is what he was shouting. “Four hundred thousand! Four hundred thousand! Lies! Lies!”

Interesting concept. My only question for the young screamer was: What?

Turns out the red-faced screecher was complaining about a headline in the day’s newspaper about protesters at the Republican National Convention in New York. The guy may have had a valid reason to strain his vocal chords, I don’t know. What I know is, he was bellowing completely in the wrong direction.

A note to future protesters: If it happened in another state and involves politics, your local late-beat reporter probably doesn’t know jack about it. He’s too busy whining about the weather and stewing over bad drivers.

The point is, people tend to fly into rages about the things they are most personally sensitive to. Right now, politics provides plenty of fodder for outrage, to the point of redundancy. Pundits are spouting off about those wretched liberals (or vile conservatives) and their heads get redder and redder, like the uppermost points of thermometers.

Downtown, where rage is less austere, people clamor about the abuse of police forces or the injustices of the court system. Neighbors rail loudly about the growing population of punks and how it’s not safe to walk the streets anymore. A woman fills the night with vocal displeasure about a neighbor’s dog. A man screams until cords bulge in his neck because the lawless towing company just hauled his truck away for the third time.

In the police lobby, people turn crimson while arguing about parking tickets. Faces darken to the shades of firetrucks as one schlep after another demands to see an officer about this injustice or that one. A man does his impression of a beet while insisting that the law is slow in tracking down the cretin who stole his bike.

A block away, a young girl stops in her tracks and hunches over slightly to muster the maximum force possible to scream at her scoundrel boyfriend. Her young face turns so bright it almost glows. Profanity and spittle fly with equal velocities.

There are nights when everyone seems angry about something. Corner store clerks bite the heads off customers. Cranky cops are quicker to write a summons or make an arrest. Loving couples find things to scrap about and do so at full volume. Lonely people storm down sidewalks, screaming at trees and buildings because no one else will listen. The color of the downtown becomes the bright red of hypertension.

There’s a fine line between fury and discontent. The person who attends a rally to voice his opinion finds himself in the back of a police cruiser. The guy who tries to politely discuss a bill with the auto mechanic ends up smashing windows and throwing a punch or two. The lady who has had it with that snake of a boyfriend snaps and burns his house down.

At one time or another, we all fly off the handle. For a moment or two, we’re no more emotionally stable than an infant who screeches with indignation when the bottle runs dry. Some perceived slight will whip us into a frenzy and we will rage like primitive men, driving our blood pressure through the roof and straining our long-suffering hearts.

It’s all part of the human experience, I suppose. I offer no profound insights or explanations. There just happens to be a particular mood out there tonight. Anger is the current of emotion surging invisible through the streets. The volume is loud and the color is red.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.

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