I finished Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book The Idiot (1869). This is regarded as his 3rd best book behind Crime and Punishment and the Brothers Karamazov. Why I decided to tackle this one instead of the others? Perhaps it suits me more.

The book is about 650 pages which puts it as one of the longer books I’ve read behind Stephen King’s the Stand and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which were both over 1,000. I finished the Idiot in about 2 weeks and it became, “I have to finish this” instead of, “I want to finish this”, which is never good. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy the work mainly because it was produced through a Russian mindset which I have rarely encounter. It’s also fun to put yourself back in that time period and wonder what it was like to survive without the communication we have today. Oddly, the issues that the characters went through back then are not that much different than today. The book was a collection of events that were mainly people sitting in a room talking. So, this was hardly a page turner. The idea of whether the Prince was a genius or an idiot was a fun concept.

I’m well aware no one comes to this blog to read a book review. I’ll turn this into a fun thought I had today while driving. There was a guy in a pick up who was in the left lane and it was getting close to the on ramp. I had a feeling he was going to try to cut me off to get on 295. I had done that to the guy before about 10 seconds earlier, but mine was ok because the guy wasn’t driving close enough to prevent me from doing it and I had plenty of time. For this yokel, I had the opportunity to speed up and make the guy miss the on ramp and then I thought to myself, “is that the type of person I want to be?” It’s ok when I do it, but don’t do it to me? But I did it with class and timeliness. This red neck was doing it as an asshole. There IS a difference. In the end, I let him in. What an idiot!

I can come up with tons of driving situations. The biggest driving faux pas I see is far left lane drivers going too slow. I was told in Germany you don’t pass on the right. It’s like a major “fuck you” that you just don’t do. In the grand ol’ US of A, I’ll pass on the right if the immigrant doesn’t know that the far left lane is the speed lane. Immigrant could also be an old person, but they don’t tend to be in the left lane. It’s usually someone who’s super stoned, on their phone, or the theme of the day, an idiot. I’ll regularly run into the constant lane switchers which bugs me a little bit, but they always tend to get ahead of me so more power to them as they make the road way more dangerous.