Maybe You’re Not as Tough as You Think
People today tend to think they’re a hell of a lot tougher than they actually are. I blame a cocktail of social media, internet anonymity, and, yeah, probably Hollywood too. And before you roll your eyes and say, “Wow, another Hollywood rant”, this isn’t that. This is a rant about weak people pretending they’re warriors.
We’ve built an online world where the timid roar loudest. Cowards hide behind screen names, threatening strangers, bullying people, flexing digital muscles they don’t have in the real world. Skinny, soft, uncoordinated sloths run their mouths online like they’re Bruce fucking Lee or Clint fucking Eastwood.
The problem doesn’t end when they log off. The safety of a vehicle turns them into road-rage warriors, flipping the bird and hurling insults from behind their dashboards at people they’d never dare confront face-to-face. Maybe it’s the police-state comfort blanket too. The meek have inherited the earth, but only because they can dial 911 the second someone tougher pushes back.
I see it constantly when I’m on the bike. Maybe they think their car is bigger than my motorcycle, so they feel brave. Yesterday was a perfect example. I was riding home from work — fast, focused, and in my zone.
That’s how I ride: weaving through traffic, threading the needle, throttle pinned when it’s safe, slowing when it’s not. I see everything, every twitch of a wheel, every subtle drift of a distracted driver. Riding like that brings me to a place of razor-sharp calm.
Most people don’t care. They’re too busy eating sandwiches or scrolling playlists to even notice me blow past. But some? They take it as a personal insult, like my existence on two wheels is an affront to their sacred four-wheeled crawl. These are the people who slam on brakes just to prove a point or pace the car beside them in the left lane while I sit behind them, shrugging in disbelief.
Last night, I hit the first light in Santa Fe at Alamo Drive, smiling under my full-face helmet, adrenaline still humming through my veins. The light turns green, and suddenly there’s an SUV to my right, window down, and this woman is losing her mind at me. Both middle fingers up, screaming so hard I can see the veins in her neck.
She had that sunken-in, missing-teeth look — the kind that tells you life’s been chewing on her for a while. And no, I’m not saying she was a crackhead, I’m saying she looked like one. Big difference. The only words I caught were “fucking bitch,” which made me laugh out loud. “Aww,” I thought, “she didn’t misgender me. How sweet.”
But I was also genuinely curious: what did she think was going to happen here? I’m 6'1", 225 pounds. Yeah, I’ve got some belly, but I’m mostly muscle. This woman? Frail. Arms flopping like skin draped over bone. Maybe five feet tall on a good day. And here she was, acting like she was about to climb out of that SUV and go full UFC.
So I gave her the Morpheus “bring it” hand.
She didn’t.
Light turns green, she’s in the right-turn lane, and I’ve got traffic behind me. I take off, but curiosity’s chewing at me, so I swing back around and roll slowly down Alamo Drive, hoping maybe she stopped somewhere. I didn’t even know what I was going to say. Maybe I’d park the bike and ask her to step out. Maybe I’d just ask the question that kept looping in my head: What did you realistically think you were going to do with those fists?
But she was gone.
Vanished.
And now I’m left with unanswered questions and a lingering frustration.
This is where I come back to the society we’ve built — a soft, chickenshit culture that outsources conflict to the cops. Because here’s the truth: that woman deserved a pop in the nose. Not because I was angry, but because her actions earned it. She was the aggressor. She was the one spewing rage out the window.
And yet, if I’d laid a finger on her, I would’ve been the one in cuffs. That’s the world we live in now. Actions have no consequences because people know they can run their mouths with impunity.
Maybe, just maybe, if more people got popped in the mouth when they acted like Chuck fucking Norris, fewer people would walk around pretending they’re untouchable. And maybe, just maybe, I could enjoy my ride home in peace.
Maybe.
