ToxicPurity Learns To Drive

Noel fears I'm turning into a revhead, now that I'm up to my third burnout from a standing start. Am trying to persuade him that he needs to teach me to do donuts and handbrake turns, so I know how to do it right, of course, but he's not falling for it.

I think I'm still taking corners a little too fast for his liking. On the one hand, after all that business with checking your blind spots and mirrors and signalling and hugging the kerb without actually running into the kerb and braking and clutching in to a rolling stop...etc, it's hardly surprising I'll forget a little thing like gearing down to 2nd, is it.

Other than that, I've surprised myself with how much I'm enjoying this. I don't know what exactly it was about driving that seemed so intimidating before. It all seemed so unnecessarily complicated, perhaps. Well, it is complicated, but there's a certain logic to the sequence of actions involved, most of which are gradually beginning to become apparent even to me: It's all about clutch control, damnit!

When Noel first put me on the road, I'd do little things to make an otherwise stressful situation more interesting, like confuse the accelerator for the brake, stall on a right-hand turn against traffic, miss 3rd gear entirely and stick it into 5th...etc. Little things like that. Little things that would prompt Noel to leap for the handbrake, and talk in extremely conversatonal tones about how the driving centre is shortly about to get dual-control vehicles, and wouldn't that be nice?

Noel still leaps for the handbrake now and again, and invokes the holy hoped-for dual controls, but not quite as often anymore. I take this as a sure sign that I'm definitely getting better at this driving thing. Or else, Noel's simply too petrified with terror to react. Either's likely, I suppose.