Beef and Casual Fighting
I understand road rage. In my twenties, I could be provoked to get out of my vehicle. Nothing ever came of it, thankfully. The insult was that there were people that could concentrate on something else while behind the wheel of a vehicle that could hit other vehicles. It wasn’t bumper cars. I judged everyone harshly in those days. Then a friend plowed my car into two other vehicles and a few dealings with different insurance companies had me singing the song of how we all make mistakes, and no one is really out there on the roads trying to hurt anyone else. Five years, by the way. That’s how long it takes for an accident that wasn’t your fault, but happened in your vehicle takes to fall off of your insurance. Every monthly billing cycle and every financial decision you make, your childhood friend’s name will be mentioned when they read off a list of your life. Moments like this humble you and you find yourself not caring about the Altima that cut you off, let it be someone else’s problem.
When Danny and Amy meet during their road rage incident, I laughed. They were definitely brand new and have never dealt with State Farm trying to get the exact story down so that paperwork could be filed. The early rage is always so fresh.
That’s the premise of the show. A chance encounter in a parking lot and they become mortal enemies. They’re my age and a similar background. The duality of their lives was one I navigated straight down the middle. 80’s babies and first-generation kids they both had California dreams. Danny stays close to home and incorporates his parents into all of his life decisions. Amy bounces and leaves the past behind. I can’t say one path is better than the other and I teeter tottered between the two for twenty years.
Tit for Tat
The minute the fighting began on Beef I had a flashback to my own incident of pettiness. You never know when you’ll enter into a tit for tat with someone. It tends to happen organically and then the course is determined by circumstance and volume.
Fighting with my Danny was never driving down the street trying to run the other off the road or pushing the other off a cliff in Malibu. It was just Internet troll fighting. If it had ever involved physical confrontation, I would have won every battle, wiping the floor with them every time.
When my fighting happened, I used it as escapism. Imagine someone you don’t have contact with that judges you merely on what they perceive of you on the Internet and you both throw jabs. A waste of time, but cathartic in its own toxic ways and funny. I’m ashamed to admit that when I watched Beef, it crossed my mind what they thought about the show. You have to be a special level of asshole to really appreciate this particular show. Everyone can relate, but if you haven’t actually gone ham on someone at that level, it hits different.
Adulting
You grow up and the fighting doesn’t give you the kicks that it used to. One day you’re hurling insults that you came up with on the fly and the next it just isn’t there anymore. The spark to eviscerate with words has died and in its place is just nothing. One minute you have created a perfect foe in your mind- someone sitting behind a mahogany desk twisting their pinky ring while they think of the perfect comeback to your tear down. It never really existed though.
You wake up to the reality that you were picking a fight with a kid that most likely got fired from Carl’s, Jr. for being truant too many times. There will never be a confrontation in Van Nuys when you both end up at the same book signing. They don’t read Scott Galloway and most of your jibes probably went far over their head.
There will come a time when someone sits across from me and asks about embarrassing moments. The pettiness ranks up there, but thankfully, in your favor, there are no videos of you driving them off of the road in a fit of rage.
Amy and Danny end up in a place — whether it’s really happening or if it’s a drug fever dream, but a place where they wish the best for the other. I definitely got there, and it didn’t take an overdose or a near death in the Malibu canyons to get there. Sometimes you just grow and realize you were out of line. I’ll never revisit that behavior, but boy, was it some great writing when I was being my most toxic. Which is to say that Beef was a great show and if it’s a standalone single season, it would still be great.
