Irrational

Several years ago when I was working in a cube farm, I was walking down the aisle on my way somewhere when I came up behind these two broads walking down the aisle side by side, in the same direction as me. When I say broads, I mean broads. They were about three feet wide and about 300 pounds, each. They were walking slightly slower than I was, maybe two miles per hour to my three. They were engaged in conversation and were completely oblivious to the fact that I wanted to get past them. It's possible I could have pushed my way through, but it's equally likely they could have taken offence and prevented me, so I whiled away my time by imagining pressing a bar of iron into a grinder really hard so sparks are flying a hundred feet and the iron is screaming in agony.

Last school year I was driving down one of the two lane roads at the PCC (Portland Community College) campus that lead to a parking lot when some pedestrians stepped out in front of me. That's okay, pedestrians are a fact of life here, I can wait until they cross the street. Or it would have been okay if they had gone directly across the street at a reasonable walking pace. But these yahoos, four or five black kids, are not walking at a normal walking pace, they are dawdling. They are making maybe one mile per hour. That would not have been so bad except that they weren't crossing the street directly, or even semi-directly. They were taking a path an extreme angle that was going to take them a hundred yards down the road before they got to the other side. Were they oblivious to my presence, or were they deliberately baiting me? I really don't know. I did refuse the bait and sat and waited for the three and a half hours it took them to meander down the road and finally get up on the curb on the other side. This is the kind of shit that makes racists out of ordinary hateful people.

This summer we took a Washington State Ferry out to the San Juan Islands. While we are waiting in the parking queue I notice a couple walking. Well, walking might be an exaggeration. Staggering was more like it. The man appeared to partially crippled and was pulling the woman along, or she was pulling on him, trying to keep him from toppling over. They were not going too fast, but they were making progress, they weren't in anybody's way, and they weren't bothering anybody, but they bothered me. In my mind I was all why don't you just walk? What is all this staggering shit? I really don't have a clue what that was about.

Except maybe this: My father had trouble keeping his balance when he got really old. I took him for a walk one time. I didn't think it was that long, but evidently it was more than he could handle. The last couple of blocks he was trying to lean over because his sense of level wasn't right, and I was having to hold him up. It was real struggle to get those last couple of blocks. I would have sat him down and gone to get the car, but there was no place to sit.

I went to the doctor a couple of weeks ago and there was a new-to-me nurse there. She was a little elderly with gray hair and a quavering voice, and the voice really bothered me, kind of like the couple at the ferry. No good reason for it, it just annoyed me. Why is that?