Buzz Off Vultures

Okay, so this blogging is beginning to become a bit of an addiction. There are far worse addictions to have, mind you. In fact ‘addictions’ have already found their place in line on the blog list.

I’m going to have to find a way to manage my blogging. As you recall, I started as a means to get me writing again. But now, blogging always seems more appealing than completing anything with a deadline attached to it. I know. Blogs can be the reward: a little slice of company at the end of the day, just me and the clicking of the keys.

This blog-reward system will promptly be implemented tomorrow. Today I blog first because today I need to rant.

Today I got a ticket for jaywalking.

The first thing you need to understand is that everyone jaywalks. It’s an overcrowded city. We’re busting at the seams and our transportation options are limited and failing.

I’ve been fully ‘ped’ for 18 months now, having signed off cars for good in July of 2005. No more financing something that loses value everyday, no more insuring a piece of metal when I can’t even afford to insure my own health, no more surprise repairs that pop up at the most inconvenient of times, no more car accidents. Oh yea, and no more gas. The whole gas gouging phase totally flew over my head. For once, I couldn’t relate to the ass-raping that virtually all of my car-dependent friends and family were struggling through. Getting rid of the auto lifestyle was one of the best things I ever did.

I’m fortunate enough to live in a city that allows me that option. Everything I need I can walk to. If I ever have the desire to hit the suburbs (Target is, on occasion the only thing I miss, and honestly, I can find socks and underwear elsewhere) there’s Flexcar. If you don’t know what Flexcar is, I urge you to check them out (www.flexcar.com).

I’ve always loved walking, so its no surprise that I turned into a ped. As a ped commuter, you learn the shortcuts, the routes that have the less-grueling inclines. You learn how to flow with all of the competing traffic (peds battle the cars, cars hate the peds and the bicyclists hate everyone). And everyone, everyone, jaywalks. If the lights red and there’s nothing coming from cross-traffic, you walk. Common knowledge.

I’ve been working out of the apartment lately. I used to be able to work from home easier, but that hasn’t been the case lately. Part of it is that working in public forces me to be on display.

“I can’t just sit here for hours, I need to look like I’m doing something. Damn, guess I’d better work.”

So every morning since I decided to start living again, it’s the same routine. Wake up. Shake off all the fear and anger and self-loathing. Forgive myself. Put myself in a positive place, create spaces for the present and the future that are creative, healthy, bountiful.

To the laymen, or the stubborn, it sounds campy. It sounds like after-school program cognitive therapy bullshit.

But it isn’t.

It works. Our minds are our most powerful tools. And we spend too much time thinking that we can’t strengthen and shape them the way we do other parts of our bodies.

So. I’m at my bliss point of the day, ready to get working. En route to a coffee house, I escort my elderly neighbor to the bus station. She’s old and dying. Her eyesight is bad, her heart is bad, her back is bad. She only has the use of one hand, the other one simply decided it was done, it didn’t want to function anymore. She doesn’t sleep at night from all the meds she’s on, all the speed she’s on to help with the depression of dying alone. She’s the sweetest thing.

I hit the bank. I hit the post office. I’m running later than I intended. I hit the intersection of Broadway and Denny. The light is red. No cross traffic in either direction. I proceed as do several others.

My second heel hasn’t fully touched the curb on the opposite corner before two cops on bikes stop me. One quickly moves to another ped. The officer asks for my i.d. He asks if its current. I tell him yes. (It is not.) He informs me that he stopped me because he’s trying to protect me and I walked when the blinking sign read, “Don’t walk.”

“Oh. I must’ve been looking at the mountains. They get me every time.”

The mountains are snowcapped and stunning on clear days. I feel a strange comradery with the Olympics, like somehow they’re here to protect me. (Apparently not today.)

He’s scribbling away on a pad and I assume he’s issuing me a warning. Several passersby stop to watch me and my fellow ped. You can tell their curiosity is piqued. “They don’t look like tweekers.”

From his pad, I get the green copy. White is his. Yellow goes to the city. What I thought was a warning turned out to be a $46.00 citation. Forty-six dollars. Holy shit. I can’t afford this right now.

He rides off and a group of students that had been watching ask me what the ticket is for. “Forty-six dollars. Jaywalking. Careful boys and girls, the city’s sniffing out extra revenue.” Everybody’s sympathetic.

“We were walking right behind you. But they didn’t stop us. They stopped you,” one student offered.

“Guess it’s my lucky day.”

“No. You look like you could afford to pay it. We’re just some poor ass students. But he looked at you and figured you could take the hit.”

He figured wrong. Just because I’m carrying a briefcase and wearing all black doesn’t mean I have anymore money in my pocket than then next guy.

“Notice how all the drunk, methed-out tweekers never get stopped for jaywalking,” another offers.

On my way to Pioneer Square I count the number of cars that run red lights, the number of cars that snake their ways through the crosswalks that I have the right of way for, the number of cars that almost hit me. I count the number of people that jaywalk diagonally. For the record, this never helps the situation.

I rewind and replay, rewind and replay. I kick myself in the ass. “Man, I didn’t even fight him on it.” I could’ve asked for a warning. I didn’t even try to fight it. Maybe I should’ve told him that it had been 48 hours since I last thought of killing myself and now I have to start from zero again.

“Stop being so dramatic. And don’t be ugly. He’s just doing his job. And technically, you did jaywalk.” I didn’t fight it because I’m tired of fighting. I’m tired of fighting everyone and everything.

I think of how the cop said he was doing this for my protection and my mind skips back to an image a month or so ago: a messy accident in the neighborhood. A ped got hit in the middle of the crosswalk. By the time we passed it, all that was left was a stray, widowed tennis shoe, mangled in the middle of the street.

If I may offer the city a word of advice: it’s not the peds that are the problem. We know how to navigate the streets. The trouble is all of the bottle-necked cars racing to make their way through the next yellow light.

My winding walk downtown leads me past the homeless addicts, passed out in doorway crevices. I am reminded that I have absolutely nothing to be upset about. I shake it off, little by little, and notice that an overwhelming majority of the people I pass are serving up a generous supply of smiles.

“How do they know I need their smiles today?”

I remove myself from the sting of the surface value. “What is the underlying message from this?,” I ponder.

Three simple answers arise.

Watch where you’re going. Be wary of what you’re walking into.
Don’t force things. Be patient, there’s no need to rush.

And last, but never least.

Watch out for the vultures that are circling overhead.