Friday, October 22, 2010

Got Sense?: Unbridled Entitlement & Fixies

When the mind ruminates on subject matter of great import, it's best to take lengthy walks to aid reflection and clear the mind.  Practitioners of the peripatetic tradition such as Aristotle and Immanuel Kant achieved great progress this way.  Consequently, when my mind was overborne with the heady and perplexing quandary of whether or not I did in fact have milk, I set out on foot to purge my mind of distractions.


While plodding out my front door, I abandoned my usual stroll along the Pathway to Enlightenment because I sought not enlightenment but quietude.  One would think that out-of-doors in Toronto's core would be a poor place to seek solitude, but being a rank and malodorous clod, I part crowds of people like a sidewalk Moses:

AJ Jacob's models the Old Testament line in BikeSnobNYC's 'hood.
Strolling thusly, I was alone to chew my mental cud for some time till I stopped for a red-light at an intersection.  [Here, I regretfully must pause and make a brief description of what I'm talking about for Toronto's cyclists, since the vast majority of them don't seem to understand what they are:

A red light.

A red light is a traffic control device meant to interrupt traffic flow to allow for crossing and merging traffic to enter the traffic flow.  By stopping, users of the road allow for a safe and predictable crossing and merging of other traffic.]

Standing silently on the street corner pondering various methodologies of dairy product ownership, my subconscious fault-finder began frantically clanging resounding alarms about a metaphysical disturbance in the fabric of my immediate surroundings and that I should, as a person of good sense and will toward self-preservation, take a step back.

I glanced over at west-bound cyclist enter the intersection and instead of turning north or south continued on, at the Urban Repair Squad's insistence, against obviously on-coming traffic.  However as this cyclist did so a cyclist heading north along the sidewalk rode through the red light into the intersection into the path of the west-bound cyclist.  Not to be outdone, a south-bound cyclist also skipped the red-light without looking for cross-traffic and also rode into the path of the west-bound (and now salmoning) cyclist.

The confluence of idiocy: you can't make this stuff up.

The stunning confluence of idiocy was enough to create a black hole-like vortex into which the universe suddenly and precipitously teetered for a brief moment before some well-timed swerving and an exchange of wrath-laden glares and other bits of nerd rage righted the universe back to normalcy.

Shaken and stirred to new heights of pessimism, I pondered various aspects of the indelicate ballet I had just witnessed: Does stupidity have mass?  If so, would it explain why some people seem to be Stupidity personified?  Did the sudden confluence of stupid mass create a sucking black hole that caused all three cyclists to gravitate towards each other uncontrollably?  Could you roll stupidity in to a ball and push it down a hill?  Is that how Rob Ford's campaign gained momentum?

Certainly, no real harm had been done because no accident occurred.  And certainly, Toronto cyclists had embarrassed themselves awfully, but no one was really surprised to see cyclists ride down sidewalks, run red lights, and salmon down one-way streets.  Ruefully, this is all regrettably common in Toronto.  Truly, the only real consequence of the incident was an entrenchment of negative stereotypes of Toronto cyclists.

Having realized the incident was insignificant, I wondered whether something was wrong with my subconscious fault-finder?  Hearing the irksome sound of a hipster skidding, my attention regrouped with fresh annoyance and immediately grasped his lack of adequate foot-rention for riding brakeless effectively, thereby reassuring me that my subconscious fault-finder was in fact working perfectly.  Moreover, it also reminded me that there's only one more sleep till Tom Mosher's Hell Track 3, an attempt to create sustainable entertainment for Toronto's hipsters by doing the same thing over and over again, but differently.

[Yet more laps around the school at Bickford Park?  What is that?  Gym class for hipsters?!]

Fortunately, it appears that it will rain tomorrow evening.

The weatherway courtesy of The Weather Network.
This is fortunate because rain terrifies sissy cyclists and will keep them from spoiling Mosher's event with their sissyness, which will help apply a convenient veneer of dedication to those who are willing to endure the savage beating of raindrops on their skin for the sake of glory.  However, having been force-fed my fill of stupidity for the week, I won't be attending.

I have more important things to think about.

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