So, Scott, Gregg, Pyle, and myself decided to grab some chicken at 7-eleven last night. Nice night, so we walked. On the way back from the store I crossed the street at the pedestrian crossing. I love crossing at the pedestrian Crossing in this town because it pisses people right off. No one’s used to people actually using it because the unwritten rule around here is that if you want to get across the street, you just jaywalk when there’s no traffic. Rumor has it that there’s actually no jaywalking bylaw here. it might be so, it might not. REGARDLESS, one of the answers on your driver’s exam is that pedestrians always have the right of way, and this is doubly true at pedestrian crossings.
So, I start crossing, and I’m looking directly at the driver’s side window, cause I figure a large truck crusing the town on a saturday night would be just the sort that would ignore me. He slows down and stops and the rest of the gang follows along behind me.
“Get off the fucking road” Yells the man in the truck
Instantly my middle finger goes up, I slow my pace and start walking deliberately with a slow motion running-man-chariots-of fire-typegyration of my shoulders in front of the vehicle, and don’t bother to turn around and look back as I sip nonchalantly on my slurpee.
Now we’ve crossed the street , (in front of fedun’s walking toward’s my house for veg types) garbled cursing comes shouted from the vehicle as they pass. Not willing to let them off with thinking they were in the right and not wanting to resort to shouting profanity. I start mock-bawling. “BRRREEEAAAAAHOOO WHHHAAAAAA!!! WHY!!! WHY ARE YOU SO CRUEL? THAT HURTS ME ON THE INSIDE… WHERE MY HEART IS! BRAAAAAWWWWW HOOOo WHAAAAAA!!!” (picture me flailing my arms about wildly and then doing a little sissy dance and limply flicking my wrists up and down rapidly. except I wasn’t doing the wrist thing cause I was holding a slurpee and chicken-on-a-stick. So in reality more of a rapid pelvic gyration with as much flailing as one can accomplish with an armload of food.)
The Truck pulls a U-Turn, naturally.
Into the parking lot it drives, there is more yelling at me that I can’t make out as I up the intensity and absurdness of my crying dance. The passenger opens the door and starts coming out of the car yelling and gesturing. The guys with me are laughing their heads off at him. Clearly he’s making the standard “You made me mad, I’ll turn the car around and look imposing and never actually back up my posturing with a real fight but hopefully you’ll be frightened by my show of man might” move that I used to get all the time in highschool. My standard response to this of course is to up the volume of my “you’re a moron and I make no bones about pointing it out” shenanigans.
He crawls back into his truck and they drive away.
Pyle swears he saw him counting how many people were with me with his finger. “One, Two, Three, Four Vs. One Two.”
I, on the other hand, swear in the 40 odd times that similar situations have occurred with me, maybe only twice has it actually come to blows. Kinda makes me sad. Not sad that I’m missing out on a good fight, but sad that there are so many blowhards out there.
Well I can tell you this, if it had come to blows tonight. After it was all over, with his face a bloody pulp (I only aim for publicly visible damage, ladies and gents, I once gave a guy about twice my size a black eye from careful dodging and sissy slapping alone.). I’d have given him a nice calm talk about the moral of tonight’s story,
Traffic laws are there for the safety of everyone.
-Dean
