Commutation and slow walkers
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Commutation and slow walkers Thursday August 3
(Really, I swear to stop writing about trains so much when they stop fascinating/annoying me.)
My mom has always been a "fast walker". We'd go to Machesney Park Mall in my younger days; between being forced to shop for shirts and jeans I was convinced I didn't need and being subjected to endless hours in footwear stores for my ever-growing-feet-basketball-playing brother, I can't say I had that much fun at the time. Of course, now it's a fond memory of my youth.
Moreso than the godawful fluorescent lighting at Kohl's (which, coincidentally contains a special wavelength of light that instantly renders young children whiny, tired, and irritable, but completely unnoticable to adults), one of my strongest memories is keeping up with my mom when she walked between stores. She'd even occasionally make remarks, out of earshot, about people who "walk like they have no place to go".
Maybe it was from these experiences that I got my sense of urgency.
Now I'm a fast walker too. Sure, there are thousands of sayings about journeys mattering more than destinations and so on so forth, but let's be real for a second. Commuting to work is not a journey. It is most certainly a destination. Some may counter that by suggesting, in some lofty, idealistic voice, that I challenge myself to find a new thing every day. It's always easier to tell people how to live when you don't have to live their life, right? Anyway.
On my "journey", I encounter many of the "slow walker" species. They have been known to commonly associate with the "waddler drone" species, which can also be found in stairwells, large crowds surrounding exit gates after live performances, and in line at the Old Country Buffet. Slow walkers occur in the wild quite frequently, and actually, with the lack of natural predators to humankind in our world today, run rampant like house sparrows outside of Europe.
My suggestion is that we bring back dinosaurs like in Jurassic Park (tm). We'll reconstruct velocoraptors from mosquitoes trapped in amber and let natural selection speed up the process. Who's training for a marathon now, foo?
However, I understand that this hardline policy is a little radical. I am currently working on a more moderate version that we can sell to the non-fundamentalists; something we can at least package on the news networks. Maybe use the carrot-on-a-stick routine, updated for modern times. We'll use Krispy Kremes or something. We could even get corporate sponsorship on that. Hrmm, this idea is coming together.
Anyway.
Until my world domination is complete, or at least, until I can reasonably enforce such a policy without jeopardizing my own status as supreme decision maker of What Should Be, I will be patient. In the event that my eldest brother Mike becomes leader of the New World Order first, as he is also vying for this position, I will lobby that I should be nepotistically named head of the to-be-created Department of Pedotransportation. For the record, this unit will supercede the Ministry of Silly Walks as well as take over responsibility for handling all liability claims stemming from Freestyle Walking.
I have devised a provisional approach that seems to work quite well.
Assign an instrument (brass seems to work best), complete with melody, to each entity that strikes your attention while walking.
For example, this evening I was trapped behind a rather portly gentlemen who was in no hurry. A tuba came to mind. I envisioned this man sitting on a metal folding chair in the band room of my sixth grade band at Kinnikinnick. He had this big tuba wrapped around him, and he was putting out an equally-portly simple bassline whose notes changed with every step: ba-bum ba-bum ba-da-da-da and then the pattern repeated. I also come across sousaphones here and there.
Old ladies often become clarinets. Like the clarinet, I'm sure there is something nice about them, but I don't really know what it is.
Saxophone players were, and have always been, the bane of my existence. Possibly, I was a sax player that never was; I like doing my own thing, playing my own tune, trying to steal the limelight with a solo whenever opportune. Yes, these guys walk just as fast as I do. But there is something dastardly about them. Something not quite right. Out of tune? C'mon, man. We both know that neither of us are going to get a seat on that train up there, so let's just hold our horses on edging out others.
Anyway, so until world domination is complete, I've got to work with what I've got. I do pass on the right; that seems to help.
