Today I had to pretend to ignore a discarded band-aid cotton ball combo that was lying on the changing room bench in the locker room.   I would say that there is a 94% chance it was from a blood draw at the health center, because it was a shimmery reflective kaleidoscope of a band-aid, the kind that a grown up would only wear if someone else put it on them.  I have had such band-aids put on me.  At the health center.  That’s the other way I know.  And so, here I am, sitting on an already pretty gross bench between a used blood clotter and someone’s dirty bathing suit hanging outside their locker.   And I wonder.  Is this really worth it?  Do I care about swimming that much? 

I do.  I really do.  Even when I hate swimming, I love it.  I hate it as one hates laying the foundation of one’s own success.   

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Another disturbing trend I’ve been noticing is that people have begun attempting suicide by running or walking into my moving car.  Now animals having been doing this for years, but it seems that we humans needed smart phones to get us moving toward vehicular self-manslaughter (lady-slaughter?). 

Example one, I am making a left turn off a busy road onto a side road, and I am stopped, waiting, with my turn signal on.  I see a woman, surfing her phone, starting to walk across the side road in the cross walk.  I wait until she has a good head start across the street and then I begin my turn.  As I get closer, she full stops in the middle of the street!!!! to typiddy type type on her phone.  In the middle of the street!  My dog knows better than that.  I swerved left (the side street didn’t have oncoming traffic so I could swerve where oncoming traffic would have been coming from).  As I passed, I certainly took the time to project out the window, “really, RIGHT in the middle of the street?”  Suicide.   It’s the only explanation.  She was trying to make it look like an accident.

Today, I watched 4 people waiting patiently at a crosswalk for a walk signal.  Unfortunately, instead of the “Walk” sign popping up next, the other green light came on, giving my lane of cars the left hand turn green light.  But those pedestrians had been waiting at least 20 full seconds, and they decided that “damn, it feels like its our turn to walk.”   So they did.  They walked straight toward the lit red words saying "DON'T WALK"  Perhaps that thought that sign was only referring to the little people.  They walked right to where we, the oncoming cars, desired to drive.  In this case, since we couldn’t just bowl them over (well, I couldn’t because the car in front of me wouldn’t go), I decided to sing a nice loud audible song out my window to the walkers that went approximately like this, “look at that beautiful ‘don’t walk’ sign, all red and asking you to not walk.  Boy do I wish you could read it, because that way you would know not to walk . . . “

I should make it clear that those were not the exact words to the song that I sung, both because I can’t remember now, and because it went on for some time.  The general feeling and tone, however, remain the same.   Which is to say that they both heard me, and looked, and one even gave me a semi-dirty/confused look.  I felt fine about it. 

We aren’t done.  I’ve had to swerve around at least 2 other downward facing dingbats who think they can simultaneously pass that last level of angry birds while navigating through town.  It’s as if the invention of the smart phone has deprogrammed the “moving cars > pedestrians” equation out of our own internal hard-drives.  Which can mean only one thing . . .

Road kill ain’t just for squirrels anymore.