Crossing the street at a crosswalk: something I had never given much thought and quite frankly, something I always believed to be a rather simple task. I, however, have never lived in New York before, and if there is one thing I know now it’s that the people vote their conscience. However, if there is one thing I know now that pertains to this situation, it’s that people in the tri-state area take things a bit more seriously.
I start to cross the street this morning, making sure I am well within the diagonal, white, cross-walk stripes. To be perfectly honest, I was equidistant from both edges of the crosswalk boundary. So right there my day was off to another spontaneous, hilarious start. As I was about halfway across the street, a Lexus turned onto the same street a few feet in front of me. Everything seems normal there, happens every day. However, for some reason the man in said Lexus got furious at me and stopped right in front of me.
At this point I was very confused. This man, who was now yelling at me and gesturing wildly through a closed window, was obviously fuming because I was crossing the street at the same time he was turning. In making his turn he had to negotiate the parked car on the right side of the road and myself on the left side. But, there was no problem. He had successfully made the turn. I hadn’t been near his car when he had turned and he had clearly not hit the parked car to the other side of him. The only reason that there was any problem was because he had now stopped in front of me, thereby holding both of us up.
The nutball in the car continued to yell and sign some bad things, so I decided to walk around his car. I went around behind his car because it would have been too easy for this loon to run me over had I walked in front. Couldn’t he have thrown it in reverse if he was completely out of his crib? Well, yes, I suppose, but it made sense at the time. So I got to the other side of the street and continued on my way to the bus.
I had almost walked another block when Lexus guy decided he had not had enough. As I’m crossing another street, he turns off where he was going to stop directly in front of me again. So, I was a little concerned because now this guy was following me in order to have it out. And this is the point that I will never understand. He remained there, parked in front of me, so he could show me how wrong and dumb I was, yelling through his closed windows. This guy had gone out of his way to follow me, had forgotten about where he was driving, so that he could yell at me and scream and bitch and moan over the little cross-walk/turning incident. Except, it wasn’t worth enough to him to roll down his window. What the hell is that?!?!?! I wanted him to roll it down, just so I could hear what was so important at that point. At least then I would have had the satisfaction of knowing what particular kind of bug was lodged up his butt. Alas, I now can only speculate as to the depth of his psychological dysfunction. To cope with this incident, I am turning it into a screenplay. It will be called Winter In (A Suburb of) New York, starring Richard Gere and Tiffany Amber Thiessen, select showings this summer in LA, NY, and Houston.