Traffic and Such

I was banished from our apartment today.  The real estate agent has been by the last couple of days; she is "staging" our furnishings to make the place more attractive to potential buyers.  "Staging" appears to embrace a whole variety of concepts, including but not limited to anything but the imagination of the "stagers:" moving things around and around and around in an endless combination, positioning them in way that all appear to look pretty much alike to me; selecting possessions that we had set aside for the trash heap to highlight our place; putting everything useful away so that we couldn't continue to live here without adopting the ascetic of John The Baptist.

"Toilet paper?  Toothpaste?  Foodstuffs?" the head stager said.  "Oh, no, no, I don't think so."

I'm kind of a big picture guy; I envision trips and new places to live and things to do and then I get contrary with the details.  SuperK knows this, and she throws me out of the house.

"Go away," she says.  "Don't come back for several hours," she says.

I went to the pool this morning to swim away my frustrations.  The New Town is very progressive and involved - there are often races and walks and runs and parades through downtown.  I have to go through the downtown to get to my pool so I'm not a big fan of these events.  Today the flashing red lights and police barricades alerted me to some fucking fun run or the other.  The races block every bridge across the river, and across the river is where I must go to get to my pool.

Can you see where this is going?  

There are two techniques to deal with traffic: to sit patiently in the traffic jam until the fun run runs its course or to find an alternate route.  My experience is that it's better to sit patiently because everyone else tries to find an alternate route, further jamming up the downtown street maze.  Today I made the mistake of asking a vest wearing volunteer standing in front of a "Local Traffic Only" sign if the road was closed.

"Oh, no, no," he said.  "The police are just letting some runners through."  

The police let a lot of runners through without opening the road.  Hundreds and hundreds of runners.  I considered going back to throttle that lying SOB volunteer but someone as pretty as me wouldn't do well in jail.  I stuck with my Stay Put and Wait Patiently plan until I thought my brain was going to jump through my skull and go back to throttle the volunteer all by itself.  I made a right turn and then a left turn, going a total of about 50 yards before running into the inevitable orange barricades.  This time a truck following me pinned me against the barricades.  The driver got out and walked around for a while.

"It's going to be about an hour," he said, when he came back.

Yadda, yadda, yadda, blah, blah, blah, about an hour later, after a stunning run of driving the wrong way down one way streets, I made it to the pool.  

No homicides, no assaults, no expletives unleashed, no curses invoked, and no impassioned pleas to god to strike that bastard down.

At coffee afterwards I called Little Westside Johnny.  I had a great talk - we had lost touch for a while and it was really cool catching up.  As I was getting ready to leave one of the other residents of my building - one of the suspected tattlers - stopped by my table and asked if she could join me.  We had a lovely talk.  It was a warm and sunny spring day.

"Our troubles, we think, are of our own making."