Playing In Traffic

It’s great to live in a town with such a large, diverse, vibrant and vital student population.  Having several hundred thousand college and university students roaming around your town has to be a major competitive advantage, and something we should appreciate and even nurture.   The students keep us young with the energy and involvement.  The faculty and staff from the educations establishment are a literally world-class civic resource, providing on-call ideas and know-how the likes of which can be found in very few other cities anywhere.  Without Harvard, MIT, BU, BC, Emmanuel, Simmons, Emerson, and the 90+ other institutions of higher ed around here we’d be nothing more than Hartford on the Charles.  So why do I keep seeing such stupid stuff from these people?

Driving by the Longwood Green Line stop on the way home from the Red Sox last night (Wakefield; 8 IP, 4 H,  1 ER — if this guy isn’t eventually mentioned with Bobby Doer, Dom Dimaggio, Jim Ed, and the rest of the demi-gods then there’s no justice in baseball) when I’m startled by something moving fast by the driver’s side window.  I literally didn’t see anything, but there had been something there.  I eventually catch up with what I’d seen/felt. He (I think it was a he) was dressed in all dark colors, riding a black bike, wearing a black helmet, with a black back-pack. It was a velo-black-hole. The only — and I mean ONLY — way you could see him was because he had his pants legs rolled up to keep from getting them caught in the chain. And those calves were white. I’m not talking Caucasian-hued flesh. I’m talking albino white. I’m talking one of the many words the Inuit have for frozen precipitation white. I’m talking the kind of white that calls out for seven dwarfs. But those calves were the only visibility this person had. I don’t even think he had a red reflector on that bike. It was really kind of spooky, just seeing those six inches of incredibly pale flesh pumping up and down, weaving through traffic and somehow coming out on the other side, to live another day.

I hope that person eventually gets a job that pays them enough that they can afford the $25 it would take to put a couple of lights on his bike. Or maybe they’ll reach a fashion cross-roads and realize that white is the new black. But he’ll probably just keep wearing the same stuff, weaving through heavy post Red Sox traffic, wondering why cars never seem to yield or get out of his way. IT’S BECAUSE THEY CAN’T SEE YOU! And for your own sake, invest in some high-quality sun screen.

Filed under: dumb stuff, Oblivousness