walking.

Walking is one of those things whose difficulty I always tend to underrate.

I mean, yeah, we learned how to do it by age two or three.  But God forbid we’d pick up on any of the social intricacies associated with it.

There is a certain walking code of ethics, I think, that far too many people tend to ignore.  Sort of an unwritten rulebook to better guide us and our fellow man down the path – whether that path is physically the sidewalk or just the trek to the adult bookstore at 10th & Walnut.  Hey, I’m not judging.

Ideally, the first rule is that you pay attention to where you’re walking.  How many times have you been minding your business, just going about your daily walking commute when some asshole on a cell phone bumps into you going the opposite direction and doesn’t even turn to acknowledge the fact?  Far too many times, in my case.  In fact, I’m on the offensive now.  I’ve got asshole walker radar turned on permanently.  If I spot any one of those bastards, be it the bleach blond fratboy or the fun-sized Asian chick, I stick my shoulder out intentionally so that they might get the hint.  They usually do, and indicate such by pausing their phone conversation to turn around and give a “what the hell” look.  What the hell indeed, yo.  Watch where you’re going.  Or I’m going to shoulder ram the shit out of you.  It’s turned into an impromptu sport for me.  And I always win.

My second rule is the general acknowledgement that it’s not appropriate to smoke in large crowds.  Beyond the immediate reality of how inconsiderate it is, it’s generally just white trash.  Seriously, buddy, you couldn’t wait until you got five minutes further down the sidewalk to get to your house or stop at a bench?  You had to light up in a crowd committed to the same path?  I don’t have a problem with smokers, I just ask that they respect non-smokers in public places.  No nicotine craving is so important that you have to bust out that pack of Newports with an entire line of walkers behind you.  If you do, you’re either socially-retarded or just don’t give a shit that you’re giving off a distinct white trash vibe.

But perhaps my biggest issue is the topic of slow-walkers.

Yes, slow-walkers.  You all know them.  They’re on the phone or sifting through their stuff or just generally not paying any attention whatsoever.  There is an acceptable walking pace, and then there is the pace of slow-walkers.  It’s far below the threshhold.  They almost need their own right lane on sidewalks, a lane reserved for people who don’t know where the hell they’re going or how the hell to walk.  And they’re always in your way when you absolutely have to get someplace.  Not just one of them, but all two hundred of them in town.  It’s a (slow) moving minefield of sidewalk zombies.  You would have been better served going to class on a glacier.  There can’t just be one, no.  Everyone between you and your destination has to be a slow-walker.

And the worst thing about slow-walkers is the process of passing them.  It’s so perfectly awkward.  Often they don’t know they’re behind you, so when you pick up your speed, they tend to hear your sneakers hitting the pavement and turn around to check.  You’ve been spotted, now you feel more pressure to pass quickly and be out of their sight so that your whole sidewalk lane change can be done with and you’ll never have to make eye contact again.  But sometimes, they respond to this act by speeding up themselves, which makes your progress of passing even more difficult.  Now they feel pressure to walk a little faster, and you feel pressure to pass them, and nobody wins because you run into another crowd of slow-walkers ahead.  These ones are surely on their phones and taking up the whole sideline.  You really don’t want to be so desperate as to actually go in the grass to pass, but you do anyway.  And just as you’re about to make your move, the slow-walker closest to the edge of the sidewalk manages to unwittingly cut you off.  Your pass attempt has been foiled and everyone can clearly see your walk of shame as you step off those unneccesarily-bent blades of grass back onto the pavement behind some girl going on and on about how wasted she’s going to get at the bars that night.

Walking is also tremendously complicated by the act of farting, be you on the blasting or receiving end.  As a blaster, there are few things worse than feeling those gaseous stabs in your colon imploring you to let loose whilst walking on a crowded sidewalk.  Chances are, you’ll never see those people again.  But in the off chance you walk into a job interview ten years down the line and one of the witnesses to your fart is sitting on the boss end of a beautiful mahogany desk, you’re screwed.  So you clench and grit and try to fight the slow-walkers to advance to the head of the back and achieve a sufficient blast radius in order to greenlight the rectal roar.  Of course, then you’re left with the post-fart anxiety that a jogger will round the corner immediately following your malodorous dispension and judge you as “that farting guy” or that your colonic cloud will linger until the back of the pack finally makes their way forward.  Then there’s just this natural pressure to get the hell where you got to go as quickly as possible.

Now, if you’re the blastee, it’s perhaps a bit different but socially awkward nonetheless.  If it’s crowd, it’s often difficult to discern who dealt it (word is – it’s whoever smelt it.)  And you’re not going to blindly accuse a stranger of crowd-farting.  There has to be ass-ctual malice.  That’s a really bad journalism joke.  There has to be indis-pootable evidence.  That’s just a really bad joke in general.  But there has to be some bona fide way of identifying the cheese-cutting culprit.  It always makes for an awkward situation if the blaster is a minority as well, because then you would just feel racist saying anything.  So, though you notice the noxiousness, nine times out of ten you’re unable to really call the bastard out for belching out the baritone end.

Perhaps more awkward than all those things, however, are the rules of walking with handicapped people.

(I guess you could group them with slow-walkers, but I feel the concept deserves its own category.  Old people might also be a separate category, but I’ll consider them a subcategory of the handicapped, as they’re naturally pre-disposed to be worse walkers than your average pedestrian.)

Handicapped folks make even the most inattentive of all walkers feel awkward.  You don’t want to pass a girl on crutches or a boy in a wheelchair.  It’s just rude, right?  To showcase your speed advantage over them, your ability to physically function at a higher rate than they can.  But at the same time, you gotta get somewhere.  And Crutches ain’t exactly blazing a trail, nor is Wheeler carting down the express lane.  So you gotta pass them somehow, and you gotta do it as politely as possible.  Solution?  There are no easy solutions.  You can nod or smile at them so as to at least look like a decent person as you leave them in a cloud of dust behind you (hopefully not a cloud of fart, because that would mean double-decking pedestrian violations.)  My favorite move, personally, is the “yo, wait up” to no one in particular which excuses you to run past the crippled party without having to acknowledge the pass itself.  The only caveat here is that you have to make sure you can get out of sight quickly, before the handicapped person pieces together your time-saving plan.

Because if they catch on, next time, they’re granted carte blanche to trip you with a cane.