There Is No One What Will Take Care of You

Ugh. Can't sleep. I think it's too hot in here. I went to bed at 8:30 tonight, exhausted from the night before, when The Reference Desk played a show at Gus' Pub. As always, it was super fun but super late. Didn't get to sleep till 3:30 that night.



So tonight I went to bed as soon as I got tired, but I guess I left the heat up a little high in my room. Now it's 1:30, and I've just woken up in a sweat from a nightmare about driving a minivan. Driving dreams are always nightmares for me, which probably has some bearing on my not doing it in real life.

The brake pedal on this minivan was very stiff, and needed to be pushed in beyond the full extension of my leg to get the car to stop. There were a few friends in there with me, and they didn't seem to notice I was having any trouble. In fact, I felt like I was doing a pretty good job of getting us around safely, beyond the nagging feeling that I might have sailed through a few red lights.

But then we came to a crosswalk full of children going to school... Well, you can imagine how that turned out. I'm glad to have woken up before witnessing too much of the bloodbath. Still feel kind of shaken, though.

I'm sure the dream was brought on by this letter of mine to The Coast. That's our free weekly entertainment paper in Halifax. I was ignored or nearly run down at five crosswalks on the way to work one morning last week and felt fed up enough to complain publicly.

There's been a lot of talk generally about crosswalk safety here due to a spike in the number of pedestrians getting hit on them. Plus, a universally beloved member of the Halifax Buddhist community was killed by a drunk driver in Hamilton right after she had moved there back in October. It's on people's minds.

I felt it necessary to point out that drivers bear the responsibility in these cases, because every time the subject comes up, people start telling stories about how irresponsible pedestrians are at crosswalks. These stories always end with the moral that crosswalk safety is a shared responsibility between drivers and pedestrians. That is even the government's own line on the issue whenever PSAs are produced.

You'll see a second letter after mine making this exact point, and then some ding dong in the comments section trying to argue the same case by steering the issue away from morality into pure physics, as if car accidents were uncontrollable acts of God. I guess he got his revenge on me by putting me in the driver's seat in my unconscious.

Anyway, I stand by my assessment. The day this letter came out, my friends Meg and KC were lightly ribbing me about it as they drove me to band practice. We had the radio on, and a story came on the news about a police car having hit a woman on the sidewalk that very day. The cop had been pulling out of a parking lot onto a busy road, and didn't notice the pedestrian. The news reader said that it had been determined the driver looked both left and right before proceeding, so no charges were being laid. Then she said, "This story should be a reminder to us all that road safety is the shared responsibility of drivers and pedestrians."

Be careful out there.