11 November, 2005

You can tell it’s getting close to Christmas because everyone panics. Deadlines that have dribbled all year are suddenly vitally important to the survival of humanity, shops are packed with people trying to beat the ‘Christmas rush’ and making a whole new kind of clutter, and I simply stop talking to people or going anywhere that people work, live or play. I have a feeling that the whole ‘time is arbitrary’ argument has been lost somewhere along the line.

Rod Donald, co-leader of the Greens died this week. I don’t often feel much when politicians die but Rod seemed to be one of those people who put a stake in the ground and lived by his principles. He made it easy to support the Greens and was a great person to listen to. New Zealand just lost one of its better people.

To my detriment I have started cycling more often as the days have improved. Apparently there are still a lot of cars on the road and apparently the people in them still have very important tasks that require them to drive very fast and get all frustrated and wound up when something gets in the way….like buildings, people, other cars etc. I’m not sure if I’m going insane or if the world is. I now seem to have quite a physical reaction to being in a car and often end up very angry, frustrated and effectively unhappy. This this is very inconvenient for long distant travel but must be the culmination of concerns with petrol costs, peak oil and not being able to enjoy the trip at a decent pace. Don’t get me started on the parking side of cars. When I bike I spend about 20 seconds parking, in a car it seems to take ages to go through the whole process of driving as close to the destination as possible and then spiralling out to actually find a gap to park in. Our record at the mall is 3 minutes of spiralling. I can’t say how absolutely stupid that is because my partner will smack me one.

Final rant. To the wanker in the van this morning who pounded through the roundabout without slowing down and yelled abuse at me because I was biking around it without my ‘indicator’ on, “Get a grip. You try sticking out your arm while leaning a tight right and balancing on two wheels”. If you’re in a motor vehicle you simply don’t have the right to shout abuse at cyclists. You’re not worthy. It was a Downer Connect van by the way. The side effect of modern advertising saturation is that in small countries we know who you are.