Crossing the cluster-fudge that is Canal and Avenue of the Americas the other day, my partner made me privy to his following fear: that walking between cars, so haphazardly strewn well beyond the cross walk, puts him on edge because he can’t help but feel another vehicle might come crashing into the backside of the very one he’s darting in front of, sending it into him and pinning him between it and the ride some other moron has hanging eight yards out of the crosswalk. Aware of my eccentricities, he asked, “You ever have the same thought?” I laughed, assured him I most certainly do but with one minor exception: I’d be left pinned not due to some heinous combination of bumper-to-bumper events, but because the driver of the vehicle I was so stealthy weaving between would recognize my contempt for his inability to not ‘block the box.’ He or she most likely would be in the midst of a very bad day, and my scornful gaze would be the final straw – at which point the driver would decide purposefully to teach me, and the society that just won’t seem to let him ‘win,’ a tough-love lesson by stomping on the gas pedal to leave me two-halves a person. It would be ugly, maybe I’d live, maybe I’d die – but in the end all most people would talk about thereafter was whether they could relate to his overpaid council’s ‘bad day defense’ that they were putting to a jury box filled with at least ten, if not twelve, other people who shared the defendant’s belief that the world won’t give them a fair shake and are sick and tired of smug skinnies like me.