High Anxiety on Blahblah Street...Blog 25SEP21

I woke up at 3AM this morning…unusual even for me, a congenitally light sleeper. As I puzzled this out further, after trying vainly to return to the comforting enfoldments of sleep, it dawned upon me that several things were unignorably pressing down on my mind, probably having already worked themselves into my subconscious but unable to negotiate the transition from conscious to subconscious management interface modes of cerebral activity.

Usually, mild anxieties of the sort described herein manage to make that transformation into bizarre dreams that I regularly have, but in this case they seem to have refused to slip gracefully into the compensatory ‘solution’ mechanisms that the dream-state performs, to help people like me not be totally consumed by undesired psychological conflicts.

And so, having failed to fight off this stubborn wakefulness, I pondered the details of these two conundrums before finally rousting myself out of the rack. The temp outdoors was nicely chill and those covers felt waaaaaay too good to forsake their comforts, but oh well…

The first of the two following bugaboos seems to be an incident I experienced a few days ago with a person I would have least expected to have any sort of conflict with: the ‘friendly neighborhood postal delivery person’ (TM, copyright Ben Franklin, USPS, 1775). In this instance, I was seated at my PC, right in the midst of preparing a vitriol-filled complaint about homeless people setting up tents in the local neighborhood park that adjoins a popular public library, to send off to our city government leaders. Included in my list of addressees were the mayor, his administrative staff, and our local district councilman (who also happens to be the ‘Vice-Mayor’ and a member of the same synagogue that the mayor belongs to, LoL) and his staff.

At such writerly moments, I am usually waxing ferociously indignant, having already worked myself into a hyper-annoyed state over the consistently negligent attitude of our elected city officials and was in fine fettle putting that angst into multi-syllabic words when the doorbell rang. Since I have recently sustained an extremely upsetting high-frequency traumatic hearing loss, I hadn’t heard it and was obliviously dipping my figurative sword-pen deeper and deeper into the well of expressive criticisms (that I keep handy for such ‘civic criticism’ moments) when wifie came in to ask me if I had heard it (the doorbell).

Further annoyed by this unwelcome intrusion, I got up and walked to the front door, which I opened to reveal our local USPS route’s mail deliveryman. This guy is a big, bulky black man who was all kitted out with what has to be standard, regulation US Postal Service attire: gray pith sunhat, regulation gray USPS shorts, contrasting darker gray shorts, knee socks, black oxfords and even a USPS-issue whistle/chain and canister of dog repellant at the waist. Hmmm. Not a big deal, except that he was holding up an envelope that had been misdelivered to our house that wifie had placed on the mailbox for proper delivery to the ‘other address’. But let me explain.

Thanks to the brilliant public works planning of the California State’s highway authority (AKA: CALTrans), back in the 70s our peaceful, pleasant little neighborhood on the western edge of the capitol City of Sacramento was summarily split in two by the then-new Interstate-5 Highway thoroughfare. That means, in functional terms, that several local residential streets were roughly bisected so that they began on one side of the freeway and continued on the other, with no direct continuity between them such as had previously enjoyed.

Further, our street is a rather peculiar one in that instead of having a 90 degree corner at the distal end, with a cross street, it simply makes a lazy contiguous “U-shape” and our street (Blahblah Street) thereby becomes a different street (Horsexhaust Street). Both our street and this ‘other' street have similar house numbering, so that our house on Blahblah Street and this other house on the other street have identical numerical addresses (e.g. 5XXX). Obviously, although the numbers are the same, the streets are distinctly different…making it pretty clear to ANYONE who is paying any attention to the matter whatsoever that they are NOT the same address!

And yet, our local post office branch which, in my 75 or so years of experience dealing with many absolutely awful, wretchedly inefficient and incompetently supervised ‘local post offices’ (with their ‘resentful’, sullen clerks and blithely uncaring supervisors), has to be one of the worst I’ve ever had the misfortune to receive my mail through.

Every day, before the route carriers who actually deliver the mail go out to distribute letters, each carrier’s mail is pre-sorted and bundled together on a house-by-house basis, so that the carrier doesn’t have to scrutinize each individual letter to determine which house it is to be delivered to. He simply takes the small bundle marked ‘5XXX Blahblah Street’ out of his bag, notes the envelope’s address that is uppermost and puts the whole aggregate (of typically 99% junkmail) into whatever box is relevant. Simple, eh? Rocket science? Not to us, but probably to them, YES!

The problem we face is that the three-brain-cell morons who ‘pre-bundle’ the route carrier’s letters for the carriers consistently misdeliver the mail intended for our address (‘5XXX Blahblah Street’) to the other house with an identical number (‘5XXX Horsexhaust Street’) and vice-versa. This means that both our households regularly get each other’s misdirected mail and that further means applying one or the other of two logical resolutions: Either I take the other house’s mail over to them (and they reciprocate) OR I put the misdirected letter on the mailbox with a note on the envelope that the letter has been wrongly delivered (i.e. “Please deliver it correctly!”).

OK. Clear? The complexities of this problem, which probably have already bored you to the verge of tears from my description of it, have resulted in this practice of careless misdelivery of our mail going on for at least 5 or more years, now, and to say I am sick to death of the gross ignorance and sheer carelessness that perpetuates this status quo is considerably understating things.

Consequently, when wifie showed me yet another such letter, I grabbed it and wrote in capital letters on the envelope with a felt-tipped pen: “Not for ‘5XXX Blahblah Street’; should go to ‘5XXX Horsexhaust Street!” and stuck it in the mailbox slot for our route carrier to take care of. Problem solved, right? Dream on, gentle souls!

So, suddenly here’s this big, bluff ox of a postal guy waving this envelope at me (like a pissed-off Yankees fan) and telling me that I CAN NOT write messages on envelopes like this and henceforth “…do NOT do this!”

I listened somewhat incredulously to this not at-all-polite and definitely belligerent admonishment from a postal delivery guy, no less, perhaps a bit open-mouthed, such was my astonishment. We’ve never, EVER had any awkward moments or scenes with our postal delivery people, who over the past 30 years here have always been either completely innocuous or pleasantly neutral in our occasional interactions. Heck, we even used to leave a bottle of good wine for our delivery person at ‘holiday time’ for our guy (until one of them refused it, somewhat gracelessly, and said ‘regulations prohibit, etc.’); we switched to holiday cookies, thereafter.

Yet, after a few minutes of listening to this unrequested harangue, I interjected with a protest about the persistent misdelivery of our (and the other house’s) mail, in an attempt to get his guy off his high hobby horse and back on the crux of the issue: getting the letters correctly delivered.

No luck. Before I was through speaking, he was back at it again, this time raising his voice to drown me out and giving absolutely no indication of having comprehended what I was trying to tell him. I must admit that I was in NO mood for any unplanned turbulence like this, still caught up in my ‘write-City-Hall-a-nasty-letter-of-complaint’ mode and my normally fairly well-constrained Irish temper was starting to wear painfully thin (situations like this can actually start bloody Irish civil wars, believe it nor not, back in the ‘auld country’).

It was quickly becoming clear that I was getting nowhere fast with this guy and the attitude he was gratuitously pitching at me, completely unwarranted and out of the blue as it was.

When he ploughed roughly through my words with a loud and vehemently verbose diatribe about “defacing a Federal document is a crime!” I reached my snapping point and snarled back (and I quote): “Get the hell out of here with that f*cking bullshit!” (Popeye the Sailorman would have phrased it "That's all I can stands 'cause I can't stands no more!") and went back in the house, leaving him to make it what he would.

Once inside and door closed upon this shameful exhibition of inappropriate ‘attitude pitching’ by a public servant, I nevertheless continued to smolder, returning to my letter writing with an even grimmer determination to redress my complaints about the city’s inept and annoying attitude about enforcing laws and regulations pertaining to proper use (and misuse) of our public parks. But under it all, I must have been so completely upset that it too quickly transited from my conscious mind to the lower (subconscious) levels (successfully, this time), where it was so caustic that even my subconscious refused to have anything to do with it!

Over three days has passed now since this encounter took place and it’s pretty obvious to me that the long-suffering, latent Irishman lurking within me is still stewing (Mulligan flavored, doubtless) over the incident! I am reminded of an old aphorism that goes, more or less, “An Irishman may appear to be forgiving…but he NEVER forgets!”

The other matter that seems to have risen unsummoned from the dark, dank depths of my personal anxiety closet at 3AM concerns the conditions that have arisen on our local roads and highways in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I am, as many of you know, a life-long fan of motorcycle technology and the alluring aesthetics of engineering design and development that exemplify that expression of two-wheeled transportation. While today the mere thought of just about ANY motorcycle still dredges up boogyman paranoia connotations about ‘bikers’ and motorcycle gangs (thanks a heap, Marlon Brando, Hunter S. Thompson and Sonny Barger!) in the ordinary person’s mind, there are actually a few of us out here who are cut from somewhat finer cloth. That is to say, we tend to be a bit more well educated, broadly read and rather more reflectively and philosophically analytical about the human experience than are so many of the hoi polloi who live out their lives in a knee-jerk-reactive manner. People who know that a great number of extraordinary individuals (such as T.E. Lawrence, James Joyce and a host of others) also had a profound regard, not just for fine motorcycle technology but also for the sheer, proprioceptic joy of rushing about on two wheels with the wind in one’s face and bugs in the teeth, in the open countryside. I’m one of those people. And I have formerly enjoyed the motorcycle experience as such and within that set of understandings.

But as someone possessed of a pronounced aesthetic personality who was brought up to maintain the appropriately consequent Northern European regard for community weal and ‘the greater good’ (with all its attendant responsibilities that go hand-in-glove with rights and privileges), I also enjoy masterfully composed music, the soothing balm of occasional quietude, the feelings of others, and a keen appreciation for that uniquely splendid natural silence that pervades nature, despite our best efforts to intrude upon it with the noise, pollution and degradation that human science and technology imposes on the quality of our lives.

To this end, despite my love of fine motorcycle technology, I consciously try to minimize the noise my own motorcycle may make when I am driving it in and around urban settings where there are other people. This logic flies directly in the face of most ‘common’ (i.e. “dipshit”) wisdom circulating in the motorcycle crowd that feels the noisier a bike is, the ‘safer’ it is (e.g. the “Loud pipes save lives” crowd that is predominantly comprised of Hardly-Goodson bikers, with their obnoxiously loud and primitive machines; and speaking of that misguided belief that the louder a bike is, the safer it is on the road around automobiles, this theory has been proven by numerous scholarly studies to be absolutely specious and totally without validation).

To illustrate, when I am out walking our pup in the neighborhood (we live near a major traffic artery that feeds the nearby Interstate), I each day experience having bikers go by us, mere feet from the sidewalk, with their incredibly loud and noisy exhaust systems making a horrific racket, which becomes exponentially worse when they ‘blip the throttle’ a few times to show off their ‘macho’. This sort of behavior bespeaks a very pervasive state of arrested maturity that too many young men are possessed of these days and that is all too common among those fueled by excessive amounts of Testosterone. The question of exactly why the need to ‘be obnoxiously noisy’ like this has long been a source of curiosity to me, as a pathologically analytical person, but let me amplify on this thread of thought a bit, if you will.

In our ‘classless’ (note: the use of GREAT irony is implicit here) American society, the wealthier classes seldom feel the need to physically impact or ostentatiously intrude upon others in an effort to draw attention to themselves. Since they already enjoy an elevated (wealthier) state of privilege, the need to puerilely show-off (I call it the “Hey! Look at me!” syndrome) has been replaced by more refined means of status display that are subtler and less overtly obnoxious. Those from the lower, largely poorly educated classes lack these sophisticated means of expiating the need for personal recognition and consequently demand awareness, recognition and rude ‘respect’ by engaging in crudely intimidating displays of personal power.

Excessive noise thereupon serves as a ‘weaponised’ form of juvenile protest against otherwise intolerable socio-economic constraints of poverty, powerlessness and involuntary constraint. It takes actual shape in the form of excessive noise, therefore, to irritate, annoy and make a statement protesting those ("betters") who already enjoy all the goodies of a higher level of life; we experience this every day in being subjected to the needlessly loud racket caused by unmuffled motorcycle exhaust systems and specially tuned ‘performance’ automotive muffler systems intended to maximise raw noise (under the pretense of improving power efficiency in an engine) and legal typically only off the street and on racetracks. But now that ordinary streets are increasingly becoming racetracks, this distinction has either been lost or conveniently overlooked by cretins who feel the chances are nil that any LEO will actually stop or cite them.

When the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, suddenly a huge range of otherwise normal social venues and outlets instantly ceased to exist and all of us were faced with the ineluctable curtailment of our accustomed peer associations. This effect began to make itself noticeable in 2020 when otherwise quiet neighborhoods began to be upset all night long by the noise created by these powerful, tuned and unmuffled vehicular engines in reference (cars & motorcycles) as their drivers (whom I surmise to be mostly young people who’ve bought or leased the biggest, baddest car or motorcycle they could get their lenders to agree to let the have) began to figure out that because of the ‘anti-police’ sentiment of the 2020 ‘social protest’ fad (read: Black Lives Matter and related PC movements fostered by young leftist ‘progressive’ liberals)…in which effective law enforcement began to take huge hits in terms of allowable policing policies and enforcement policies…that led to reduced manpower LEO resources, increased gratuitous cop-killings and especially street enforcement efforts…they could suddenly get away with flaunting the previously existing laws & constraints (such as speed limits, stopping for red lights and in general just driving with reckless abandon). This is now so commonplace that the practice is rampant (just now, coming back from a dog walk, I witnessed one such hopped-up muscle-car with blackout windows blast through a red light that had been on for at least 30 seconds at about twice the posted speed limit as we all watched, open-mouthed).

Although a sensitive, keen social observer might similarly discern this trend through simple observation, the phenomenon has not by any means been overlooked by various ‘credible’ agencies and individuals (such as law enforcement organisations and magazine writers, as in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Harpers, etc., et al). Several such articles have already appeared in not only the ostensibly conservative press, but in ‘liberal’ press publications as well. And in our society (unless John the Baptist is prophesizing exclusively in ‘social media’ venues, no one perks up and pays attention until a New Yorker Magazine writer parrots the theme nationally); ‘John’ has thus far appeared bemoaning said trend in several of these literary outlets.

Hence, we arrive at the present paradigm in which young (what I called ‘arrested juveniles’ who may actually be in their 30s, 40s or 50s) drivers routinely flaunt the rules and drive recklessly, imprudently and WAY beyond reasonable limits as a matter of custom. The noise caused by all this antisocial behavior is getting more and more noticeable each passing day even as CHP (police) spokespersons concurrently announce new policies of ‘non-enforcement’ (so as to reduce mortal threats to the safety and wellbeing of their officers during vehicular stops).

And there you have it. As the progressive left becomes more and more anarchistic, eschewing prior regulation of both private and public conduct, all these immature and narcissistic retards that are causing so much needless vehicular noise and mayhem interpret this as tacit permission to continue being obnoxious, annoying and also in most cases, outright hazardous to be around while driving on the road (and that goes double for responsible, thoughtful motorcyclists like me!).

There is a speed limit posted in our quiet little neighborhood of 35 mph (25 when school kids from the nearby school are on the streets) and yet every single day cars continue to zoom by at speeds close to (and in some cases exceeding) 50-60 mph! It’s sometimes so bad that you feel as if you’re on a racetrack with every car fighting for pole position (and believe me when I say that, for I used to race sportscars back in the 80s through SCCA at Sears Point and Laguna Seca). It’s a very uncomfortable thing to experience, when all you’re trying to do is get ‘Fluffy’ safely to the local park, with absolutely no need to go anywhere any faster than common sense and the law permits!

OK. I think I’ve just about beaten this particular dead horse to an advanced state of death with all of the above, so I’ll let it rest at that, but I hope I’ve made it clear that things like these REALLY get under my skin as an older, vastly experienced and far more mature driver who respects the rights of others.

With regard to my motorcycles (I currently have three of them, all around 1000ccs displacement or so), I am literally afraid to get out on the street with some of these Harry Hot-Rod types, since the mere fact that I am on a high-powered, somewhat exotic sports-bike (f’instance, on a Kawasaki ZX1100 Ninja that has the potential to go 197 mph and reach 60 mph in a mere 2.6 seconds from a standing start) seems to goad these puerile dimbulbs into thinking I am out looking for a street-race contest, like a red flag waving in front of a bull. It’s annoying as hell, since I’m usually riding my ferocious beast at or just under whatever speed limit applies and they actually seem to RESENT that! Unaware of the fact that I have about 50 years+ or life experience in excess of their dim, still wet-behind-the-ears consciousness, the body language they throw out is unmistakable. It is the same sort of grossly immature “My dad can beat up your dad” challenge that we all experienced in our own youths.

As another illustration of this, I usually try to take my bikes out for some exercise when the odds (in my favor) are that there will be as few other cars on the road as possible. Since early Sunday morning most idiots are either in church or still sleeping off their hangovers from the prior night, that’s usually my chosen day. This morning however, at least two cars (all with the 360 degree blackout glass so you can’t see the drivers) demonstrated overtly aggressive ‘threat’ displays near me (this typically consists of gunning the motor loudly or roaring past you at excessive speed…it’s pretty obvious and hard-to-mistake vehicular ‘body-language’). Obviously they think I‘m some sort of 18 year old ‘dude’ out for a street race, just like them (since I wear a full-coverage helmet, they can't see the tell-tale gray hairf and beard)!

When I think more intently about all this, I actually find myself getting the slightest bit shaken to think that one of these days, some ‘kid’s’ misguided, reactive behavior along these lines may be enacted to an extreme and result in a serious accident situation (for me). And at my age, just about ANY accident between me on a bike and a car would be catastrophic (I say this on the basis of considerable ER trauma experience in the medical world, dealing with acute accident injuries). I’ve also lost a few friends along the way in just this very same manner: it could just as easily happen to me, despite my extreme efforts to drive safely.

So, there it is: two very bothersome demons from the personal anxiety chest that lurks under my bed that arise from time to time, like vague wraiths in a late-night graveyard,  to complicate my efforts to sleep peacefully…and that replenish the unsettling stuff of my nightmares and bad dreams each night.

As someone who has always taken the greatest pains to avoid predictably adverse circumstances and needless unpleasantness in life, when trouble comes my way despite all my best efforts to avoid it, I know myself well enough to be quite familiar with my usual reaction of extreme irritation, indignance and resentfulness to such intrusions. I am thus perhaps more reactive than many others would be on that score, but since I don’t drink, do drugs or beat small children as a hobby, my options for expiative compensation are somewhat limited!

At such moments that old aphorism comes to mind that admonishes: “Anger is the intense urge to choke the living shit out of someone who richly deserves it!” [I think it was in fact an Irishman who originally said this… ]

So…remember to keep the lock on your own anxiety chest (and also on Pandora’s box, which probably resides adjacent to it) well secured, eh? [And perhaps it would also be a good idea, if you're a parent, to be mindful of another parenting tip: "Mama, don’t let your son grow up to be a motorcyclist!"]

--------------------

Postscript: Last night, for the briefest moment as I involuntarily and unsuccessfully resisted a return to conciousness for about the 6th time, I had the startling notion that the loud, aggressive snarls of racing muscle-cars cars on the nearby Interstate were primeval roars of ancient, rampaging dinosaurs, as they battled each other in some sort of extinct Jurassic setting. It was both amusing and disconcerting, but I don't thnk these particular modern-era dinosaurs are headed for extinction just yet, sad to say! [Unless Saint Elon has anything to say about it! Meanwhile, praise Musk and pass the electric car microchips! Amen.]