Last week there was a firestorm over cycling in the city on the pages of The Globe. It was ignited by a letter to the editor from a certain Marika Plater, which is worth quoting in its entirety:

THIS IS to the man in the blue Volkswagen who screamed at me, with an obscenity, to get on the sidewalk when I was riding my bicycle on Memorial Drive last week. Actually, this is to all of the Boston drivers who have honked at me while I’m biking and following the traffic laws; who have given me the finger, cut me off, splashed puddle water all over me, and squeezed me to the curb.

I want to tell Boston drivers that they do not own the road. Bicycles belong on Boston streets as much as cars do. Especially because the number of bikers will rise as skyrocketing gas prices and heightened environmental concern cause people to seek new forms of transportation, drivers need to learn how to be respectful of bicyclists and to share the road.

So here’s an abbreviated list of Massachusetts bicyclist rules of the road:

Bicycles are allowed on all roads, unless there’s a sign that says they are prohibited.

Riding bicycles on sidewalks is discouraged in general and is illegal in Somerville and parts of Cambridge.

Bicyclists must obey traffic laws.

Bicyclists should use hand signals when turning.

Bicyclists should stay at the edge of the right hand lane when there is not a bike lane, unless making a left turn, in which case they can use the left lane.

Boston drivers: Bicycles have the legal right to share the road with cars . Please watch out for bicyclists and remember that we are not protected by pounds of steel as you are . Please be considerate rather than cruel when you encounter us on the road, and please look out your window before opening your car door. Biking in Boston does not have to be as stressful as it is .

Her rant elicited the obligatory counter-rant from a certain David McCaffrey of Waltham:

MARIKA PLATER must have a death wish (”Bicyclists belong on the roads, too,” letter, Aug. 17). No one in their right mind would ride a bicycle on Memorial Drive. Hundreds of bicyclists use the sidewalk along the Charles River daily. Is Plater so obtuse that she would risk her life because there is no road sign prohibiting bicycles?

She gives a list of bicycle rules. It’s more of a wish list. Not only do bicyclists disobey the rules, their aggressive actions are a real threat to pedestrians. While driving on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge recently, I observed a bicyclist swerving in and out of traffic at high speed. When he came to the red light, he blew right through, narrowly missing an elderly woman. I observed four more bicyclists blow through the same red light.

Why do so many bicyclists disregard the rules of the road? Probably because they are unaccountable. They need no license plate, registration, inspection, or insurance. They don’t even pay an excise tax , which helps pay for the roads they use.

The next time Marika Plater wants to vent, she should look to her fellow bicyclists.

Ouch.

People. First of all, calm down. There are no innocents in the war of all against all going on on Boston’s mean streets, so let’s not pretend we’re not all at fault here.

Secondly, one of the reasons cyclists behave the way they do is that as stressful as driving is in Boston, cycling is a hundred times more stressful. It takes a lot less to get yourself seriously injured or killed on a bike than it does in a car. because many Boston streets are not made with cyclists in mind, you have to develop some aggressive strategies to get from point A to point B. Until cycling is considered a serious transportation alternative, you will have guerrilla cyclists on the streets.

Which doesn’t entirely excuse bad behavior on the part of cyclists. And I have seen cyclists behaving very badly indeed–usually, but not always, those loathsome bike couriers, biking’s version of cabbies and truck drivers. They think because they do it for a living it gives them the right to dress and behave badly. It doesn’t.

I myself have rarely encountered any real trouble with motorists, to tell the truth. You do have to keep a look-out for motorists and pedestrians, but that’s just cycling in the city. I have not been honked at, given the finger, cut off, splashed or squeezed to the curb. Really. And I ride along Mass Ave for a good portion of my commute.

I do avoid traffic, and choose my routes carefully, though. I’m not biking to prove a point, I’m biking to get from point A to point B. And I give myself enough time to deal with unanticipated delays. So the main reason I have not encountered too much trouble on the road is that I anticipate it, and take measures to minimize the probability of it.

So it’s no tribute to Boston’s drivers, God knows. They have a real problem signaling turns. They routinely blow through red lights. And many have anger management issues. Instead of putting all the blame on cyclists, motorists like McCaffrey here should get out of their cars, hop on a bike, and ride through the streets every once in a while–not Memorial Drive, of course (he’s right that Plater’s a dork to do this).

What he would find is that all those things that annoy him about other drivers when he’s in a car, are multiplied and amplified to the nth degree on a bike. And they’re no longer merely annoyances that he can blare his horn at. They can be downright life-threatening when you’re riding a bike.

Not asking for sympathy, here, just telling it like it is.

And personally, I don’t object to a certification course for cyclists. In fact, there are courses on urban cycling offered by MassBike. The idea of an excise tax for cyclists, whose lightweight vehicles have hardly any impact on roads, and who in many parts of the city don’t have lanes of their own, is a little outlandish, however.

Cycling should be encouraged, and every measure taken to ensure it’s safe in the city. That means cyclists should learn the rules and the necessary skills, and that the city should work to build a cycling infrastructure that would minimize dangers of mixing with motor traffic. And motorists should get out of their cars on occasion and ride in the city, as well. They might learn a thing or two, and maybe, just maybe, they’d find a better way to get from point A to point B in the process.

I had a daunting weekend, and it’s splattered all over my week so far. The weather has been more or less wonderful, of course, and I was able to spend a bit of time in the garden Saturday, but for some reason–maybe the planets are in an evil alignment– my relations at the moment are almost universally prickly. The ones that aren’t prickly are like trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

There are times when you’re in the flow, when all those seemingly disparate elements beautifully converge, and then there are times when nothing comes together, and all those perfectly merged elements scatter to the four winds again. Sometimes life is like looking through a kaleidoscope, isn’t it?

And sometimes you just find you’re in the dark. Usually when you bang into something head-first you didn’t see was right in front of you. So many disparate emotions, your thoughts crowding each other out. It’s all a lot of static. Nothing resonates.

It seems to augur change.

So I’m sitting in the movie theater with a friend, watching the thoroughly delightful Little Miss Sunshine, and at the end, when the little girl performs at the pageant—a wonderful scene, even if you saw it coming—I find myself bawling my eyes out. Hmm. Funny.

The movie was a “small, good thing,” to borrow Raymond Carver’s famous phrase. I liked the theme of impotently defying society’s rigid structures. And the peculiarly American take on that modern struggle between artifice and authenticity. I was impressed once again by Steve Carrell, whom I think is the next generation of a venerable comic tradition whose current best practitioner is Bill Murray.

This may have been a hybrid genre piece (dysfunctional family goes on a road trip), but it was a good one. As for whether genre pieces are worth seeing, there was an interesting article in the Sunday Globe by their film critic Ty Burr, about Snakes on a Plane, where the always astute critic asserted: “We go to movies–even honest schlock–not to see what we expect to see but to be surprised by what we hadn’t expected.”

But do we?

This assumption on the part of critics is really a presumption in disguise. It’s like saying that when we go out to eat we always want Chinese. We don’t. Sometimes we want Japanese, Italian, or Mexican. If we ordered a humonga-chonga, we will indeed be surprised if the waiter brings us mugu gai pan, but that’s not what we wanted. Novelty is sometimes not on the menu.

The critic might, out of ennui, choose to distill what is valuable in a picture to “surprise” or “originality,” but this contradicts everything we see in the actual history of art, where a genre is invented, replicated endlessly, mastered by degrees, finally perfected, and then parodied, mocked, and morphed in its decline, cannibalized and hybridized beyond recognition, until a new genre emerges.

The important thing to understand here is that “we” don’t necessary want to be “surprised”–movie critics, because they are bored, because they watch too many movies that seem to be too much alike, want to be “surprised.”

Why do people buy albums and listen to them over and over and over again until they know every lyric, every guitar lick, every little lilt in the lead singer’s voice? The Cult of the New is particularly modern. And has actually already been superseded. Postmodern architecture is not about out-and-out originality, but appropriation and recombination. The ascendant forms of entertainment, like video games, are not about originality or surprise, but about repetition and mastery.

But the point here is that there is no one reason to go to the movies. Sometimes we want the salve of ritual, the stations of the cross; sometimes we want surprise. For me narrative cohesion, pacing, good–that is to say authetic, appropriate–dialogue, and a dose of je ne sais quoi are the ingredients of greatness, regardless of genre.

As for prickly relations. I mean, aside from those that are just generally prickly, regardless. (And you know who you are!)…

I got a good dressing down from a relatively new FWP about my treatment of the Newbury Street shopper a couple weeks ago in my blog. To be fair, he admitted that if he had been people-watching on Newbury Street and she had passed by loaded up like a pack mule as she was, shaking her thang, he might’ve cracked wise, but he would not have gone home and written about it.

It is an interesting distinction. And there is definitely something to it. The diarist sometimes seems petty for recording for posterity off-the-cuff observations that come off seeming unseemly when the moment is past. This is the chief source of danger in keeping a diary, in fact, as anyone who has for any length of time and has the courage to read it over occasionally can tell you. Come to find, we are all petty.

What do we do when we see someone so utterly self-absorbed they don’t even realize they’re being stalked by bloggerazzi? We mock them at a safe distance. My new FB acknolwedged this. What is unseemly is admitting it after the fact. But there is a remedy even for this. Mock the blogger. Pierce made his point–”mock not lest ye be mocked”–by mocking me! Stalked by the online mockerazzi? Mock them back! We will all go down together! In a stinking plume of self-pity and scorn!

I think to many people I heard from on the issue it seemed “unfair,” but also a bit cowardly, particularly to photograph our mystery shopper, especially from behind. It’s like shooting someone in the back. I’ll own it. But come on, people. If you step outside your door these days you run the risk of being shot. It’s not everyone else’s responsibility to be watching your back for you.

Then at work yesterday one of my esteemed colleagues sort of pulls me aside, sweetly says she wants to ask me about something I recently wrote.

Now, I should preface this by saying, about a month ago another of my esteemed colleagues, an Italian gentleman, pulled me aside in the corridor (literally grabbing me by the collar) and growled: You MUSTa Write about a de WARRRRRAH! I was like, which one? I mean, Christ. Well, the Big One, of course. It’s Armageddon, you know.

But I didn’t write about that war, because no matter how judicious you try to be about it, you will get it from both sides, and, frankly, I don’t see where the big emergency is. This has been going on for millennia, and it will go on for many milennia more. It’s the freakin Hatfelds and McKahlils. What’s the rush to write something? And so what if it is the end of the world (which it isn’t)—then what?

But finally I did write something—not really about that war, but about the War on Terror, and not from the Jewish perspective, but from that of the humble Goy.

Oy.

After reading what I had written (which, for the record, made no mention of Israel, the Jews, Hamas, or Hezbollah), my colleague this morning (who is Jewish) totally JEWED-OUT on me.

To my Jewish friends out there (even ones who claim to be Reform Jews and to be all nonchalant about their Judaism): please calm the fuck down. Your homeland is under siege, I understand. It’s painful for you. I understand that, too. You don’t need to go around picking fights and casting aspersions for me to see it. We all see it.

By the way, my Jewdentials are impeccable. I’m not even talking about the part of me–eight and a half inches (give or take a few)–that’s German Jew. I won’t mention that one of the major romantic entanglements of my adult life was with an absolutely Jewlicious Hungarian Jew. (All I will say about it–TMI ALERT– is that in one of the great ironies of History and destiny, I was the circumcised one and he, like many assimilated East European Jews born post-WWII, got to keep his foreskin–where is the justice?)

Is the modern state of Israel problematic? Yes. Is the Arab world a mess? Mm-hmm. But Yahweh is a fighting God and Jews are fighters. Didn’t you see Yossi and Jagger? You want me to drop everything and rend my garments every time a missile is hurled at you? It sucks, but I only have so many garments to rend.

Apparently trying to make up for a slightly skewed sample in the previously referenced “debate” over urban violence, Metro went out to Mission Hill seeking forgiveness.

I think it would be too much to attribute method to Metro’s madness, but if you do, then you can look at it a couple of different ways: either the editorial staff wants us to think we live in a deeply divided city–the “Two Bostons” hypothesis, or we really do live in a deeply divided city, and it’s enough that a random, unscientific, infinitesimal sample bolsters this tale of two cities.

The third way to look at it is, like John said in his comment to the first post: “Sometimes I think the Metro pulls their ‘Today’s Debate’ section from old issues of The Onion.”

I noticed this weather has been making me a little crankier than usual. I always get a few emails chastising me for raging out, but, people, that’s what I’m here for. I’ve said it before. It’s like complaining that all the dishes at the Chinese Buffet have MSG in them. It’s just the nature of the beast. Don’t want the MSG? Don’t go the Chinese Buffet. Simple as that.

Yesterday I was useless. I went in to “work” in the morning, just to get out of the heat, but left around noon. I dropped in to the gym, which is in Chinatown, a couple blocks from Brattle Books–so a lot of times, if the weather’s good, I amble on down to the bookstore there, and browse the one-dollar section outside. I always leave with something.

The thing I like about used bookstores is that you go there with an open mind, and you leave with something you didn’t expect to find. I mean, I never go there looking for anything in particular. But sometimes what you find feels fateful. Maybe you’re thinking about something, trying to work something out in your head, And suddenly you open up a book, and there it is, right there in front of you.

Yesterday, on the one-dollar cart, I stumbled upon a book called Secrets of the Kabbalah, and thought: now, this will bring me closer to Madonna! It was full of beauty tips, particularly about grooming your beard. There was some fellow called Microprosopus, who has a most impressive beard. “That is the beard of adornment, true and perfect, from the which flow down thirteen fountains, scattering the most precious balm of splendour.”

I didn’t end up buying the book, but my interest in this Microprosopus character was definitely piqued. So when I got home I googled him. He was not on wikipedia. But there was an extensive entry on him in the Wisdom Archive at the Global Oneness Commitment at experiencefestival.com, that was enlightening to say the least:

Microprosopus (Latin) [from Greek mikros small + prosopon face]: Qabbalistic rendition of the Chaldean phrase Ze`eyr ‘Anpin (Short Face), which designates the nine smaller Sephiroth, in contradistinction from the Macroprosopus (Long Face). Microprosopus or the nine Sephiroth are the manifested universe or Third Logos unfolded in manifestation; whereas Macroprosopus (the Crown or Kether), the first and highest of the Sephiroth, is the First and Second Logoi considered as a unit, the purely spiritual universe and its roots. Hence the Microprosopus is the Logos manifested, and of such logoi there are many in boundless space. Naturally each such universe has its own Macroprosopus, Crown, or Kether, all these universes being united by their divine-spiritual roots in the Boundless.

Something clicked, you know?

I went back and listened to that song “Isaac,” on Confessions on the Dance Floor, right? About Isaac Mizrahi, right? And at the end, there’s this quote from Yitzhak Sinwani, this UberKabbalista of Madge’s acquaintance, where he’s like, “…the gates of heaven are always open, and he’s discovering the sky and the angels, how they sit, you know, in front of the light. That’s what it’s all about.” Yes, that’s what it’s all about. How could I have missed it? How the angels sit in front of the light, times thirty-seven, minus eleven, divided by the square root of one-hundred and three, carry the nine, and whoop! There it is!

Next I stumbled upon Nietzsche. I opened up his anthology right to his essay “Why I am so Clever” from Ecce Homo. So, why is Nietzche so clever? “I have never pondered over questions that are not really questions.” Whoop, there it is, AGAIN! In your FACE, Mizrahi!

But I did not leave with Nietzsche, either (He is a good drinking partner, but leave him at the bar). No, I left yesterday with Aphra Behn, the seventeenth century political satirist praised by none other than Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.

There was a little blurb on the back cover that read in part: “Famous for her frank eroticism—“ I’m there!—“…she was the ‘sole Empress of the Land of Wit’—yet two centuries of female modesty were to pass before she could again come into her own.” I found that interesting. Not least because it goes to show that the more you delve into the past, the more you see that many of our assumptions in the present are based on bunk. Time and history are just not linear. Which doesn’t mean they’re necessarily circular, either. I think string theory’s the answer.

Anyway, I go in to Brattle Books to make my purchase, right? I didn’t have any cash on me, so I paid with my debit card. I bought a couple other books, too, but the whole sale came to under ten bucks. The clerk asks me for a picture I.D.

Where do they get bookstore clerks? What’s wrong with them? This was an instance of “because I can.” It’s hot. I’m irritable. Do I look like someone who’s going around stealing people’s identities to buy moldy dollar paperbacks from Brattle Books? Because that’s what you’re saying. In the guise of protecting me. It’s the very definition of “retail passive-aggressive.” Seriously.

I said, no, I don’t have a picture I.D. I don’t have a driver’s license, and I’m not going to carry around my passport for a five dollar purchase here and an eight dollar purchase there. Just ring me up. Well, did I have something with my name on it, at least? I took out another card with my name on it, but if I had stolen the debit card, I could have stolen other cards, too, right? So, what’s your point?

Don’t get me wrong. There are definitely situations in which it makes sense to ask for I.D., and situations in which it’s just the clerk—or the waiter or waitress—throwing their meager weight around. Like, I was at this restaurant in Cambridge having dinner, ordered a beer, and the waitress demanded I.D. I didn’t have a picture I.D. I’m like, look, I could not be mistaken for under twenty-one by anyone. She’s like, sorry, no picky, no dwinky.

When the clerk at the bookstore had finished with me, he actually apologized to the guy in line after me, for me. I mean, he was like, sorry that guy was in front of you and you had to wait. And it’s not like it took any time at all to ring me up. Seriously, I think it’s some kind of syndrome amongst bookstore clerks.

I wonder if the Kabbalah can shed any light on that?

Sometimes I can’t get to Dunkin Donuts for my daily dose of dread. When I go to “work” in the Back Bay, it’s more convenient to go to Au Bon Pain on the way. It’s a little different, but just as good, as for despair. (That’s what the pain in Au Bon Pain is, innit? Bet you thought it was French for “bread,” dincha?)

Dunkin Donuts in Dot, you get that blue collar crowd. Au Bon Pain in Back Bay, you get the white collar perspective. Honestly, in my experience, working class people, when they’re in their element, are more polite on the whole than their cubicle-dwelling white-collar counterparts are in theirs.

I think this has to do partly with the stress of expectations.

Being working class is pretty cut and dry (which is not , by any means, to say easy). But when you have haute bourgeois ambitions, things get complicated. And in the cut-throat world of the cubicle, forget Solidarity: you’re on your own. It’s not just at the top–It’s lonely in the middle, too.

So Au Bon Pain, around ten to nine on a weekday is a war of all against all. For some reason, as I stood waiting for my order, looking around, I caught myself thinking of one of my favorite Bukowski poems, “eyeless through space”:

it’s no longer any good sucker
they’ve turned out the lights
they’ve blocked the rear entrance and
the front’s on fire;
nobody knows your
name;

last is first
lost is everything;
the giant dogs mourn through
dandelion dreams;
the panthers welcome cages;
the onion heart is frosted
destiny is destitute
the horns of reason are muted as
the laughter of fools blockades the air;
the champions are dead and
the newly born are smitten;
the jetliners vomit the eyeless
through space;
it’s no longer any good sucker
it’s been getting to that right
along

Just thought I’d share.

I met an out-of-town friend on Newbury Street for coffee the other day, walking from the BPG to Starbuck’s behind the woman above. She was moving at a pretty good clip for someone loaded down like a pack mule. But you know how high-powered boutique shopping pumps up those adrenaline levels. And the more outrageously useless and overpriced the goodies are, the headier the rush. This chick was possessed. Maybe she had a shot of testosterone, or something. She must have strutted the whole length of Newbury Street showing off her booty (the pun was unfortunately unavoidable, given the circumstances).

Of course, it’s entirely possible there was nothing at all in those bags, and she was either a paid advertisement (however ill-advised) for the shops along Newbury Street, or (a little more likely) a bag lady collecting recyclable plastic water bottles on the sly. You just never know.

She seemed proud, but there was something shabby about her, sad to say. Too many bags, no one to carry them for her. Does she really think that’s something to be proud of?

People have clearly lost their minds. What tiny little minds they had to begin with.

Here’s something. I happened to pick up Metro last week–I think this was Tuesday or Wednesday, and I thought I had an op-ed in it (about Ralph Reed–but the editor was apparently skittish about some of the content–asked me for sources and everything, then never ran it–you can read it HERE, but it’s nothing special)–so on the op-ed page they have this thing called “Today’s Debate!” where they ask your schmoes, shmegeges, shlemiels, and shmendriks on the street what they think about something they’ve obviously never thought about.

Tuesday’s looked like this:

Now, as someone who lives in Dorchester, which is not a world away, by the way, I take umbrage at this willful Allstonian ignorance. Could they possibly have found three whiter, WASPier wankers to ask about urban violence? I’ll tell you what happened here. The reporter was too afraid to go to those “certain neighborhoods” Jennifer (who apparently has no last name–she’s like the Cher of Chelsea) seems to have maybe possibly heard that some of the alleged violence in Boston was “centralized” in.

The WASPiest answer was “You just need to be smart about where you go and what time you go there.” I think they left out the end of the quote, probably something like …to buy your crystal meth and cruise for rough trade.

It’s sad that Boston is so Balkanized people in one neighborhood doubt there really is a problem in the next one over. It’s true, as Jennifer says, that it’s concentrated in certain neighborhoods. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the whole city that suffers when violence erupts. Or that it’s not in our interest to examine what’s really happening (and, yes, it’s as bad as people make it out to be), why, and how we can stop it.

It’s not that far from Dot Ave to the Newbry, you know.

Two or three times a week, when I’m working from home and have nothing in the larder, except the emergency provisions our vigilant governor has urged us all to keep on hand (several liters of bottled water and a variety 12-pack of ramen noodles, some duct tape, and The Book of Mormon), I amble over to the nearest Dunkin Donuts for my Bavarian cream fix. Say what you will, I’m not ashamed. I am a cream queen, and proud of it. I mean, a donut’s eighty-nine cents whether there’s just a hole full of air in the middle (hold it up to your ear and you can hear the wind whistling through it) or a hole filled with pudding. HELL-O. Is this an intelligence test? I’ll take door number two, Monty.

But the great thing about my Dunkin Donuts, roughly at the intersection of Mass Ave and Columbia Road, is that along with your Bavarian Cream and coffee, you get your daily recommended dose of DESPAIR, absolutely free of charge. Jesus God, that place is Desperation Central.

I mean, first of all you’ve got all these people rushing to get to their dead-end jobs. There are little acts of kindness, of course–a big, burly construction worker type (rowr!) held the door open for me this morning, as an entry-level schlub tried to shove his way past me–but even the kindness has the poignant feel of politeness between doomed seamen (oops–there’s that cream again) aboard the Lusitania.

But the real misery is behind the counter. Always new faces, always the same look of doom on them. Doing things is definitely not what they like to do. Nope. The thing that gives me that extra kick on the way to my daily existential crisis is that the despair is always fresh (like the coffee and donuts), and there are so many varieties to choose from.

This morning, for instance, the young woman behind the counter was overly affectless. Overly unresponsive to any attempt at human kindness. She seemed to have a force-field of affectlessness all around her to repel even the most minor acts of compassion one might feel compelled to engage in on her beleaguered behalf.

I want to be clear: I believe–really it is the cornerstone of my “belief system,” if you will–in the sacred autonomy of each individual. This belief has many implications that I won’t get into at the moment. I don’t for a moment think that this young woman’s job at Dunkin Nonuts entails fulfilling some psychic need of customers for some semblance of humanity along with their purchase. This young woman is obviously not present inasmuch as she can not be present while being present, and is likely not paid enough to be fully present. With her aggressive affectlessness she says to her customers: I will use certain of my body parts to fulfill certain simple requests, but I will not use my soul. And a customer has no right to ask it.

She is, of course, working out her own answer to the old mind-body problem. I would say, from my brief interaction with her this morning, that she’s probably your average, garden-variety substance-dualist. It was not mixing well with my physicalistic-monist mood, though. If they had been out of bavarian cream donuts, there could have been an ontological rift into which all of existence would have been spontaneously sucked.

Not to say that existence sucks.

And so another day begins.

I was riding my bike in Back Bay yesterday a little after noon. I was headed down Dartmouth, towards Copley Square when one of those Back Bay slacker-temp type jaywalking schlubs sucking on his jumbo iced coffee, plugged into his ‘Pod, stepped out in front of me without looking first. Boston needs a Rudy Giuliani. But more on that in a minute.

I swerved to avoid him, of course. Since he had not looked in the direction of traffic before crossing, and therefore was not aware I was already right on top of him, I swerved right, behind him. But at the last possible moment he saw me, and, startled, staggered backwards. I had to slam on the brakes, which sent my back wheel up, and me flying over the handlebars.

So there I am on my back in the middle of Dartmouth Street, arms and legs akimbo, my bicycle lying on top of me. I look up at this guy looking down at me. He’s like, “oops, my bad.”

I don’t know which was worse: his stepping cluelessly out in front of me, or his looking down at my mangled form after causing me to crash, and quoting “Clueless” to me.

So that set me off. First of all, people: “my bad” is not an apology. Unless you’re, like, three years old, and you’ve just pooped your pants. But not when you are a thirty-something office temp who has just nearly killed someone through your zombie jaywalking on your way back to your data entry job from Dunkin Donuts with your fifth coolata of the day. No.

You might not have been aware of this: “my bad” actually reached a critical mass yesterday afternoon, but this noxious example of rampant anthimeria has been gaining speed for years. Although there’s some confusion about its origin and etymology, the likeliest culprit is, unlikely as it seems, Manute Bol, the impossibly tall Sudanese NBA player whose native tongue is Dinka. He reportedly used to say it whenever he flubbed a pass. It apparently spread through the college basketball subculture (such as it is), emerging in the print press in ‘89 (first in the St. Louis Dispatch, and then, days later, in USA Today). From there, in the mid-nineties, it made its way into TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and movies (Clueless, where it is, coincidentally, used by a character who has just caused a cyclist to crash). By the noughties, it had become the punchline in late night comedians’ monologues, which is where most of corporate America gets what pseudo-original thoughts it has. I’m quite sure that when Mr. Bush is finally indicted for war crimes his mea culpa will come in the form of “my bad, hehehe.”

The expression has layers of nuance, of course. The wiki-site, urbandictionary.com, which lets visitors identify, define, and vote on the most accurate definition of slang terms, offers this consensus definition of “my bad”:

A way of admitting a mistake, and apologizing for that mistake, without actually apologizing:

“I did something bad, and I recognize that I did something bad, but there is nothing that can be done for it now, and there is technically no reason to apologize for that error, so let’s just assume that I won’t do it again, get over it, and move on with our lives.”

Ruder than apologizing, but with the same meaning: a flippant apology.

The number two definition, which also garnered several “amens!”:

(n.) A combination of an apology and a dismissal. Basically, saying “oh yeah, I did that, but I don’t care”.

Persons of an older generation can find this quite annoying to hear when expecting an actual apology.

That definitely sums up how I felt about it, although I do not consider myself a “person of an older generation.” And the pathetic thing is that the schlub who said it was probably my age, too.

So there I am on my back in the middle of Dartmouth Street with this pudding standing there sucking on his iced coffee staring down at me. “Dude, my bad.” I just tore into him. I told him in the future he might want to look the other way–the way traffic is coming–before crossing the street. I mean, I don’t get it. Somebody could’ve been seriously injured here.

He sneers at me, mumbles, “dick,” and schlubs off across the street, leaving me battered, bruised, broken, and in disbelief.

Not really. I was lucky there’s a little hill there, and I was going uphill at the time. If I’d been on the other side, heading downhill, I probably would’ve broken my neck. So I was bruised all up and down my left side, and a little sore afterwards, but not too much worse for wear. And I wasn’t really in disbelief, either, I just like alliteration. The whole thing was all too believable, unfortunately. You’d actually expect it in Boston.

Which is why we need Rudy Giuliani. And not just for the jaywalking, either. Drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians all need to seriously shape up. Streets should be color-coded. Cyclists should have dedicated lanes, as should buses and cars. Traffic signals in areas with heavy pedestrian traffic should be modified, with shorter waits for pedestrians, who should be allowed to cross intersections diagonally (which means red lights in all directions for auto and bike traffic when pedestrians have the “go”). Cars, bikes and pedestrians who violate traffic rules should be aggressively pursued, and excessively fined. This will wound Bostonians’ rampant sense of individual exceptionalism and entitlement, but in the end it will make our streets much more livable.

(Speaking of livable streets, there’s a Street Social this afternoon in Cambridge starting at 5:30 sponsored by Livable Streets–click HERE for details.)

There’s room for debate, but I think part of the problem is the suburbanization of the city. And I mean attitudewise. Because a city is not just a place, it’s a distinct state of mind. A set of attitudes and values often at odds with those of the suburbs.

One thing every city has is a double-life. You either get that–and celebrate it in your own life in the city–or you should really just move out to the ‘burbs where you don’t need manners or social skills to get around, just an SUV and a credit card.

For those who would like to set up shop in the city, you should understand the unique spirit of cities. The secret life of cities, if you will. We all know that cities are inconvenient to get around, that they’re full of menacing crowds, multiple barriers on our way from point A to point B. But to those with eyes to see it, these barriers are passages to the secret city.

Not a hidden city, mind you. This second life of the city is an open-secret. And it opens up when you do. And when you grasp that everything and everyone is significant. And that you must strive always to be where you are. Be here, now.

When I enter a subway car I always think, “what if something happens here? What if my last moment on earth is here, in this subway car, with these people?” Because the last moment is The Moment. When the present is finally undeniably present and accounted for. When I walk onto a subway car, it’s like: I am here, now. Funky as it is. Everything that happens her and now is significant. There is no throw-away moment, no throw-away encounter with a fellow traveler, even that one there, groping his way along in the dark from one coolata to the next. My encounter with one of them yesterday could have been the death of me, after all. Careless, disconnected, coolata-fueled. It’s a deadly combination.

This secret life is made up of all the little interactions we have with one another, however careless and seemingly casual. They all play a role in our fate. They’re all significant, without exception. That sounds ominous and scary, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s about connectivity, after all. We are a part of each other’s stories. At the time of their telling. It’s a conversation to which we have to bring a respect of the other, and a genuine curiosity about the nature of this extraordinary organism of which, however different we may be from one another, we are each a vital part.

Not to sound too evolved, but I rarely see hints of awareness of this whole here, though I’m always on the look-out. Seems today we Bostonians are more likely to think of ourselves as impermeable, autonomous units, never mingling our auras gracefully, generously, like fellow travelers, but banging and bashing into each other like bumper cars, on our way to nowhere. We’re “in” our ‘Pods, with our urban armor to protect us. This may be a function of fear: the fear of potential violence so often associated with race, or the fear of affrontery so often seen in highly class-conscious cultures.

When your city is little more than a glorified bumper car course, you’re going to get banged up occasionally. I understand that. If that’s how it is, that’s how it is. But when you bash into me, please, please, whatever you do, just don’t say “oops, my bad,” or I will be forced to bash back.