Have you ever found yourself casually ambling down a city street, only to encounter someone exiting a shop and joining the flow of pedestrians exactly alongside you? This results in the appearance that they’re actually accompanying you on your happy little stroll, and have been all afternoon. A sidewalk-jacker.
The more polite inflictor of this mildly embarassing situation will usually hastily strafe away in a breakneck fashion. Occasionally, you find the oddballs who think it’s an amusing circumstance, and will glance up at you, grinning and misguidedly believing they’ve stumbled upon the type of serendipity found in romantic comedies. These are the more worrying sidewalk-jackers.
Somewhat opposite is the guilty-porn-purchaser. They’re only all too keen to zip around everyone to avoid any direct eye contact, as they fly headlong from the stairwell of some skanky porn store, as if inflicted by some ridiculously violent socialphobia (in fact, they probably are inflicted by a ridiculously violent socialphobia).
Then there’s the crossbreed variety I made first contact with on the weekend: the guilty-porn-purchaser-sidewalk-jacker. Some grungy old kiddy-fiddler type soared headlong out of a porn store, accidentally synchronised his walking against mine, yet then released a sleazy chuckle while eyeing me up and down! All while holding his brown porn-bag. I had to engage in some serious random stacatto sidesteps just to get rid of the fucker.
What’s with the oddballs on the streets lately? Something about the coming of spring seems to have cranked up their crazy. Just this afternoon on the train home, I was innocently reading the latest Kerrang, when some uni dropout plonks his arse next to me and proceeds to perch over my shoulder and stinkily mouth the article text under his breath.
He was straining to make conversation, sitting there and chuckling “Oh, ho, ho” while nodding knowingly at some random band, or exclaiming “Oh no!” at the latest picture of Courtney Love’s breasts (which I suppose is a fair enough reaction).
The final straw came when I flipped the page, to a picture of a rather unhappy-looking Phil Anselmo strutting around in front of Pantera, just before they fell apart. “Oh, I remember that,” nodded the bum next to me knowingly – then speedily asking me for a fiver as I looked up in surprise. I mean, fuck off. Try something far more believable to get my attention (and preferably not so close to my personal space). Really, are you intimately familiar with the internal fuckwittery that tore Pantera apart? You don’t mind a bit of Great Southern Trendkill singalong in between your stinky panhandling? BLOW ME DOWN.
In other news, we got ADSL2 today, so I have to go and download some porn. To, you know, test and shit.