Transparency

I wonder if I’m ever the idiot.

I was trying to watch something today, and the same guy kept standing in front of me. This happened three times in a row. Three straight. After a bit of wrangling, I’d maneuvered myself into the vantage point I wanted, and he decided – without putting in nearly the amount of work I had - to step right in front of me and block my view.

So I moved, and he did it again.

Then I moved again, and he did it for a third time, so I said something.

“Dude, are you doing this on purpose?” I asked.

“What?”

“Everywhere I go, you go and stand in front of me. Have you not noticed that?”

The third time was the most annoying of all, because he couldn’t just stand in front of me. He had to flaunt the fact that he was standing in front of me by starting a conversation with the guy standing next to him and not even watching what we were supposed to be watching. In other words, he’d moved directly in front of me, cutting me off from seeing anything, but his head was turned sideways and he wasn’t paying any attention to what we’d all come to see.

In the nightclub business, we call people like this customers.

If you’ve ever read anything I’ve written on this site, you know I’m very sensitive to this sort of thing. I’m also – or so I claim – very proud of my capacity for spatial awareness in crowds. In other words, I try very hard not to irritate the people around me by getting in their way, bumping into them, or making excessive noise. I’m not sure whether I’m always successful, but at least I make an attempt at non-annoyance, which is more than I can say for most of the people I come across on a daily basis here in New York. This place is filled with jerkoffs who don’t know how to act. The majority of these people are ugly.

Today’s encounter made me think about things, though. It made me wonder if anyone thought I was an asshole today. Did I bump into anyone? Was I speaking too loudly at any point? Did finding the “vantage point I wanted” entail my own version of standing in front of someone who, in turn, wanted to put a foot up my ass? Do I even care?

This, for me, is what passes for philosophy these days.