Don't Stop

I understand that a lot of professional comedians favor New York over Los Angeles because it is more conducive to coming up with jokes. It's not that funnier stuff happens there, but when you take trains and walk to get places, you see more of it. You're there on the ground, not zipping through too fast to observe anything except your steering wheel. Well, I may live in Los Angeles, but it seems to me that I have the best of both worlds due to my reliance on public transportation. I've made this clear enough in the past.

Something else happened just before my account of the old man and the scofflaws took place. I was a bit scatterbrained, having had a minor accident while hurrying to leave the house that morning. With me there is a cascading effect, with each misstep setting the stage for another until I calm down. So it was on this day, because had I been in a good state of mind, I would not have let the following transpire. Really, it's a kind of non-event, but interesting anyway.

There I was, walking to the library. I was clutching some dvds to be returned and moving purposefully in accordance with the music I was listening to. A man rather the worse for wear was beckoning to me from a stationery position near the small bus station on that street. Anyone standing on the sidewalk and not moving sends up a red flag with me. No good can come from that. It's compounded by proximity to a poor man's mode of transportation. I don't know why I stopped to submit to him.

I did though, and found out what he wanted. Evidently he had come all the way from Maine, if I understood him correctly. He was trying to work out how far he had come each week in the time elapsed since his journey's beginning. Of course, he didn't express it like that, or I might have understood faster. In any case, he seemed to know roughly how far he'd come and how many weeks he wanted to average it out to, but couldn't put those two pieces of information together.

Enter me, apparently looking like a relative math wiz to his eyes. I'm not, but under ordinary circumstances I probably could have helped him out just doing the math in my head. Somewhat distraught as I said, I couldn't think clearly enough to even make out all of what he said, let alone comply with his request. I confessed that I couldn't answer his question, and suggested that he seek out a calculator when he asked how he might find an answer. I had a calculator on my phone of course, but you'll be understanding when I say that I just had to get out of there. Some days you just don't want the encounters that generate ideas.