SKATEBOARD PUNKS TRAUMATIZED ME!

Skateboard punks traumatized me. For example, on the campus of the Ohio State University. This probably would've been in the 20th century. Right in the middle of the campus, about as busy as Columbus pedestrian traffic got, there's a museum and performing-arts center designed by Philip Eisenman. Parts of the exterior happen to be great for skateboarding. I don't know if they've changed anything in the meantime, but back then, they hadn't decided whether the space should belong to pedestrians or to skateboarders, so you had lots of both.

 

I don't know whether the skateboarders were intentionally terrorizing... me. I was going to write, "[...]terrorizing pedestrians," but to be honest, I don't know whether anyone else was terrorized. So anyway, I felt as if the skateboarders were invading my personal space and making me get out of their way, and making no effort whatsoever to get out of my way. Even at the time, I wasn't sure whether there was any danger, or any reason for me or any of the other pedestrians to have to dodge them. I don't recall hearing about any skateboarder-pedestrian accidents, or any skateboarder-bicyclist accidents. 

But it FELT as if they were being very rude and as if people had to dodge them, while they made zero effort not to collide with people. And that made me angry. And so I tried to collide with them, I tried to step into their paths. None of them ever hit me. 

So then there was this other guy. I have no idea whether he was a skateboarder or not. He was on the bike path. Or, more precisely, IN the bike path. 

There was a bike path which went from south and east of the OSU campus to north of it as far as Worthington, and probably farther. And often, when I rode on the path, I was grumpy, because 1) I'm grumpy, 2) various large dogs seem to have been trained to attack bicyclists, and 3) there were a lot of people who seemed not to care whether they were in bicyclists' way: walking in big groups, cycling really slow and veering unpredictably from one side of the path to the other, etc. 

So here was this guy, on the path as it ran through the campus and past an area which was divided up into several soccer practice fields. This guy was sitting IN the path, sketching in a pad.

And I mumbled something as I biked around him. 

And then he screamed at me. Something about how he was just doing what he had to do.

Maybe I was twenty yards past him at that point. I laid my bike down on the ground and turned around and faced him. He screamed some more, something like that I should come on, I was twice his size. 

As if he assumed that I intended to physically fight him. No, that was not the case. I had stopped because I was considering talking to him, telling him I got stressed from having to dodge people on the path, and how, at least as it seemed to me, there was plenty of round NEAR the path where he could have been sitting, without making cyclists have to dodge him. 

But I ended up not saying anything. Instead I picked up  my bike and rode away. I suspected that he might have been crazy, or on angel dust or something, and that an attempt at conversation might have been useless. 

I never had any intention of pummeling the guy. And I was upset to begin with because it seemed to me that he was making it unnecessarily difficult for me not to accidentally hit him.

So it seems to me that either I get upset a lot when I shouldn't, or that many other people are astonishingly rude. Or perhaps both.