Off the seat of a bicycle
48)     Explaining crows, women and uniforms

I want to tell a story from Chicago that goes to my ‘experimental-thinking’ ‘activist’ lifestyle and how I might affect women … and also to delve slightly off-track into the world of omens and other psycho-bullshit.

First let me creep out on a narrow-limb of sanity and say I heed advice from Crows.
OMG, you say, closing the book, ‘that’s about two hits-of-acid farther off-center than I want to hear.’ Well, I don’t want to argue that point, except to say that crows carry information and I don’t know how or why, but they do it.

Let me present the following test case and let you be the judge.

When I worked at the hardware store in the Chicago suburbs, it closed at 6 PM, but the forest preserve down the street closed a half-hour earlier at 5:30. Needless to say I ignored the forest-preserve closing-time and regularly enjoyed walking and riding around the trails any time I pleased …

… my rule sez: if other animals are welcome in the forest, then humans cannot be arbitrarily excluded.

You see, I believe humans are busy setting up exclusions over other humans because somebody thinks that’s the best way to get to heaven … you make a rule and everybody who stays on this side of the line goes to heaven, and everybody who steps on the other side goes to hell. It’s an easy way to justify management of human behavior.

On one particular evening, tempting hell and riding my bike after-hours in the forest preserve, I unexpectedly encountered two males walking on the path. One of them was a park ranger at the preserve and the other was I gauged his boyfriend by the way they walked.

I rode past them like it was mid-day and pretended not to hear the ranger’s protestation. ‘Fuck you’ has always been my motto against arbitrary human restraints, and rode onward thinking, if humans aren’t supposed to be in the park, what the hell are those two guys doing here?

Ok, I got around on the far end of the park and start walking my bike along the Des Plaines River, which is a mud ditch really, and a Crow flew overhead. This Crow was flying fast and making a ruffling noise off the front edge of his wings. I looked up to see and hear the 'news' he was bringing.

Something was up, but I waited.

A bit further along, as the path circled back toward the parking lot, three Crows flew directly overhead, and one made a loud call, so I knew somebody unseen was coming straight down the trail toward me.

Usually I heed Crows and would normally disappear out the back way, but that day, honest-to-god, I wanted to test the Crow hypothesis, so continued forward.

Sure enough the Crows were absolutely right and here comes a young woman park-ranger, all decked out in uniform and disgustedly marching toward me, with little white elbows flying hard in the wind.

I ignored proprietary human behavior when she confronted me, and continued to walk ahead as if I were a free man untethered by human bond. After all, would she confront a brown deer? No? How about a red dog or a white possum? No? How about a hairy two-eyed bigfoot? Hell no.

Her sole appointed task in life was to confront all non-sasquatch hominids who didn’t wear a ranger patch, and that, by sheer twist of fate, matched the ascribed offender ... me.

Evidently I was the only animal forbidden to ‘eat the forest-preserve fruit’ after 5:30 PM. Central Standard Time … forget the fact that she and two other people were in the forest too, and one was not a ranger. So if everybody else was in the park, what difference does one more make?

Oh, but wait … it’s a RULE … and we’ve been taught to follow the rules, even if they lead to a neck-deep pile of sheep manure.

As it turned out, the Crows were right. She was there, and they told me somebody was coming. And permit me to add a small dime here; she was mad with energy, and it was precisely directed at me … so did the Crows get excited by her sparkle of human energy? After all, everybody knows Crows are attracted to shiney things, and nobody can say how the vast mysterious world works.

The lady kat-ranger kept trying to stop me from walking. She wanted her confrontation despite the fact that I was walking toward her vehicle. She started hanging onto the handlebars of my bike and I was pulling her along, just minding my own business.

Then she got incredibly mad and said, ‘alright then,’ and swung her arm in a big banana arc and karate-chopped into the wedge of my neck.

That crazy kat-cop karate-chopped my neck and I just bugged out my eyes … of course I barely felt it … but who the hell is training these people? Did her judo instructor fall over in pretend agony whenever she gnatted a chop?
 
But more importantly, why the hell did she attack a person over a sheep-shit issue like park hours? Was she defending Central Standard Time?

After the tiny blow bounced off my neck, a sudden look of fear flushed across her face as she realized she was confronting a large man who didn’t flinch her best shot. I was 6’3” and 220lbs and she wasn’t more than 5’6” and 120. So I ignored the whole thing and continued walking my bike up the path.

She grabbed the bike seat and I was sliding her along in the leaves, until I gently let go and said, ‘alright,’ … pretending as if her real objective was to take the bike and it was cumbersome to me so I agreed to give it to her …

… and then she leaned over from the waist, still holding on to the seat, and laughed, and so it was over, and we walked back to her vehicle … which is where I was headed anyway …

… so why the fight?

Ahhhh … it’s the uniform! The uniform caused the fight.

Kat-ranger was not a fighter … she was determined to do her job, yes, but not a brawler with high school experience punching classmates heads into locker doors, or getting deck-slammed toothless by the girl whose boyfriend she stole. Shit no. She was a bird-loving idealist who always followed the rules … and she thought I was there to do what? Fire-piss the trees?

The problem was the uniform … when you wear the uniform, all havoc can take place because it means you ‘care’ enough to blow a bicycle infraction into a rolling brawl with a potential for gunplay and all manner of bodily injury.

I tried to engage kat-ranger in conversation as we walked, but the human side of her never came out. The only thing happening in her mind was ‘kat-cop’ over-stimulated by duty, so she documented my name and I rode away.

Using a very strange experiment indeed, I got to see the psychological profile of a presumably rational, tiny white female who was willing to attack a large strange man for walking in the forest after ‘closing time’ …

… and it explains why Napoleon said soldiers ‘fight wars for the baubles,’ because achievement can be marked inside group norms by awarding a better uniform or bigger flag.

Kat-cop was fighting for the bauble of her job … and she became a non-sensical slave to the uniform … and she did it by rote; without one grain of human introspection.

Here is the underlying point of this chapter: I knew what kat-cop was all about as soon as I saw her white elbows marching at me.
The Crows told me it was coming ... maybe they were asking me to avoid the problem so the day's tranquility would be preserved.

I should have honored the Crows.
What a gift I have for inciting the avoidable problem, but if the Crows had warned of danger, that Suede Brown was lurking, I would have disappeared the other direction.

Chapter 50) Bike trip from Tampa to New Orleans
Index of chapters