Driving in a busy city governed by a car-hostile left-wing council is fun, but usually only after 11 PM when all the normal people are off the street. During daylight hours, the experience varies between boredom, stress, and terror, with the mood vigorously swinging between these extremes. I’ve already written about the joys of suicidal bike riders. Today I am inclined to comment about pedestrians.

No, not the well-behaved pedestrians who cross at proper intersections, or taking proper precautions. No, I mean the other kind – the kind so prevalent on streets like Bayview Ave., Yonge St., and probably countless other arterial roads with busy pedestrian shopping attractions on both sides. Here, that peculiar species of pedestrian known as “gottarun” stalks.

Many gottaruns are typical yuppies – men and women adults of prime reproductive age, showing as much desparation to get to that corner coffee shop for a morning hit as a urine-filled homeless guy searching for the perfect bush beside City Hall. Under such perilous conditions, there is no time to waste – one has to park, and one has to run across the road, right fucking now.

An intelligent person with a mere yearning instead of chemical withdrawal symptoms may take his time and walk to a proper safe place to cross, wait a while, and go in peace. But the gottarun is more cunning. It waits only as long as needed to squeeze into the already miniscule gap left between consecutive cars that, partly due to the left-wing council’s efforts, move only slightly faster on average than the giant running breast-worm after a mastectomy. This search is especially effective if, as frequently happens, the cars are blocked and therefore a gap appears stationary.

That’s when even the slowest, most ancient gottarun leaps into action. Well actually it doesn’t leap, it just wades into the traffic as if it was a warm comfy wading pool where toddlers splash and pee peacefully. It is a rare gottarun that looks left and right, and a rarer one still that having done so, does the wise thing and withdraws. No, most gottaruns proceed monotonically and moronically toward their destination, once they have planted their feet on pavement.

Many gottaruns appear to drive cars, but somehow utterly lose any consciousness of the realities of the situtation as soon as they begin their traffic crossing. If those parts of their brains didn’t spontaneously revobrigate, they would realize that the way most likely to get killed is to step immediately in front of a vehicle that is about to start moving. And yet a significant fraction of gottaruns does exactly that, rather than the slightly less stupid idea of stepping behind said vehicle. (An aside for the gottaruns and other ignoramuses: this is because the next driver has some warning and can take evasive maneuvers. Stepping immediately in front of a driver requires him to have a keen sense of peripheral eyesight, just at the moment that he may be concentrating on traffic ahead.) But apparently a gottarun tries to minimize distance, not danger.

As the reader may begin to suspect, I had multiple gottarun encounters this morning. One of them was a pretty lady blonde in her late 20s, who did everything according to the gottarun principles, meaning that she did everything wrong. She was a split second away from having to have her doubtess perfectly pH-balanced flesh and blood be scraped off the nice yellow bumper that ELASTIC so nearly smacked her with. After a “wake up, you suicidal idiot” honk, she turned to us and gleamed with a big beautiful smile: seemingly totally unaware of her near death experience. I hope that when it’s time for me to go, I’m just as spaced.