Floundering Bounder.

I saw today something that occurs everyday, in fact, i see it every day. Today though, I really saw it.

I was feeling vulnerable on my daily route to work. The wind was biting cold and i had selected a thin Plastic Mack to shroud my quivering cocktail stick bones. My belly was empty and had tightened itself into a cramp when faced with the morning revulsion of feeding the cat. Cat food is so oppressively pungent and looks like a war ration. The last thing i need as i attempt to iron shirts, hunt for matching socks and find those bloody keys that I've hidden from myself, is to be reminded of World War one and all the suffering that makes my morning shout, stamp and whinge look like a trip to Hawaii with Pamela Anderson in tow.

I stopped in the street on my last leg of the journey, shoulders arched up over my head like a wing-ed Demon. I stopped because i wanted a respite from the nature of the journey to work. A to B. A, being a desirable though ultimately purposeless home, full of beds, meals and idle entertainment. B, being the work place, my physical bread and butter, though my metaphysical desert inducing famine.

When people travel from A to B, especially if it is work related, they seem almost entirely single minded, operating on some sort of auto pilot. The strangest thing is the level of frustration they display when anything obstructs this journey, even for an instant. Often, it has been apparent that the traveller will almost be searching for frustration, huffing with indigence at the person in front who objected to leaping fearlessly in front of an oncoming Juggernaut travelling at 60 mph, and shouting at it, 'BACK, BACK YOU VEHICLE OF SATAN, I AM RIGHTEOUS, I AM GOING FROM A to B AND THOU SHALT NOT OBSTRUCT ME LEST YOU BE SMOTE'. It seems somewhat unreasonable on reflection.

I on the other hand like to stop at any given point on a journey, simply to re-assert my freedom. I will go to work, I will go to B, but I will do it my way, in my time and i will find something to enjoy or to involve myself in en route if it bloody kills me. The feeling is not one of defiance or of a desperate search for individuality amongst the grinding cogs of social necessity, it is similar to the childhood trudge toward a ticking off.

One figure of authority would send you to visit another, be it parent or teacher. In between, whatever happens at the two ends of spectrum, is your time and yours alone. So why rush it? Inevitably i would be moping along like a rain soaked beagle either brimming with indigence or racked with trepidation but also guilt. I was rarely reprimanded unless I had crossed some moral boundary, caused misery, inflicted something upon someone and was as such shaken to my bones by an empathy that rendered my previous action senseless. I would on these walks, stop, sit, idle, chew the fat, fatten a goose, goose a gander anything to create a personal experience separate from the point of the journey so that I might take something of my own from the experience.

That is what I was doing today, when I saw it.

A man in his 50's wearing a suit looking pained by despair, jogging on the spot behind a small cluster of people moving slower than he wished down the street. Not enough people to be a permanent block, a brief obstruction.

Why? It is unlikely that this was an impromptu bid to reclaim the fitness of a forgotten youth. It is unlikely that he was a raging but bold agoraphobic bravely but desperately racing to his destination like a child that needs the loo.

It is likely that he was late or at risk of becoming late. It is also likely that he was high enough up the food chain at his age, that it was the shitty rod that he has shoved up his own anus and inflicted upon everyone else in the name of protocol that he was beating himself with.

Or was it that he simply wasn't thinking? If he was late, then he is exactly that, late and no amount of running on the spot will turn back time. Ambitious though running against the turn of the earth on it's axis is, it won't get it moving the other way, and even if it did, the desired effect would not emerge. If he is nearly late, then he will be in work there or thereabouts on time, a few minutes either side and simply walking at a higher pace where possible would suffice. Attempting to plow through the thudding grey rock of London Commuter crowding is only adding frustration and a sense of being wronged to his plight.

It only takes a brief look around to notice that they are all doing the same thing, panic stricken, desperate to get to work convinced of their purpose.

Why is this so distasteful to my palate?

It's the greed, the way they demand that their journey is more important than everyone else's and even worse, the way this futile act that tickles the gag reflex creates an almost universal sense of righteousness permitting them to take the aforementioned shitty stick and jab it in my eye whenever my methods, my scribble, drifts outside of the line that they are all adhering to with Biblical fervour.

So, I stood and watched him go, it took him fucking ages and i thought it was hilarious when he smacked his brief case against a lamp post and ran on as if it hadn't happened.

Then I went to work, my journey my own.