Tuesday, March 28, 2023

REDRUM! REDRUM! Okay Not Really It's Just Me Walking Down a Hallway

The hallway in the apartment building I'm in right now has the longest goddam hallway in the world; I swear it must be like living in the Pentagon. So of course the nightmare scenario is when I'm down at one end of the hall and OH FFS someone is all the way at the other end of the hall walking towards me so that we may eventually pass like ships in the night. But since it's an apartment building there's no cutaway or room or bathroom or office that I can pretend to need to duck into, so now me & whoever are just walking from miles apart towards each other. I can't lock eyes with someone for fifty fucking yards and the biggest pressure anyway is deciding when it's early enough to do the "hey" head nod, because if you do it too early then you're still staring at each other for another 15 fucking feet and so it feels like you're either on a date or you've said all your emotional goodbyes for a big sendoff and then annoy everybody by popping back in again.

Of course I can dick around with my phone for some of it, looking VERY concerned about pork belly futures, but I can't really run the risk of plowing into this person either so I do hafta look up for part of the walk. But it never occurs to me that the person on the other end might be going through the same thing, I always assume they're just fucking crushing it walking down hallways like a baller and has no interest in giving a shit whether or not there's about 90 feet of awkwardness between us. I assume I'M doing all the one worrying/changing for them, and they don't change on thing for me.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you point out a similar mindset during your high school football career over a dozen years ago?"

Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers, YES I did!

Anyway, here's how it all looked in real time:

No comments: