© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 14
There’s an old joke about a chicken that crosses the road. The humour lies in a painfully obvious answer. There are now about a million variants on the joke, give or take a few, ranging from political tirades about chickens to slurs on blondes, gays, men and even plumbers. What can be said about crossing a road, regardless of ‘who’, is that there must be measure of ambition, even if like a chicken, the butt of the joke has the IQ of a sixteen year old in a bar that doesn’t bother with checking ID.
There are a few things left unsaid in the joke that are worth considering. Consider this proposition: why did the chicken cross the farmyard? Now that’s even more lame than the original version, regardless of the ambition. The interesting thing about the original is that the chicken crosses a road.
The thing that strikes me is that the chicken is incongruous in the road. If you have read PJ O’ Rourke’s remarkable ‘Holidays in Hell’, particularly the advice about driving in the third world and the advisability of stopping when you hit an animal, you will know why.
Unless there is no traffic, the chicken doesn’t stand much of a chance. One hopes that whatever catches the chicken’s attention from the other side of the road is worth dying for. And if there is no traffic, it’s hardly worth calling it a road in the first place.
People are a lot like chickens. I have seen enough accidents at and away from pedestrian crossings to be able to confirm this with absolute clarity. Fast moving traffic, red lights and warning signs lose all relevance when weighed up against the irresistible aroma of a coffee shop or a friend waving from the other side. Remember that first-grade teacher who spent all those hours teaching us to ‘look left, look right, look left again’? She’d be horrified.
Charles Macadam designed the road to take life places at high-speeds. He didn’t intend it to be polite or sensitive to the needs of pedestrians. Motorists seem to have taken this to heart, and echo his sentiments, rarely allowing the speedometer to dip below the speed limit. More often than not, the rules of the road are treated as amiable suggestions, rather than means of preserving lives.
And then there’s the element of randomness. There is no eye that can look around a corner or predict a brake failure. So even if you have a death wish, you still don’t have much certainty. You may want the status and style of going out under the wheels of a large, luxury German sedan. Don’t bet on it. It could just as well be an economical Japanese compact.
The road is a metaphor for life. There is a particular style of movie, known as the ‘road movie’. It involves a journey with a destination. The only two variants that I have come across are the destination of self-discovery and the destination of death, with a sub-variant that combines both. If you haven’t yet seen a road movie, David Lynch’s ‘Wild at Heart’ is deliciously demented. Nicholas Cage’s defense of his snakeskin jacket and juvenile Southern honour will stay with me forever.
Like the road movie, life has its tempo and its destinations. The road either takes us on our journey or divides us from our destinations. Unlike the road, however, life has no speed limit or warning signs. Everyone is in a rush and very few stop to think about what they are doing or where they are heading.
Accidental meetings, ‘bumping into someone’, may be fortuitous, especially if the parties who meet are consenting adults with time on their hands and a few drinks too many, but don’t bet on it. There is nothing quite as aggravating or likely to result in mayhem than having to interrupt your goals and wait for someone to get to the other side. If you doubt me, examine your feelings towards receptionists and bureaucrats.
In reality life has a very limited store of patience and won’t stop for you or me. Think twice before you cross the path of someone else’s journey. Look left, look right, look left again.
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