Jogging By A Paralyzed Person

There’s something so eerily innocent and fucked up about jogging by a person in one of those Stephen Hawking scooters, only to make them stare at you as you blissfully sweep yourself off your own two feet, one gleeful god given step at a time and run blissfully on by. As an every day runner (Yes I’m better than you and no I don’t like doing it either but I’m not a lazy piece of shit anymore and I take pride in that so shut up and let me brag ok if you got your thirty year-old ass up ((Old. I know.)) and ran almost every day you’d have no problem shoving it in peoples’ faces either ok?… What’s the problem? Oh I didn’t put enough punctuation in there? Need to catch your breath? That’s a lot for an out-of-shape pile like you isn’t it. “Jesus christ we get it!” Ok. End of rant. My apologies. ) Anyways, as someone who runs in neighborhoods most days, and usually in the afternoon when people are getting home from work, you tend to compete for sidewalk and road space with not only a low-level froggeresque stream of various four wheeled vehicles traveling an equal variety of speeds, but an equal number of pedestrians moving with the help of anything from their own two old legs (It’s Florida), to golf carts, bicycles, and last but not least, those damn motorized scooters with what I swear have to be souped up engines because no motorized scooter leaves the factory that fucking fast. I’ve seen sports cars with 400 ponies under the hood clear an intersection when it looks like the red light district slower than I’ve seen these batshit crazy old people blow through stop signs driving these things. I guess my long winded point is you see it all, and perhaps more importantly, you run by it all. Have to. Run by, it all. And today it happened. I ran by someone (I’m pretty sure a quadriplegic) operating one of those electric scooter crazy contraption things as he was driving it on the sidewalk, and for whatever reason, I felt absolutely horrible. And not in like the normal horrible or terrible sort of way, like when you hit the back of your mom’s heel because she’s walking too slow, or apparently you’re “not paying attention” or whatever. No, more like a depressed horrible feeling, with a weird edge of happiness and honestly, joy. You’re just happy to be in the position to pass this confusing yet perfect example of just how cruelly precious life can be. I mean, look at this guy. I thought to myself as I ran by. Holding on for dear life, or to what was left of his life. Literally. To what controlled it. A joystick.

Ironic name for it.