Sidewalks

I was walking a little aimlessly today, kind of hoping to see something of interest at the side of the road. Not very successfully at all I might add. I guess that the really interesting things like broken cell phones, shiny bits of metal, dismembered body parts from a doll, discarded ear buds, CD’s of some artist I’ve never heard of and every now and then, a nickel or a quarter. Some days it just doesn’t pay to look at your feet.

I moved my attention to the homes that I was walking past. Some were just lovely, with beautiful, weed free lawns bordered by a rainbow of flowers. Some places were just weeds and dog shit leading up to a run down home. Most places were kind of like mine, a little work had gone into the lawn and flower beds but not much time or thought. The nice places made me feel that I should put in more time out in the yard. The crappy places made me feel that I was spending too much time out in the yard. The places that looked like mine made me feel that I spent just the right amount of time in the yard. I guess that is just a variation on the Goldilocks theme.

I looked down and I saw that the sidewalk was cracked. I have come to expect cracked sidewalks; you can’t go more than ten feet without finding a crack to break your mothers back. There is one section where the crack runs lengthwise and travels hundreds of feet from section to section. I wonder what they did wrong. Not enough rebar I suppose, or perhaps the concrete mix was sub standard. Perhaps some rich contractor or city official has been scrimping on materials in order to line his pockets. Maybe the workers were incompetent or stoned when they laid the sidewalk. It could be a result of the freeze/thaw that happens in the early spring, but you would think they would have figured a way around that.

I am going with lazy incompetent workers or corruption.

Fucking unions and elected officials!!

I don’t remember seeing so many cracked and broken sidewalks when I was growing up. I will freely admit that I probably wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have, but the sidewalks seemed to be okay. We played hop-scotch chalked onto the side walk and I’m pretty sure that I learned most of my early swear words from insults written on sidewalks. “Jody sucks big dicks!” “Suzi is a f**king cow!” “Tommy’s mom is gay.”

I do remember seeing sidewalks with dates on them going back decades and decades. I don’t know why they would have put dates in the cement, maybe because they were proud of the work they did and stood behind it.

Perhaps the city workers of today should put their names and date the work they do. I doubt any of that work would still be around decades from now. We are a disposable society, but I would have thought that concrete would be the one item that we could count on.

Nothing lasts forever, not concrete, lawns, city workers or crooked developers. One thing that has stayed the same over the decades is that Jody still sucks big dicks it seems. Well, at least that’s what I saw written on the sidewalk today.