Confessions of a Side Walker

Here is the updated version after many very nice suggestions.. Enjoy!

Confessions of a Side Walker

The true confessions of a side walker start back at the beginning of the side walking experience. It has to start the night before the initial epiphany that “I need to start walking more! I will do this for my health!” Then, before you know it, it is 5:00am with the bedside alarm blaring in your ear. Take a shower before the walk? “Ah, forget it.”

You skip the shower and walk into the closet and find your old jogging suit. (Even though you are not going to jog, you want people to look at you and see the jogging suit and have them say, “Now look at this health nut. I wish I could be more like this person!”) After you struggle getting your ten-year-old jogging suit on and falling face first onto the closet room floor, you head into the kitchen. You glance at the cool green numbers on the microwave oven. It glares at you in sick humor saying "5:00am". You think to yourself, “Coffee? Ah, forget it.” You stumble out the front door with pretend coffee in hand.

You step out the door and it’s still DARK! “Why the hell am I even doing this?” Even so, you grind your teeth and make your way out. Not many people are up at 5:00am, but it is very amusing to see the few that are. You start making your way down the cul-de-sac, passing the few neighbors that you dislike because they party at two in the morning, every morning! But yet, you still smile and wave.

The sickness in your stomach, for being up this early, has now passed as you make your way towards the city. The sun is starting to show its beautiful colors across the mountains of skyscrapers. It’s a beautiful site and now you forget why you didn't want to get up in the first place.

From a distance you can hear clanging noises that sound a lot like glass breaking. You are a little timid to move down the street any further because this is the city, you know. It is the same reason why you moved in the suburbs to begin with. But, you make your way down the street anyway, and come to find a very angry couple. It seems as though the girlfriend is breaking up with her boyfriend but from the fifth story apartment building while he is trying to come up. She is screaming at the top of her lungs for everybody to hear that he isn’t the lover she wants him to be, or maybe it was girth. You try to pass by the boyfriend swiftly so you do not have to get involved with this scandal. At that instant, a 27 inch screen TV comes barreling down from the fifth story window. It nearly passes your head as you skip by, crashing on the sidewalk behind you. You jump startled and wonder how you survived that one. And then, once again, you ask yourself why you were walking in the first place.

After the break-up fiasco, you hope your morning walk will be a little more peaceful until a poor homeless man grabs your shoe. Apparently, he doesn’t have a job and lives in a Frigidaire box just in front of an abandon coffee house. He begs for change from you and you wonder why he would ask such a question when he can clearly see your ten-your-old jogging suit that has no pockets! But now you are starting to jog to get away from the crazy homeless Frigidaire man.

You stop your jog at the city park. There sits a very nice park bench you wish to park your tired rear-end on. And now this is the best part your side walk experience; people watching. You sit and watch all the time crazed people trying to make it work on time with their Starbucks in one hand and briefcase in the other. Taxi drivers are zooming up and down the narrow streets as if there is a natural disaster about to occur. And, yet still, you cannot get away from the homeless Frigidaire lunatic man. Then, you jump up and run as fast as you can the opposite direction to the suburbs.

The sprinting is now becoming a jog. Then turns into a slow walk. You glance furiously back and forth tyring to plan your next move, watching for more homeless people or aliens that are going to suck you up in their floating craft. (You ponder about this very thought of aliens abducting you. You wonder if it would be a nice change. Only if they had another way of abducting you without using the green beam of light. Only if the had a nice china set you could have tea and sugar cubes.) The sun has come now, without notice, and you want to get back home now and take that much needed shower.

The confession of a side walker: “I confess I will never walk on a city sidewalk again!”