Pilot avoids crash, but not the crazy, in Porter Square
Airline pilot, salon.com contributor and askthepilot.com guru Patrick Smith revealed himself Friday to be at least a part-time Porter Square resident — and one with a classically weird Porter Square story to tell.
The episode, described as a “Seinfeld” moment, starts when Smith is leaving the Shaw’s supermarket plaza on his bicycle and stops before hitting another rider at a bike rack.
My brakes squeal, but it’s obvious we won’t collide. When I come to a stop, we’re abeam each other, about three feet apart. No harm done. “Hey, shoot, I’m sorry,” I say to him.
What happens next I don’t understand:
“Nice!” he says. The guy is around 50, I’d guess. My height, bigger at the waist, with glasses. He looks like any normal, middle-aged person you’d see in Porter Square. Professional, but sort of crunchy around the edges. He’s wearing a helmet and reflective vest. “Didn’t you open your eyes when you got out of bed this morning?”
The way he says this — there’s something in his tone that leads me to think he’s making light of the whole thing. So I joke back to him. “Damn sidewalk riders!” I say.
“F— YOU!” he screams at me. Just like that. Then he pedals away.
It gets worse from there, meaning the anger and weirdness merely increases — to the extent the reader has to wonder if Smith was inadvertently wearing a T-shirt with a swastika on it, or some other coincidental provocation.
Probably not. Universally, people can get livid over the strangest, most harmless of things, and those are the sane ones; Porter Square isn’t exempt from crazy. This post makes it sound as though Smith met up with a smidgen of that crazy but at least avoided getting his ear bitten off.
The complete post is here.