hat IS it about wearing black?

Look, I commuted in on the bike today. It was 7am, still dark, and misting. My glasses were beading up but I swiped them when I could. I rode with full lights, yellow shirt and jacket and a brilliant orange safety vest.

I passed about four pedestrians on my travels. Half of them were crossing the road outside of crosswalks (one was only twenty feet from it). All of them were wearing black (I nearly hit the guy off the crosswalk – like it’s hard enough to see normal people – stupidity ninjas are invisible).

Yeah, I’ve got a walk-around-town jacket – it’s light tan.  Why? Because I want to reflect the sunlight and stay cool. Nothing looks more stupidious than a Goth slugging along a sunbaked street under a Florida sun, their white joker-paint dripping onto their black shirt. Shit, you dress to match your environment, otherwise you are stupid.

And wearing black in the dark under bad visibility is stupid. Unless you are a ninja. Or a criminal.

I know what this is about – see, it all goes back to the idea of a “nanny state”, of fierce independence and cowboy tenaciousness. The idea of doing something because it is safe is equivalent (to the idiot’s reasoning) to doing it because “the man” told you to. Staying within the lines (like crosswalk lines) is bad. Doing whatever you want is good. And that is why you see people drive without signals (or lights), or looping about traffic at night on a bike, or zipping in and out of traffic on a motorcycle, or (of course) crossing a dark road in the wet gloom decked out in black.

I really don’t care if you are hurt. It doesn’t matter at all if you are killed. I just don’t want to have to wait for the police to show up to scrape up your mangled body, just so I can say, “I didn’t see him, officer”.  

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