Where the sidewalk meets the curb can be an important place or it can be nothing special. There are a lot of factors.

If you get hit by a car after stepping off the curb, we’ll be reading about you in papers and online and it won’t be until later that we understand what all the honking and road rage was about. That step will have been the most important step of your life, even more important than the very first one you took.

If nothing happens and you keep walking, however, then it’s just another step in your day. Which it is either way.

Sometimes that place, that precipice, takes on a life of its own. Sometimes it has an inherent meaning that wasn’t there moments before and won’t be there after you’ve gone.

This moment is one of them. People are dodging something and I can’t see what it is yet because we’re bumping shoulder to shoulder toward the skytrain. We’re automatons, we’re living an existence Kafka would take pleasure in, a pitiless existence, he’s laughing at us as he writes us into being. Vonnegut watches our self-destruction with the kind of pain you only get from someone who cares too much and is stuck in a world that doesn’t care enough, if at all. Vonnegut sighs and says: I told you so. And so it goes.

I can’t see what the fuss is yet. As I get closer I smell it before I see it. Urine soaked blankets and clothes. It hits you hard, like you deserved it. Bundled up in all that filth is a human being. Like some caterpillar cocooned away dreaming of better, brighter, lighter days, the person has only a portion of their arm extended and it holds an empty cup.

It’s a ratty looking coffee stained white paper cup. They’re hoping for all these automatons to drop some spare change in there. I don’t have any on me and I feel guilty about it.

Who says you should feel guilty? I tell myself I’d only be enabling them anyway. It’s little comfort. I half believe it. Someone passes by, stops, turns around and comes back. She digs into her pocket and comes out with a mitt of change. She places it in the cup and carries on.

This has disturbed the natural flow of things. People are upset. People are disgusted. Some shake their heads. Most just carry on like the person isn’t there. They can pretend they aren’t there but deep down they know. How can they step around something that isn’t there? A few people look back with a certain hatred in their eyes.

Someone nudges me over the curb because, by slowing down, I have become a problem. I consider nudging back, only harder, and turning the herd into dominoes.

It’s as if this person could will themselves out of their situation.

The people passing by don’t want to admit what they know, don’t want to admit that it’s possible for them to be where this person is. That little urine soaked bundle, crumpled up in the middle of the sidewalk, is a potent reminder that anything is possible.

Some type of law enforcement are on their way toward the bundle. You can’t expect to disturb the universe and go unpunished.

Today, the place where the sidewalk meets the curb is where the penguins push each other over the edge for their own selfish reasons.