Respect for life

I was just grabbing the receipt from the gas pump at Cosco.  The young woman behind me in a smallish 90s economy car was already done and waiting for the middle lane so she could be about her business.  

If you've ever been in a car purchasing gas at Costco, you know the lanes are clearly marked out with white parking stripe paint for pulling up to each side of the pump island.  There is a far and a near pump, so each island can maximize our depletion of fossil fuels by servicing four vehicles at a time.  Between each pair of islands there is a third or middle lane.  This allows a customer waiting in one of the lines (and there are many) to pull forward to the far pump position if the far pump in their line frees up before the near pump.  It's highly efficient and I guess is how Costco is able to sell gas cheaper than anyone else. Back to my experience:

The young woman behind me would have liked to have used the center lane to pull through the rest of the Costco gas pump clusterfuch and be about her business.  She was prevented from doing so by another customer who had been waiting in line at the adjoining island and had detected that the far person in her line was finishing up and getting in their car to pull away.  This other customer had anticipated and was occupying the center lane at precisely the same time that the young woman in the economy car wanted to make her getaway.  

There may be a point to this.  I think.

The economy car woman fretted and fumed as her way was impeded.  The offending center-lane-occupier grew frantic as she waited for the far pump customer to exit the fuel staging area for the far pump.  Yes, it was another young woman in a four-door boat of a car -- and it was a good thing both participants in this little drama were female, as it turned out, because with two men this story could have ended quite differently with the police being called and maybe an ambulance, whereas with two woman it is much more likely that verbal violence will resolve the dispute.  And it did.

The far pump customer pulled away.  The four-door boat pulled up to the far pump.  The coveted middle lane was free.

Only the ecomomy car woman couldn't let it rest.  She pulled up beside the boat.  She rolled down her window and waited for the four-door customer to get out of her car.

"That isn't a parking space."

"What?"

"That isn't a parking space."

"I know. I was just waiting for -"

"#%&$*)*$#@+^$+_+&*!"

And with that, the economy car woman drove away.

The entire scene, from the moment the woman who was inconvenienced realized she was inconvenienced until the time she jetted away, took all of 15 seconds.

As I pulled away from my far pump (after the center lane freed up and I could get back in my vehicle) I ended up in line (35 feet from the described altercation) behind another vehicle with bumper stickers saying BREATHE and PRACTICE RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS KINDNESS.

In the small city museum (seven blocks from where I got in line and 10 minutes later) I read about the Yurok people who used to create canoes out of redwood trees in the traditional way in my part of the world.  This involved cutting down redwood trees with things like deer antlers and sharpened rocks.  The appropriate trees would be roughly 3 feet wide.  While redwood is relatively easy to work, it could take up to two months to fell a canoe tree.  The whole time the tree was being cut into, the whole time the tree was being turned into a canoe, the future owner would reassure the tree, telling it that he wasn't trying to kill it, but turn it into a canoe and that it would then become a member of his family.

Yurok traditional canoes have kidneys and hearts and lungs and noses literally carved into the interior of the canoe.  You can see them.

Thousands of miles away in the Middle East, religious disputes that nobody remembers the original cause of (as well as other real and imagined greivances, including some of our making) are at this moment convincing people with hate in their hearts to give away their lives in exchange for the chance to murder countless others who they think they must hate.

Among the things that the Wicked Witch of the West moans as she melts into a pile at the end of The Wizard Of Oz:

"What a world!  What a world!"

I tend to agree.