Raod Cone Connoisseurs

Just like a gang of off-duty

cops, these cones shoot the

breeze over by the lamppost. 

My perception of road cones completely changed when I started making theatre with them. On the street I began perceiving common pylons as a population of inanimate actors whose job is to keep people and situations safe from each other. One the one hand they protect people from temporary urban circumstances, such as potholes or worksites, on the other hand they try to protect things as frail as wet paint or cement from the blemishes of oblivious humans. Like citified scarecrows, road cones exist as a scattered phalanx of passive uniformed guards, bearing two reflective stripes on their bright orange coats that silently say, "Hey! Watch it buddy!"

But this clean system of clean orange cones neatly demarcating messy situations is pretty imperfect. Not every street that needs a cone has one—sometimes the pothole, wet cement, or other hazard lives unguarded indefinitely. Conversely, not every cone on the street is on active duty, for after the pothole's filled and the cement's dried, workers often drive off and leave their cones behind for citizens to ignore, appropriate, or maybe make into art. What happens then is the intended job of the common road cone gets taken less seriously in a Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf sense: danger is not always signified with a road cone, and road cones do not always signify danger.

What are they doing
behind that plant?

There is someone in Philadelphia who cares about the job of the common road cone enough to tweet and post photos about it. Here's an article on her, and here's her Twitter feed. I love her perspective as an urban planner who invites an eye for the theatricality of these street scenes. And it's nice to know that I'm not the only one personifying inanimate objects. Stay tuned for a follow-up on this post in the near future.

Sympathy for the Bevel

I was helping some friends move a couple hundred folding chairs. We hauled them from a van onto a loading dock, and then put them on carts, which we wheeled onto a freight elevator, up one floor, down some halls and into the big room where they'd live. The carts that we used were an assortment of dollies, flatbeds, tall bins on wheels, and grocery carriages from bygone supermarkets.

"Don't use that cart." someone said, pointing to a three-foot flatbed pushcart. "It's no good."

But that no-good cart managed to follow us, loaded up with piles of metal chairs that fell off and had to be picked up by other carts. After finishing the first round, I flipped over the no-good cart and saw the problem: one of its four big casters was loose, making it bevel in ways that prevented it rolling smoothly. I could've fixed it had we a pair of crescent wrenches.

We loaded all the carts back into the elevator and brought them down for another lot of chairs. Someone said, "Let's leave that cart here. It sucks."

"I looked at the cart," I said, "and I feel differently than I did before. I don't think it sucks, it's just injured."

Would anyone else—say someone less handy or unversed in dis/ability justice—have felt the same way about this cart as I did? Or do I overpersonify inanimate objects?

Triple Dissed

Funny how this year, as I've been focusing on my primary dis/ability, I've taken on some others for short stretches of time. Back in May I was walking with a cane for a couple weeks, and in April I lost my voice for a few days. And now I can't hear out of one ear due to an infection brought on by a flu that had me totally immobile for a spell.

Not seeing so well can be a bit disorienting, but hearing every sound come at me from one sound only amplifies that experience. Usually when someone calls my name, I know the general direction the voice is coming from and can wave over that way regardless of whether or not I see who it is. But that's blown for now. 

I'm realizing why a lot of people adapting to shifts in ability prefer to stay home: it's a source of embarrassment, a pain to explain, and very vulnerable territory both physically, socially, and emotionally. Going to the clinic to get my ears examined turned me into a three-ring circus of dis/ability, performed multiple times for receptionists and medical assistants and doctors. I need help filling out the form and repeat what you said please and boy do my joints ache right now. 

I've learned not to apologize for any of this stuff: I never say "sorry" for not being able to see because that's not my fault. Some of the people who work at these places are learning not to apologize either, and that's good because my dis/abilities are not their fault either. An apology is an empty substitute for help and as a person with a dis/ability (or two, or three, depending on the day) I'll take a singular act of help over a hundred apologies.

Good news is: flu is gone, no more body aches, but I still can only hear out of half of my ears. And of course I can half-see out of both of my eyes.

Stay tuned!

Watch My Bag

Who is the thief in this coffeeshop?

It's not your fault. It might be mine.

In a café some months ago a friend asked me to watch her bag while she went to the restroom. What was to watch? Especially in the years since that corner of our neighborhood got gentrified, right? No one goes into other people's purses anymore, especially in a bustling, brightly lit café. So I may have gone up to the counter to refill my tea, but only for a moment.

And then, a year later, came CONES, the show I made about my vision loss. And my friend saw it and said, "Now I know how that happened—How I asked you to watch my bag and all my credit cards got stolen out of it."

Huh?

"Yeah, I guess I shouldn't asked you to do that."

Hmm...

Let's return to the scene of the crime: A table at a coffee shop (that's what we used to call them before gentrification) with two chairs facing each other just three feet apart. My friend asks me to watch her bag, which is just three feet from my face, and I have no trace of being visually impaired—I am passing for able-bodied and, in all honesty, would clearly see if anyone were to start rifling through that bag for anything. Still, 30 minutes later, sometime after we'd had coffee and tea, my friend went to use her credit card at the grocery store, and it was gone.

Conclusions: People still steal stuff in gentrified neighborhoods. No one stole that card out from under my nose, they stole it from behind my back. And this did not happen because of my dis/ability, it happened because I got careless for a moment, and it only takes a moment for someone to steal something out of someone's bag.

Sorry about that.

So, who wants to go get coffee with me?
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Photo of "Awaken the Mud" by Beth Nixon. See her work at www.ramshackleenterprises.net.

Spicy Ally

I love cooking. I taught myself to cook when I went vegan more than 20 years ago. A big part of that was learning how to use spices. But as my vision has waned, I use fewer spices in my cooking, mostly because I can't see the labels on the spice jars.

This week a friend who was staying with me changed all that with some masking tape, a magic marker, and a little time spent organizing:

Big Change

Sometimes the clerk doesn't tell me my total.

"How much is it?"

The clerk points to the display on the register. I can't read it. In my wallet are a bunch of smaller bills that would probably cover it, but I hand over the bigger bills and let them make change.

I could say, "Can you read me the total? I can't see so well."

But I never do.