Mozzeenet

Sometimes I feel that everything in our city lives is just too complicated. There are a zillion options, we’re bombarded with information, run around like mad hatters thinking about our next six moves on the chessboard, want everything to happen immediately and what’s more, this pressure-pot of egotisical mania is sending us all M.A.D (Me And Damn the rest of you).

Rage has been in the news in Sydney with two deaths in recent weeks - the first a case of road rage with one driver killing another over a traffic incident and the second, a publican who was caught in the middle of a pub brawl and copped a fatal head-blow from the pointy end of a bar stool.

What is it with this society? Are we so disengaged from each other that someone else’s life can be subsumed by our own egos or are we all deep down a sizzling ball of anger and resentment due to the fact that we humanly cannot achieve what we ourselves have mapped out for us?

Sometimes I feel it myself and I hate that I have succumbed to that. This morning when I went out to my car, there was a note carefully folded and placed under the windscreen wiper. It had been printed in a large, bold type asking me to park nearer my driveway so that another car could park behind me in the small space that was left before the next driveway. This is the second such note that has been placed on my car (the first was hand-written). The author evidently makes it a habit of printing out these notes and leaving them for local car drivers.

Both notes have been polite I must admit but I still felt angry and resentful. Due to the anonymity and appearance overnight on my car of the note, I had no avenue for reply, no voice to defend my car-parking behaviour. I began to wonder who had enough time to print out notes for people who parked less precisely than they deemed acceptable.

I looked around at the closed houses, blinds drawn. I rarely see my neighbours across the road (I suspect one of them is the note-leaver) and there have been no friendly greetings when I have seen them. I park my car in various spots in the street and have been conscious of the parking issue since receiving the first note on my windscreen earlier in the year.

I unwittingly transgressed again though and thus received another note. Try living in Newtown Nit-picking Neighbour where there are parking restrictions, narrow streets, side-mirrors regularly get swiped, people swap parking tickets to others’ cars and residents have to go to the council to purchase parking stickers. The council offices are only open during business hours and a few hours on Saturday mornings. Where I live now, we don’t have such restrictions and generally there are car spaces available I find so I really don’t think it’s something to get the knickers/jockstraps/undies in a knot about.

Anyhow I have degenerated into thought patterns which I intended to avoid and so I will move on to my second stage of thinking which was that I need not respond with anger and resentment towards someone else’s request for me to park my car differently or interpret it as a damning criticism of my actions. They have the right to express their opinion and I can listen, understand and take action as I see fit. Why then do I still really feel annoyed about this?

Is it because I don’t know this person and thus I don’t care about them? Not only do I not know them, I am not likely to either because there is no sense of community in our immediate neighbourhood like there would once have been. I don’t expect that person to be looking out for me so why would I be looking out for them or taking their feelings and needs into consideration?

I think this is the heart (or lack) of it and I find that extremely disappointing because if this is what it is like at the microcosmic level, I shudder to think about the bigger picture. I don’t even want to go there!