Instead of screaming into the void of Twitter, I bring you a weekly highlight reel of what it’s like going places in Greater Hartford when one is gloriously car-free. These posts are on a slight time delay because nobody needs to know exactly where I am when I am there.

CURB ALERT
I was walking down the street, and just like that:


It appears to be some kind of furniture.
It confuses me, yet I covet it.
I also know better than to take soft materials from the curb.

You know this is a quality find when a friend texts you to make sure you’ve seen it, and then advises about the ability for extreme cold weather to kill bedbugs.

Continuing with that rock star vibe:


It’s not all bloody masks and fentanyl packets out here!

BABY IT’S COLD AF OUTSIDE 
Do I want to walk to the grocery store when it’s 9°F?
What do you think?
I want to hang out in bed and watch movies and try to forget about the eighty ways the world is terrible today, but there is a cold, windy, and wet storm approaching, which suggests that if I wait until afternoon when it warms up, the store will be madness.

The tricky part here is not the cold so much as adding a mask before going inside. I wear my balaclava on the walk over, and I’m sweating. But then I need to pause, move the balaclava, add a mask, and pull the balaclava back up for another layer. Nothing is sitting right. I can feel layers of material over my face and nose, which is the point, but things are odd and it probably is best that I have no mirror and have mostly given up on caring how I look in public. (How are people still bothering to get haircuts?) Things are slipping off my ears, but remaining in place on my face. My hat is riding up. My glasses are too dark still for the store, and they are foggy. I regret not taking the bus to a different store, but after my dream bus experience, I’m not sure I can handle the disappointment of a regular bus with stained seats and other people.

Actually, my concern is the virus and having to stand around in the cold. Sunday service is not great, and there have been bus trips canceled for weeks because of staffing. Being in motion when it’s cold is not the same as waiting around for 20-30 minutes for a bus. Most shelters are unheated. And that’s why I’m at The Supermarket Of The Damned where there are no hand baskets (in hell without a handbasket!) but plenty of harassment from the robot overlord who is here to thwart shoplifters, yet stand idly by as people roam unmasked. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here.

MULCHFEST
Ahh, the season of tripping over discarded formerly live trees that people toss wherever, like across the sidewalk of a school. I’ve been the Grinch about this before, but I feel like if people can figure out how to get a tree into their home, they can figure out how to properly dispose of it, which should be dropping it off at a centrally-located site or two, because why are we spending tax dollars on this specialty collection service? Bah!

NYC has Mulchfest. Instead of wasting fuel/resources sending trucks down every street, people bring trees to woodchipping sites and receive a bag of mulch in return.

We could have arranged to do this over two or three weekends at several Hartford parks, with tents set up for Covid vaccines — hell, let’s throw in some flu shots while we’re at it — and giving mask and test kits.

Oh well, hindsight.

What we have now is the season of tripping over tree debris, because the mattresses and other garbage strewn across sidewalks was not enough.

POP QUIZ


There is ample on-street parking. There are multiple parking garages nearby.

Do you:
(1) Park in any of those legal places designated for car storage?
(2) Abandon your vehicle in a crosswalk?

Honestly, this is a roll-the-eyes-and-keep-moving situation because “Front Street” was designed like a suburban strip mall pretending to be a bustling downtown, and it’s not like pedestrians or cyclists were prioritized anywhere in this project anyway.


YOU DON’T KNOW FROM LIMBER?! 
There is at least one house on each block in my neighborhood where limber is sold in the summer, and this is not secret information. There are handwritten, hand painted signs announcing such. I suppose if your entire interaction with a neighborhood is from within a car, you might miss these advertisements (unless you have a spidey sense attuned to frozen treats). On foot, they’re obvious, especially when created from every color of the rainbow.

I’ve had people, patronizingly, comment on how well I know Hartford. It’s not that hard to do. It’s a small city. If you’re able, it’s compact enough to become familiar with quickly. Why we don’t have the majority of police walking or cycling instead of hanging out in their cruisers is beyond me. And I extend this sentiment to social workers and teachers who often live in the suburbs but work in Hartford. Want to know something about a place? Go outside once in awhile and stop wearing your car everywhere.

FROZEN OVER
It used to be that we would get multiple snow storms every season, with lots of the good snow. Maybe I’m romanticizing it, but I recall winters when the snow kept piling up. If ice factored in, it was puddles and ponds freezing, or a rare ice storm making branches droop heavy, creaking and snapping.

It was not this trend of a little snow, freezing rain, the sun coming out, melting everything, a little more snow, rain, and every surface being slick and impossible the next morning.

This morning, after scattering salt across my sidewalk, I went back inside and chose to work remotely. The roads were glazed. The sidewalks were glazed.

Even after two years of being immersed in this pandemic, it seems so many people never recalibrated their values. We have the tools, many of us, to find alternate ways of completing a task, yet so many workplaces needlessly require staff to appear on site despite a highly contagious virus (that would be less of an issue of employers took safety seriously at any point in the last two years), and still, when there is the added danger of icy streets and sidewalks. If it’s not the dollar that is placed before workers’ safety, it’s someone’s need to make a workplace look the way the bosses believe it should look, the way it “always” looked. Never have I seen so many uncreative bosses. Not leaders —bosses. They stubbornly resist fresh ideas about effectiveness, service, and how we should relate to our jobs.

The best advice I was given, several decades later than I wish I had heard it, was that work will never love you back. You might need it to survive, but it will never love you back. You get vacation days? Use them. You are scheduled 9-5? Work 9-5. None of that sticking around, on the regular, until 6 PM to show your “hustle” or whatever.

Hustle non-stop, for what? So you can enjoy retirement if you’re lucky enough to live that long? To accumulate gold stars on your behavior chart, none of which matter because, legally, you can be fired at pretty much any time? It’s good to love what you do, but chances are good, it will not love you back.

Clearly I’ve been listening too much to Jorts, but if you’re going to get radicalized, let it be by a cat on the Internet.

All of that is to say, if I fall on ice and break my arm, I will definitely be an unproductive worker, so it’s better to work from home where I can get as much done as if I were there in person. And I am grateful to be somewhere that allows for this kind of flexibility.

WHAT NEXT?
Read the 2022 Climate and Energy Connecticut Legislative Priorities, and after you finish screaming about how how the four transportation priorities are all car-centric, contact any/all of the organizations named on the document asking them (probably in your polite voice) WTF is up with this. Where is rail? Where is expansion of public transit? Where are bicycles — acoustic and electric? Where are pedestrians represented? The transportation section can be found on pages 4 and 5.  While you’re at it, ask them where they get off even mentioning diversity, equity, and inclusion when they fail at the transportation piece.