When I’m old and gray I want to ride around not in old clanky wheelchairs but a power chair or a motorized scooter. I want it to be bright red so I can roar around with a bandanna on and be the terror of the neighborhood. If they still have Medicare then, and I’m not using the scooter to escape cannibal barbarians, I can get my doctor to evaluate my mobility needs and perhaps get Medicare to pick up the tab on most of it. And if they don’t, or it the countryside is plagued with barbarians, I’ll put metal spikes on it and hang the scalps therefrom. Who says that young Road Warriors should have all the fun?

As in, I do not care.

I’ve had to work a few Plaza art fairs and–for the most part–knock on wood–as far as we are concerned they are relatively quiet things. You can’t drive into the Plaza, and you can’t get out of the Plaza, not without extraordinary difficulty. Biking out yesterday afternoon took an additional ten minutes, because you could get across streets or through intersections, and traffic south of the Plaza through upper Brookside was appalling.

In a real sense this impenetrability is almost as real a hindrance to the usual weekend crowd as an ice storm or a foot of snow–perhaps more so. The weekend crowd are an independent lot in their helplessness, and the human factor might be more daunting, or at least more irritating, than a force of nature.

The art is daunting enough.  In the long ago time, when I was just a lad, it was mostly not a commercial enterprise, the domain of artists who travel from city to city and art festival to art festival, but a place where local artists, for the largest part, showed their work. Such is not the case now. Another thing that has changed in the past four decades is that it is not, in reality, a family-friendly environment. The last dozen years or so has shown a spike in alcohol consumption and public drunkenness. I wouldn’t go down there on a bet.

A part, I suppose, of the coarsening of society and the collapse, if I can call it that, of social standards, when the toniest district in this little city can turn into an open bar under the aegis of an “arts” event.

It’s nothing, of course, to the 3 a.m. gunfights and liquored-up brawling that I had to endure living on the Plaza when the STD-laden bars let out . . . that was something else that changed after about 1994.

What have we wrought?