sidewalk ettiquete.

There is a peculiar thing about living in society--surrounded on every side when you lay down at night, in every direction for miles, people sleeping, loitering, perambulating, watching pulsing-lit screens. There are strange rules that reign us all--silently agreed upon. Etiquette, rules dealing with proper association and dissociation of those people that move around each other. "it's like, we go through life, with our antennas bouncing off one another, continuously on ant autopilot with nothing really human required of us."
There is a certain queer human quality about the way we deal with such banal interactions as walking down the sidewalk. I noticed this just this week; as I walk along, I am at a different pace as another person who goes the same direction I am going. As I catch up with him or her--or he/she catches up with me--it is not permissible, it is beyond our social boundaries, to walk along side that person which I do not know for any stretch of time at all. The quicker person must speed up, and/or the slower person must slow down so that neither of them--or anyone else walking by-- may be forced to consider that they have anything to do with each other. It feels awkward to walk beside a person I don't know, at the same pace, without looking at them--that is an unmentionable violation of their personal space--and yet without overtaking them.
It seems as though walking beside a person somehow binds you to them. Obviously, if you want to be associated with a person, to carry on with them in some way, you do walk alongside them. Perhaps it is too much intimacy to share with a stranger. That is what I have learned with city life, there are people out there that I don't know, and "I'm not supposed to speak to strangers," after all. But, "I don't want a straw! I want a real human moment, you know!"
I could go on, but I'll leave it at that...what do you think??