Open Writing

The notice peremptoriously and unexpectedly fastened to the gate of Quail Run off-leash Dog Park said:

Due to the possibility of potentially hazardous situations plastic chairs must not be left in the park overnight.
People had been bringing garden chairs to sit on in the park for years. Patrons bring them so that they can sit under the shade of the trees, and out of the sun’s merciless glare, their ease of portability allowing ease of shifting position when required.

That was the primary function of the seats. Their secondary function was to let friends group together in one place and spend time talking about their dogs, their families, and anything else that they felt like.

Somewhere along the way, the primary and secondary became interchanged, when it became obvious that the location of the chairs was of far less importance that the sociability they cultivate when grouped together.

The notice, and its prediction of "potentially hazardous situations" threw the park’s clientele into paroxysms of perplexity. The head scratching that followed was so intense that dandruff stood inches deep covering the scraggy greensward as if it were snow. Since the phantom reseeding of the park this last summer, what grass there was has disappeared. Could this be due to the unseen nocturnal activities of potentially hazardous plastic chairs?

The park closes on Thursdays for maintenance. One of the ways it is maintained is by a grass-cutter that crops grass so close that large swathes of green shafts are afraid for their lives and so pull themselves down by their roots to avoid being shaved into a nothingness.

Do the plastic chairs cunningly control the mower blades, making them cut deeper than intended as a plot against the grass that is sprouting unseen to all eyes except those of the City of Mesa, which insists that it is flourishing? It could be, but even if it was, that is not a hazard, or even a ‘potential hazard.’

It is now several days since the illegal and dictatorial abduction of the chairs by the City Press Gang, perhaps to decorate some upscale golf club’s pavilion, or ease the burdens on the minds of City employees busy making notices to hang on dog park gates.

None of the park’s regular users is any the wiser as to what kind of shenanigans the Chinese made chairs were likely to cause. No warrant of seizure has been issued, no warning of intention to steal the chairs and permanently deprive the owners of their property without compensation, and without even the simple courtesy of an explanation.

The high-handedness of the "Chair Theft" is the veritable antithesis of a modern democratic society. If it had happened on the cold plains of the Russian Steppes under the Man of Steel, no one would have batted an eyelid, because that it the kind of thing tyrants and megalomaniacs do. However, in the heat of the Arizona desert in twenty-first century United States of America, people have higher and more civilised expectations.

Had the extraction been commanded by some potentate at whose word men live or die, there would have been no comment, no murmur.

But, what Emir have we here?

What Bey took them away?

What Mullah issued the edict to alleviate and confiscate?

What local Atilla has gone silly?

Whose petty mind hatched the plot to steal the property of taxpayers on such a transparent pretext? "Potentially hazardous situations!" Yea, right. Pull the other leg, it has bells on.

During a sleepless night, I ruminated over the possibilities of what had driven the City Council to grand theft larceny, and given as their reason, an excuse that flies as well as the one about WMD’s in Iraq. "Potentially hazardous situations!"

Do the chairs gang up on lumbricus terrestris, as the cognoscenti who gather in the basin call night crawlers?

Do they mug itinerants who climb over the fence to sleep on the hard and insufficient iron benches until the sprinkler system gives them a wake-up call and a shower all at once?

Do they fight in lumps, knocking sharp plastic chips from one another’s profiles, or attack night patrols checking on them to see that they are well-behaved and following protocol?

Worse still, do the iron benches and the plastic benches engage in internecine warfare in the nocturnal gloom, thus threatening the integrity of City supplied seating? If that is the case, it is out-and-out anti-chairism and must not be tolerated in a multi-seated society. Let the benches and chairs share equal footing, but one can not be allowed to prevail at the expense of the other.

Besides which, what "potentially hazardous situation" is likely to arise at night when the park is empty that is less likely to occur during the day when it is used by dogs and their parents, huh?

Perhaps, and you won’t read this in the newspapers, the plastic chairs lurking in the darkness were responsible for the price of motor vehicle fuel sky rocketing? There could be something to that theory, because almost immediately after they had been stolen, the price of combustion fuel fell. Hmn!

Or, Chandler Council might have launched a secret sortie under cover of darkness and appropriated them to make nursing mothers comfortable in various places. If so, few would complain, but having the opportunity to donate them of their own free will and choice to such a noble cause would have caused less of a flurry among the mums and dads of our furry friends.

So far, even after the City has been asked for explanations, none has been forthcoming. Is the Mesa City Council so embarrassed that it fears to speak and acknowledge that it acted in a high handed, anonymous, and Machiavellian way?

Will an answer ever be squeezed out of them? Do they know that the plastic one-piece injection moulded chairs are here to stay. That much is certain, unless, of course, you leave yours unattended overnight in Quail Run Dog Park where it will becomes the source of a potentially hazardous situation and taken to whatever is the equivalent of the Guantanamo Bay Hilton.

"Beam me up, Scottie!"

Copyright © 2005

Ronnie Bray

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED