A saddening realisation

No.. not the fact that I'm too 'busy' to blog much anymore. Busy, being relative in technological-age terms, meaning I'm too busy thinking about other things and being focused on other aspects of my life to concentrate on typing out my thoughts here. That in itself is a bit saddening to me actually, now that I'm thinking about it, because I have a lot of thoughts that I wish I could log down here and I guess share with whoever would still be reading this thing. And yet either I lose the thought or get sidetracked.. much like I'm doing with this post.

so getting back to the original point, which has never actually started yet: I was dropping home my friends the other night, who are staying right off the highway. So I drop them home and head back out and while making the turn from their road to the highway, I see a woman standing on the side of the road with a cell phone to her ear, dressed in a nice black dress looking a bit stressed. Mind you this is about half 2/3 in the morning and the area isn't exactly the safest (I mean where is except for Goodwood Park?). So in my brief passing of her I actually slow down due to my contemplating stopping to see what was wrong with her. But then another emotion overrode the sympathy and compassion I felt for this woman - fear. What if she was just part of some robbery-waiting-to-happen? Some lure to get me to stop or slow down enough for the men hiding in the bushes right behind her to hijack my car.. ? what if she herself was the robber?

so I drove on. I continued on my way home, with her always in my mind even until I went to sleep. The sad realisation, if you haven't figured it out by now, is that the state of the country directly influenced what happened. (By state of the country I don't just mean the crime btw, I mean the reporting of the crime as well). Every day my senses are inundated with crime facts and figures, stories and rumours, overloading my capacity to cope with all this information. I've always been cautious but I've never been put in such a situation where I felt like that.

and the strange thing is the woman could very well have just been.. a stranded woman on the side of the road, put out by a hopefully-ex boyfriend and not have had a second thought about the guy in the wagon that just passed her. And yet she, and that 'situation' has remained with me very much til the day after and will prob continue to remain with me til.. who knows when.

I had one thought as I drove away from the woman, our lives not to be intertwined that night; "I hate this country"