by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

One's participation in any public activity is proof of one having nothing better to do. Voilà, Kristian's First Law of Why You Should Stay Home. Accordingly, it's better to sit alone watching Texas Justice drunk than it is to participate in a walk-a-thon for starving babies. In the absence of witnesses, one's isolation can be construed as something more redeeming than any real activity. In your solitude, you could actually be working on a revolutionary anti-gravity formula. Nobody knows for sure. Leave the house and the mystery is blown.

I periodically violate this law of voluntary reclusion by attending my local west end borough council meetings, which I discovered to be a rich vein of edu-tainment even before my first exposure to participatory democracy got under way.

While waiting for the francocrat to misspell my name on the question list, an elderly concerned citizen started yammering that I'd almost ran him down in the street outside. As I'm usually the one making such outrageous accusations, I was caught dumbstruck and spent the rest of the evening with a quip-too-late on my tongue about how good he'd look sprawled on my car hood.

The old crank - undoubtedly an escapee from the loony wing of his geriatric home - eventually wasted people's time with an improvised question about the problem of ice falling onto sidewalks. This was in August.

Soon, another quickly-identifiable freak took the podium and started quarrelling about the number of questions he'd asked. I restrained myself from escorting him out with the hillbilly-girlfriend-grip (you grab the top of the bicep, pull slightly upwards and walk them away).

Throughout all this, a grey-haired, perky woman kept initiating unsolicited and unrelenting eye contact with me, which is something only a hooker usually does to a stranger. I felt her eye contact sapping my energy as her already overflowing pool of perkiness grew. Eventually she asked her question and thankfully went away.

Then came questions from a series of holier-than-thou, mostly bald guys claiming to represent groups that oppose poverty, not to be confused with the groups going all out to increase poverty.

This pattern pretty much repeats itself at all borough council meetings. Plus, there are inevitably gangs of citizens indifferent to all except their own problem. I fall into this category, as undoubtedly do the residents of Iona Avenue, who showed up this week with a petition denouncing their new street sign, which reads Iona Street, rather than Iona Avenue. Yes, this bugs 'em.

These borough council meetings are designed to counter arbitrary, centralized decision-making by city hall. It's good, but also bad, because it gives near unlimited license for citizens to block even beneficial changes to their neighbourhood.

It's also a bit preposterous to imagine that these people represent the common will, considering most Montrealers are doubtlessly too busy or oblivious to attend these proceedings. The vocal minority is no mathematically reliable sample and one might argue these people could better be described as self-interested lobbyists than concerned citizens.

Such criticisms don't apply to my beef, of course, which concerns Oxford Park, traditionally a spot where city workers would come to sleep in their vans. Shockingly, they showed some initiative and replaced the field with plastic grass a couple of years back. Then they placed a high fence around it. So locals unable to scale the fence are locked out of the public field, which is only opened for invading soccer teams. Depressingly, the nearby church had to cancel its traditional religious festival, as the city worried their fireworks would damage the plastic grass.

Residents could deal with this, but not with the hugely disruptive soccer league that attracted hundreds of loud fans and motorists almost every night until midnight last summer. After a year of concerned citizens showing up to borough council meetings, the city has promised to find a more appropriate venue for the soccer league. Maybe there's something to be said for public consultation after all.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca