Decades ago Mike Constable showed me a bike route that follows laneways from Bathurst and College to about Clinton. Later I figured out how to combine this, using a north/south lane between Euclid and Manning, to join up with with some more lanes running all the way to Shaw just above Dundas (there's a small traverse across a former schoolyard that has become either a movie set or a construction site).
Along the northern run of this route there's a municipal parking lot with this sign ("Purchase ticket and place face up on dashboard" --- to come). I can't ride by without having visions of happy customers snoozing with their cheeks
on the dashboard. I passed my vision on to my sons, and thought of it as our private joke.
Then I noticed that somebody had spray-painted out the word "up," making the double-entendre much more intelligible. Nice to have more people on the same side of a joke as I am, I thought. That wasn't the end of it.
A week or so ago, I noticed that a new, grafitti-free sign had been put up. I guess this is in analogy with the broken-window theory of crime prevention: if you fix minor ruptures in the atmosphere such as broken windows and grafitti, you decrease the prevalence of harder stuff like muggings. I'm not sure I believe that, but I assume that the sign-replacer was thinking along those lines: better nip this bit of irony before it gets out of hand!
After all, irony allows us to consider alternative interpretations of reality. Start going down that road, and you might try to change reality as it's currently implemented. If you prefer your quo static, irony deficiency is a virtue rather than a vice.
If the world were programmed like a video game, irony could lead to un-Nintendoed consequences.
