Every morning since 1986, I have walked from my house in Bridgeport to the lakefront and back. Three point four miles each way, rain or shine, blizzard or heat wave. I’ve done it in snowstorms that would make a postal worker quit. I’ve done it in August humidity so thick you could wring out the air like a washcloth. I have never once missed a day, including the morning after my hip replacement in 2014, which my doctor said was “medically inadvisable” and my ex-wife called “the most stubborn thing you’ve ever done,” which, considering our marriage, is really saying something.

The route has changed over the years, sure. The old tire shop on 31st became a yoga studio, then a different yoga studio, then a place that sells candles shaped like famous buildings. Fine. That’s the city. Things change. I’m not a monster. But last Thursday, at 5:47 in the morning, I tripped over an electric scooter that someone had abandoned in the middle of the sidewalk on Michigan like a drunk leaving a bar, and I have decided that this is where I draw the line.

These scooters are everywhere. They breed overnight like rabbits, except rabbits have the decency to stay on the grass. I counted fourteen of them on a single block of State Street last week. Fourteen! Lying on their sides, propped against light poles, blocking wheelchair ramps. One of them was in a tree. I don’t know how. I don’t want to know how.

The people riding them are worse. They come flying down the sidewalk at fifteen miles an hour with no helmet and the spatial awareness of a golden retriever, weaving between pedestrians like they’re in some kind of video game where the points don’t matter and neither does anyone’s kneecaps. I’ve been nearly hit four times this month. Four times. I survived sixty Chicago winters and I’m going to be taken out by a twenty-six-year-old in joggers doing twelve on a rented scooter? Absolutely not.

Back when I started this walk, the biggest obstacle on the path was the occasional puddle or a pigeon with an attitude problem. Now I have to navigate a obstacle course of abandoned technology while people on wheels zip past me close enough that I can smell their cologne, which is always too much, by the way. Always.

I called the city about it. You know what they said? They said there’s an app. An app! I can report improperly parked scooters using an app on my phone. I told the woman I don’t have the app. She said I could download it. I said I don’t want to download it, I want someone to come pick up the scooter that’s blocking the sidewalk like it pays rent there. She put me on hold for nine minutes and then the call dropped.

I’m going to keep walking to the lake every morning because that’s what I do and I’m not about to let a piece of motorized aluminum change that. But I want it on the record: if I ever trip over one of these things and break something, I am suing the scooter, the company, the app, the person who last rode it, and the city of Chicago, in that order.

My knees crack when I walk now and my back hasn’t felt right since the Obama administration, but I’m still out there every morning, which is more than I can say for these scooters, which just lie on the ground like they’ve given up on life. At least I’m vertical.