It's like fighting gravity, or in the alternative, the herding instinct.

Downtown Chicago is why I love big cities: it invokes that childlike curiosity about everything. It also invokes fascinating human behavior that you really cannot find or simulate anywhere else. As with most things in life, if you have the right kind of confidence, everyone will follow you - even if this means into a busy road. The first round was purely accidental (I was staring wide-eyed at the Chicago Stock Exchange) but then I decided to test my hypothesis. The plan: walk right past the crowd waiting at the corner directly into the street, see if anyone follows. The result: they do. Then, of course, you have twenty people standing in the middle of the road looking at you with this glare of "well, you got us into this mess, now get us out" and drivers are kind of dumb-founded (I mean, are you going to honk and holler at twenty irritated looking people?). I started asking people why they followed me. The best response was that it was like fighting gravity - once someone started the momentum, it was natural just to follow. There was some kind of marathon today and a bunch of people whom I was questioning had numbers written on their arms and legs. After following me into the road, they looked strikingly like cattle. I asked to take their photo for my journal. They declined.