Highlights From a Conversation at the Laundromat

He tells me he's going to kick some guy's ass and I ask what happened, figuring he's been jumped or vandalized or something, and he says the guy's been talking about him behind his back, and when I say "all right, but did he commit some kind of crime against you?" he tells me "no, but he?s been saying stuff about me for the last three years. I couldn't do anything about it before because he was too young, but now that he's of age, I'm taking him down." "Okay, so he's 18 and you're 39 and all he's doing is talking and you think it's worth fighting about?" and he insists "if someone was talking about you that way, you'd do the same thing," which is a stupid thing for him to say since he knows that You Know Who has been dissing me behind my back for ages but I always say that getting revenge would make me an even more petty and pathetic person than her. My fourteen-year-old is listening and she tells him that he sounds like some of the boys in her class. I make the point that as the older and supposedly wiser adult with above-average intelligence and tons of life experience, he ought to be setting the example by using wits instead of fists, but he's determined, and I think he actually will beat the guy down eventually, compelled to act by instincts and forces that he doesn't (or pretends not to) understand. And so America goes to war. 2/7/03