| Oh Joy! | ||
| 2000-05-31 || parenthetically speaking | ||
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I remember the first, and last fist fight I was ever in. 1983, 8th grade. Gym class, my basketball rolled into the wrong court and Tom Atwell when asked to return it threw it at me.He was sort of a jock type, and didn't really like us "burnouts" as they called us. I threw it back, and a fight almost ensued. "2:15 at the bottom of the hill dude". I walked down with my friends, and my Black Sabbath-Mob Rules(arguably the best non-Ozzy Sabbath record next to Born Again which featured Deep Purple crooner Ian Gillan, at the very least the best Dio/Sabbath album still) t-shirt. I can still remember Toms nerdy friend Corey Tapper, a guy who went on to start his own landscape business(as most of my fellow graduates did), as well as have a pretty hot younger sister, Lisa(well, she had a nice body the last time I saw her a few years back), telling me "don't fight him". I had some sort of pride stuck in my head though. Perhaps I wanted to impress my friends Dave Simons and Matt Spencer though(or Terri Miller, the girl we hung out with who was in love with Matt, but I was in love with her with her feathered back hair and white courduroy pants). I knew as soon as we were "done" we would go over to Daves house and steal some of his parents pot, sit on the couch listening to Dark Side Of The Moon, and Frank Zappa-Freak Out, and generally act like Beavis and Butthead before Beavis and Butthead existed.(now that I think about it, Dave Simons' attic was the first place I ever saw MTV. I can still remember the rocketship commercial and the Thomas Dolby and Def Leppard videos clear as day). I think maybe 5 punches were thrown the whole time. He fell to the ground, and I must have felt triumphant. Or maybe in the back of my head I felt really stupid, and it carried on to my older years, as I've never used violence for anything since then. There's no reason to. I get in these moods where I think I could beat someone up, but it's such talk and bullshit it's not even funny. I would have no clue how to punch someone in the face. I can picture it now, it would be like in those movies when someone punches Arnold Schwarzaneggerhoweveryouspellit, or Steven Seagal and they end up shaking their wrist in pain after. This is usually followed by some witty line of sorts. I see Tom Atwell every once in a while, he's got about 4 inches on me, and maybe 20 pounds. On Sunday afternoons I usually like to go down to the coffee shop and read for a few hours, and I would see him in there every Sunday with this attractive girl. I wondered if he knew who I was(my hair was shoulder length and "heavy metal" back then), there was always a bit of oddness when I would see him. I remember he started coming in there alone, and I silently wondered what happened. Did they break up? Did she move away? Did she die? I saw her at the shopping mall one evening with her arm around a "new guy". I felt like going up to her "what happened to you and Tom? Yeah, he can be a real jerk...I beat him up once....oh no I haven't talked to him in 17 years or so...I just knew about you two...". I have no idea what can come over me sometimes that I need to fill with anger. Nothing is really bad. (Who pissed in my Cheerios this morning?) Sometimes though, the last thing I want to do is to deal with anyone. I end up taking it out on people, saying stupid things, doing stupid things. Work is the worst place to be when this happens to me. Nobody can do anything correct when I feel like this. I need some time out from the day to day. The open road will hopefully help me out of this daily bullshit I get caught up in. Perhaps I'll appreciate things a bit better. I always think this way. It feels better when I get back, yes, but it just turns back around to greet me again. Sure the winter up here still feels like it's hanging out to play with us New Englanders for a few more weeks, and we know what happens to us when the winter is here... I saw the new Tom Cruise movie tonight, it was okay for one of those movies. The worst thing of the evening was buying the tickets to the movie as the fire alarm started going off. This brought up a point though. Fire alarms are not fucking working. People still just stood in line to buy their tickets, buying popcorn. I planned on going to the men's room, thinking "oh, it's just the alarm, there's no fire in there". I suggested to Matt we run into one of the theatres yelling "fire", but just as we started entertaining the idea people started flowing out of the theatres to wait for word. Everyone huddled right against the building, still ignorant, all of us to the fact that this alarm could mean there's a bomb in the theatre. As far as I can remember, I learned that if a building is about to blow up, or a car, or anything you're supposed to just run and put your hands over your head (hands will cushion the blow of 75 pound slabs of concrete, and fast spinning sharp pieces of metal apparently). Eventually they came out and said it would be a few minutes, and if you wanted to go home, you could come back "later in the week" to get a free movie. When they finally let us back in, we never had our tickets torn, so we are going to return and see something else "later in the week". Mission Impossible II is definitely not worth $8.50. The building never blew up, and there was no fire, just some teenage burnout somewhere laughing his ass off. |
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