Quote of the Day: Friedrich Nietzsche

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”



I assume you came here today because you read yesterday's post and can't wait to hear about the time I almost turned into a monster. Like I mentioned yesterday, I've never been a real fight but I have come close a few times and one time I came close enough to the abyss to shake my fist at it. This is post is my story so sit back and enjoy the ride.



I was about seventeen at the time and working a summer job out at a tree nursery pushing sawdust around on my hands and knees. My friends and I were on a crew with a bunch of other high school kids, most of whom we knew since the majority of us were from the booming metropolis of Ephrata (pop 5000). There were another group of kids on the crew that we started to verbally spar with the way high school kids will. To be honest, I am not even sure who started it. I'd like to say they did so I can sound better, but I was a bit of a smart-aleck back then so there's a good chance it was me.



It started out with the usual teenage insults about one's sexuality and mother but quickly escalated to dirt-clod fights. This went on for a couple weeks until it started to get a little more serious. There was another kid there we thought had a lot of street cred because he was from the big city of Seattle who liked to egg us on for his own amusement. He kept telling us we were wimps (not the exact word he used) if we didn't fight like men. Even though we all thought he was an idiot his argument did have a sort of primitive logic to it. Men don't let other men disrespect them so pretty soon we were getting in each other's faces and threatening to beat each other up. Both groups thought it was a fun game to chase the other one down with our cars when we were out "cruising" at night. (That was our main activity in that town besides causing malicious mischief.)



So anyway, one day things got particularly heated and me and a kid from the other group threatened to beat each other up after work. I really had no intention of following up on said promise. I just thought I'd say a few things to make him look stupid like I always did and he'd walk back to his car with his tail hung between his legs. (I need to stop and tell you about our work transportation for the rest of the story to make sense. Every morning, our crew would meet at the main office warehouse and be carried out to the fields in an old converted school bus that wold also take us back to our cars in the afternoon.)



When we got back to the office that day, I saw that his car was parked in front of my friend's car so I knew some kind of confrontation was inevitable since we couldn't leave until he did. We got off the bus to punch our time cards inside a little shed. I was one of the last one out of the bus so I ran into him going the opposite way as I was heading into the shed. He elbowed me in the chest and called me a profanity that I won't repeat since I'm sure my mom is reading this. I pushed him back and said, "You want to go, tough guy." (Yeah, I'm pretty hard-core.)



He asked, "What are you going to do about it?"as he stepped outside with me following right behind him.



After we squared our bodies around to face each other like duelists, I said, "This." I then proceeded to ball my fist up and cock my arm back into the position. As soon as he saw I was serious he took off running at a frantic pace. Too bad he only made it about two feet before smacking his head clean into the open bus door. He fell to the ground and just lay there.



"Look what you did," his friend told me. I think everybody thought he was.



"You're an idiot. He did it to himself. He ran into the bus." The crew, who had all gathered sometime in preceding ten seconds, started laughing at him. They only laughed harder when he started rubbing his head and crying.



Finally, our crew boss showed up. His name was Naom and he would later go on to marry one of my classmates. He asked us what was going on then told us to leave before one of the head guys who happened to be the father of one of my best friends showed up so we all left.



Guess what my nemesis did the next day at work? Nothing because every time he opened his mouth everybody made fun of him for beating himself up because he was too scared to let me do it. He was fired a week later and we didn't mentioned the incident when he saw each other at school that fall.



Thus ends the story of my one and only fight.