Here is a fighter. The captain of my team. Lately he’s been going through some tough times on and off the field. I imagine he’s not crumpling in the face of his challenges but trying to battle through them.
But me? I’m not a fighter. Here’s my annotated lifetime record of confrontational fiascoes:
1972: A fellow four-year-old shot me with a suction cup dart gun. I wanted to kill him. My mom intervened. I have never gotten over this injustice.
1977: A fellow nine-year-old from my rural town came over to play one day. He was the coolest kid in my class, a rider of minibikes and snow machines, a beebee gun murderer of birds. At my nonviolent back-to-the-land house, boredom quickly set in for him. To break it up he started calling me dufus.
“Don’t call me that,” I said.
Cardboard Gods 