"I'll kick your ass, man!"

I love water cooler conversations simply because they bring about some very unusual topics that permeate the rest of the day. This morning, as one of my coworkers was walking in, a random girl on the street started talkin' smack for no apparent reason other than to be a nuisance. As she persisted, my coworker muttered something under her breath which triggered our antagonist into "What you say, bitch? I'll kick your ass!" mode. It never elevated to physical violence but could have if my coworker hadn't just kept walking.

I was going to blog about internet tough-guys today but I'm a bit more interested in this real-life mindset of using violence as a means to solve an issue. Nothing as complex as the war in Iraq or even the South Central-esque live-and-die-by-the-gun culture. Maybe it's due to my middle class WASPy suburban naivete that I fail to understand the idea of "beating somebody up" over a parking space or a snide comment.

I was in one fistfight in 8th grade, and I think it's safe to say most of us have been there. And I can understand fighting in that context - you just hit puberty and as you enter your teenage years you have to show the rest of the world how big your newly-descended balls are.

But some of those people never quite transcend that mentality. I'm sure every guy on this site has at least once accidentally cut off another car in traffic. While most of us handle road rage via screaming the nastiest obscenities imaginable, there is always the other guy who feels that by punching somebody else in the nose, they are stepping into Doc Brown's Delorean and hitting 88 miles per hour to seemingly reverse the fact that they had to wait an extra 5 milliseconds to merge into traffic. That, or they are simply "getting revenge". I don't know. I don't get it.

I'd be curious to know if anybody on this site has gotten into a fistfight as an adult outside of a drunken brawl situation (because let's face it, those are fun for everybody!). Nobody who I've conversed with on the site or in game strikes me as the kind of person who thinks they're a real-life tough-guy.

I could keep rambling but I'll let George Carlin's rant about macho men take over. From "You Are All Diseased":

“This is my idea for one of those big outdoor summer festivals. This is called Slug Fest… This is for men only. Here’s what you do: you get about a hundred thousand of these fucking men; you know the ones I mean, these macho motherfuckers… yeah, these strutting, preening, posturing, hairy, sweaty, alpha male jack-offs… the muscle assholes… You take about a hundred thousand of these disgusting pricks and you throw them in a big dirt arena; big 25 acre dirt arena; and you just let them beat the shit out of each other for 24 hours non-stop. No food, no water. Just whiskey and P.C.P. … and you just let them punch, pound and kick the shit out of each other until only one guy is left standing, then you take that guy and you put him on a pedestal and you shoot him in the fucking head! Yeah, yeah. Then you put the whole thing on T.V. Budwieser would jump at that shit in half a minute. And guys would volunteer, guys would line up, all you gotta do is promise them a small appliance of some kind. Men will do anything, just give them something that plugs in the wall and makes a whirring noise."