The 2x4

Note: This account of the incident is rather hazy. I will describe what happened, but as a warning, I was quite baked and a bit tipsy from a pitcher and a couple of shots (although not blackout drunk) … I've heard several other competing perceptions of what I'm about to describe, but they were all, to be modest, a little bit more fuckered up than I was at the time.

I was at this bar up the street.

Me and a buddy of mine were playing a bit of pool, shootin' the shit and Doing Whatever for a little while.

Who won, who lost … who knows.

I don't remember. It's only a highly addictive, geometrically played and kinetically paved pointless, yet satisfying, waste of my time and energy … kind of like PCP and AA.

So I walked home after the "fuck you"s and "you still suck, you dumb fucking twatwaffle"s were exchanged and ways parted; a couple of the neighbors were being drunk in their front yard as all of my neighbors do. Coors and Miller should sponsor my neighborhood … we drink enough beer around here nightly to pay every employees' health insurance bill.

Shit, seriously, on the block where I live, if you shot a random neighbor in the liver with an M-4, it would not only stop, but also absorb, the bullet and they would take another shot of Jose while laughing about how your pussy ass didn't have the balls to shoot them in the face.

They were both quite hammered by sledgehammers.

Well, that's a bit of an understatement.

Neighbor1 is stumbling all over the yard. In fact, I have a friend we call Sticks, who has Cerebral Palsy, who can walk better after having his legs run over by a truck than this kid. No lie, he can walk, just severely bowlegged, and he needs support to do so.

Neighbor2 is sitting there laughing at his [arguably] fortunate pal doing the best he can to find what was once his Center Of Gravity.

I say hey, and it begins.

"Hit me," Neighbor1 says, with a slur in his voice that would make Ernest Hemingway tell him to get his ass into rehab.

"No," I said.

"Come on, you some kind of pussy or something?" Neighbor1 says. "Fucking hit me, you fucking pussy."

"I'm not going to hit you," I said.

"Why?" He inquires with a slightly angry tone. "FUCKING HIT ME, YOU FUCKING FAGGOT!"

This went on for a good five or ten minutes. I was quite sober at the time, and, had I not practiced my non-violent tendencies toward interaction with my fellow homo sapiens, I would have seriously hurt this kid.

I am not a fighter. I hate to hurt people [physically]. In fact, I've lost just about every fight I've ever been in, and I really have no muscle.

But had I decided to actually grant his wishes that we get into the Fisticuffs Stage, he'd probably be in the hospital.

He's much smaller than me, and severely disadvantaged by the fact that he's [a] more shitfaced than an Asian hooker doing scat porn and [b] much smaller than me. Yeah, some assholes have Beer Muscles, but having them requires the Superhero Ability of being able to, say, walk in a straight line or stand up for more than 30.14853 seconds independently.

So he decides in his Non-Existent State Of Mind that, since I refuse to put a few nice cracks in his jaw peacefully, he must do something that will piss me off enough to actually hit him.

I have no idea why drunk-ass people get this urge to have possibly life-long debilitating damage done to them for no reason, and not even over no material or pussy-related matter where one party violated the other party, but that urge is unstoppable. Like, Iraqi Insurgent unstoppable.

Think about a fat motherfucker's urge to eat half his weight every day and not even get off his ass to get the newspaper, and I'll bet you know what I mean. Although I don't usually exhibit this class of inebriated behavior after one more than a bunch too many, Some People do.

After all, not everybody sees the same thing off of the same acid.

I guess there's been work done on their house lately, because there's this nice pile of 2x4's within reach of drunk-as-fuck Neighbor1. He picks one up, and he fucking swings it at me.

Although not hard enough.

Being the jumpy, paranoid motherfucker I am, I grabbed it way before it connected.

Now, I wanted to give him a warning. So, with the 2x4 attached to him, and now in my hand, I gave him a nice warning tap.

Not hard enough to leave a mark, but hard enough to hopefully deter him from going on further with this silliness.

We talk for a second, and *WHAP!* … he cracks me in the side of the fucking head with it.

I don't really remember what happened next, but apparently we fought over who controlled the 2x4 for a little while, but no real violence ensued.

My head's been throbbing since that happened. I woke up the next day feeling like midgets who were small enough to fit inside of my brain were playing that carnival strength-test where one has a hammer and tries to ring the bell by slamming a lever with said hammer.

The bruise wasn't visible, it was covered by my hair, but every time I felt it I felt like I was pushing down a Battered Flesh Pillow.

He apologized to me the next day, saying "I'm sorry … I was a drunk son of a bitch … I'm the shit and trash of the world now … etc."

And I said, "No worries.

"Just wait, I'm going to get my revenge. You won't know where, you won't know when and you won't know how.

"But it is going to suck," I said. "You hit me in my fucking head with a fucking 2x4, you son of a bitch."

I'm thinking of a little spiking of his beer with some Tobasco Sauce some night.

Or maybe some fiberglass powder on his bed some night he's about to get laid.

/any suggestions?