How can we end forum beef?
07-01-2018, 02:48 AM
Man, do you think I could remember what thread I wrote about this in?
A small, but seemingly-profound moment today. I made it back into town from spending five hours cementing today. Was damn exhausted, so showered up to get all the dust and filth off, then thought "Well, it's still an hour until dark. I could probably get some meditation in," so headed up the hill with my rosary and Divine Intimacy in my knapsack. Yeah, it's something like 12 degrees here, but you kind of just tune the cold out when you meditate.
Around the corner from my house, I kept hearing this loud thumping noise: I've gotten very good at doing recitation despite distraction, so I wasn't really paying attention to it, until I was halfway past where it was coming from.
It was the house where the woman had stopped me last week, and asked me inside to 'fix her computer'. There was a white car parked roughly half on the street, half on the lawn. Someone had parked in a hurry.
I still didn't pay it much mind. I very much step out of the world before meditation.
It was only a couple of houses up the road that I finally heard a woman yelling. "Cheryl, you open the damn door!" The thumping was, obviously, this shouting woman kicking against it.
"I don't have time for this! Open the farken door!" She had one of those horrible Aussie 'Shazza' voices where they sound kind of a crude man crossed with a pig.
I thought: "She sounds fat." If you talk to enough people over the years, you can kind of predict what people look like fairly-accurately. (Though there are exceptions: there was a giant bodybuilder at my last job who sounded fruitier than Milo; and there's a Sister up at the Monastery here who's about four foot tall and somewhere north of 90, but has the clearest, melodic speaking voice I've ever heard in my life. I keep expecting cartoon birds and rabbits to be following her around).
Then thumps got louder and more rhythmic: she was obviously throwing her weight against the door, but it didn't last too long, because, well, fatty + the accidental exercise anger produced.
I could hear her again, voice now puffed. "I said, open the farken door, Cheryl." Then a pause - I figured, ok, pot plant through the window time because she's too fat to do anything else - then, a few seconds later, the sound of breaking glass. Women are so damn predictable.
"You stay away from my farken husband ya mole!
I guess she got someone to fix her computer after all.
It was obvious from the tone of porky, self-righteous smugness that escalating had tickled her fancy, rather than knowing when she was going too far, so it was obviously about to get much worse.
Now, once upon a time, I might have intervened, as tried to broker peace, or told her to calm down, or something. "If your husband keeps cheating, have you tried not being fat?" Now, I just thought: that could have been my drama, if I'd followed through with temptation.
People bitch slapping each other seemed like the world's business, not mine, so I went back to the Anima Christi and continued on my way until I could no longer hear the sound of fat, spiteful arms smashing things.