Have you ever been in a fight?

My last fight was in 6th grade. One of the "burn outs", think the smaller bully in A Christmas Story (Farkas' sidekick) ,was cheating in a game and I called him on it. I was the smallest guy in class but said I was tired of it. I gave it my all and got a bloody nose and some scrapes (okay nearly got my ass kicked but got some shots in) but most importantly got much respect from everyone around and even the Mr. Voorhies.

Closest since was throwing a couple of punches at a guy in a pickup game at my gym/club when I was about 30 before marriage or kids , it was a standoff but was separated and sat in mgrs office waiting for mgr to discuss with an ice pack and thought to myself "what the hell am I doing? I'm a lawyer and I'm going to go to the office tomorrow and say I was in a fight at the gym??? How stupid am I?" Thereafter, never even contemplated physical altercation.

 

Sixth grade is a little early to be a burnout. He was smoking weed that young?

 

I once fought my own teammate during pregame warmup. Shithead was a loudmouth off the ice and on it, had to use his stick to stay upright. Warmup starts and what do you know, the kid manages to hit and lift a high-riser that hits me in the right shoulder.
Now, again, warmup had just started. Not even a few taps to low pads. I threw off my gloves, charged out and punched the guy out. The guy learned his lesson. Didn't talk much around me after that.

 

in '74-75 they smoked cigs to look cool. Weed? maybe, wouldn't put it past them.

 

Yesterday, I got as close to road rage as I've ever come in my life.

It was in a parking lot.

We were getting one of our cars serviced after work, so we drove both cars down to a strip mall about two miles from work at 7 a.m. in order to take just one car to our parking garage downtown (we have only one pass). My wife was ahead of me, and when I arrived, she pointed to a little old man and said, "He's not going to let us park here." Mind you, we were on the outer edges of a huge parking lot, maybe 30 rows away from the stores.

I rolled my car over to where the guy was striding down toward our cars. It appeared he worked at a TrueValue hardware store. I asked him, "Do you really have nothing better to do than hassle people 30 rows away from your store?" And he screeched at me, "You wanna test me? Go ahead, test me."

I really wanted to engage him. I really wanted to tell him how small a little man he was. And I saw him pull a pad out of his pocket, obviously to take down our license plates. Not wanting to pay a towing fee that afternoon, we high-tailed it out of there and parked a block away at the outer edges of a farmer's market parking lot.

When I got to the office, I was still so pissed. I got on the hardware store's website, went to their comment line and wrote, "If your employees spend their time trying to police a strip-mall parking lot, you obviously don't use your time to provide good service. That's why you have lost my business, and the business of everyone in my department." Which probably didn't make a dent, but I guess it made me feel a little better.

By the way, when we passed by that parking lot en route to picking up our car at 5 p.m., there were no cars within 10 spots of where we had intended to park. Just one TrueValue hardware store delivery truck.

 

I was in sixth grade in 1980-81, and a lot of kids smoked pot.
We didn't have money or access to it so we could smoke it every day yet, but a lot of us smoked pot.
And cigarettes.