Right Angle: Backstage 08/08/23

I know I probably come across as trying to sound like some kind of tough guy in these posts. That’s the problem with communicating solely in text as opposed to face-to-face conversation. My meaning can be mistaken.

I’m really not all that much of a meanie. Many times in my life people have sincerely applied the adjective “kind” to me. I’d rather make peace than war any day of the week. Sadly I don’t always get my ‘druthers.

Because I won’t tolerate nonsense either and if I’d say something to someone in here, I’d say it to their face too. If they decide that something more than a verbal response is required, then so be it.

Too often bullies and other vermin get away with their uncivilized behavior because the person they’re focusing on doesn’t think a fight, verbal or physical, is worth the trouble.

The bullies mistake that for fear or capitulation. When far more often than not it’s just wise discretion which actually benefits the bully more than they realize.

I don’t care to allow them to harbor such mistaken beliefs and am more than happy to correct them. I’m aggressive, assertive and combative and while I don’t want to fight, I love a good fight too. I never, ever start a fight even so. If someone starts a fight with me they’re not going to get the satisfaction of thinking I went away because they scared me.

Now that we’ve got all that out of the way … Anecdote time.

I had a friend who was about 6’4″ and weighed in the vicinity of 375 lbs. He was not the biggest guy I ever saw but he was a pretty large, very strong dude and had a very intimidating appearance.

He had a shop next to my office and we became friends. He did a lot of EBay and such stuff and went to the post office every day in the course of his business.

He also had narcolepsy and was sheer terror to ride with so if we were going to do something together I drove. My Lincoln was also a lot nicer ride than his beat up old Chevy S10 compact pickup which was generally overflowing with junk.

One day we decided to go do something, can’t remember just what. He hadn’t made his post office run yet so I told him to put the packages in my car and we’d swing by the post office on the way.

We got to the post office and he took his stuff in while I waited in the car. There’s a halfway house right next to that post office and there were always bums and beggars hanging around the area. Mostly they were harmless and safely ignored. Until one of them wasn’t.

I had the car shut off and my window rolled down, back then I smoked Winstons so I had one lit. This filthy man comes up to my car window and tries to bum a smoke. I simply said “no”. I wasn’t being impolite or a smart ass, I was just denying his request politely but firmly.

He got all bent out of shape and made statements to the effect that he was going to kick my ass. So I pulled the keys, opened the car door and stepped out.

He wasn’t expecting that.

I said very calmly (as you will certainly appreciate) “Go for it, Skippy. This could be the most fun I’ve had all week.”

He backed up a little and blustered a lot. He said “Step across the street (there was a large green across the street from the post office) and we’ll settle this!”

I said “Hell no, we’re doing this right here, right now. I want to see how high you’ll bounce off the pavement. Throw down, boy. Let’s see you back up your bullshit.”

I was inwardly contemplating the best way to avoid any horrendous diseases I might contract in the course of moving that guys juices from inside to outside his filthy hide. But figured the entertainment value would be worth the risk.

Just about then my man-mountain friend comes out of the post office and walks up with a big smile on his face. I used the opportunity of that distraction to reach back through the car window, get my driving gloves off the dash and put them on. Diseases are diseases after all.

The bum took one look at my friend, visibly freaked out and started backing up. Trying to gather the tiny shards of his shattered dignity in his very bravest terrified voice he said to my friend …

“I’m not scared of you either!”

My friend laughed and said “You dumbass. In case you haven’t figured this out yet, I’m NOT the one you need to be scared of. (Pointing to me) I’m his friend and he scares the shit out of me. The only thing in question here is how bad he’s going to hurt you before you die.”

My friend was an avid reader and student of history. He had a way of saying things I found amusing.

I started casually closing the distance between the bum and me. Just to make it easier for him to deliver on his threats. By this time I was genuinely starting to worry that he wasn’t serious.

The bum was focused on my huge friend so in his perception one second I was 8 or so feet away and the next heartbeat I was within easy reach. I knew this was the exact moment that would either trigger fight or flight. I knew if this was going to be a fight it would start in the next fraction of a second. And suddenly, sure enough …

The bum decided something at the other end of the block needed his urgent attention and got there in an amazing amount of haste. Turns out burnt up old druggie husks can move pretty quick with the proper motivation. Who’d a thunk it?

I guess he didn’t want to be maimed or die over a cigarette after all.

Dammit.

I had him pegged for a coward but it was disappointing to be right this once. Total waste of perfectly good Grade A, First Class American adrenalin.

You should’ve heard my friend tell this story from his viewpoint, that’s even better. Alas, that will never happen as he died a few years back. People that big often have heart problems and that’s what killed him.

Back to the topic …

That bum made a serious miscalculation. He thought that because I was dressed moderately well sitting in a white Lincoln Landau Town Car in front of the post office that I would be an easy mark.

Had I given him a smoke the next thing he would have asked for is a light, then he would have asked for money. Three time’s a charm. If I had said no he would then drop back and punt by trying to scare me. He probably wouldn’t have gone the whole nine yards to attempted strong-arm robbery but then again that kind of person isn’t all that bright.

He had that all planned out. Because he had done exactly that sequence before and it worked for him. Very, very likely more than once.

What he hadn’t planned on was someone who would have planned better than he had. When I short circuited his whole gig from the get-go he went straight to threats. Which I had hoped he would not but figured he would. Or at least figured if he did I was going to be ready for him.

I was ready for him, whatever he decided to do.

This is what I was talking about above as a proportional response in context. Because I already knew what was happening, or could happen, I was mentally prepared for confrontation. That aggression on his part didn’t take me by surprise. So I didn’t get a debilitating adrenalin jag when it happened. There was lots of adrenalin flowing but I was using it not it using me.

The bum got aggressive but HE wasn’t prepared for me to get even more aggressive right back at him. In a very calm and damnably frightening manner. He knew I knew something he didn’t, he just didn’t know what. What he did know is that I wasn’t reacting the way he expected me to and I’m pretty sure at that point he also knew he was no longer in control of the situation. If he ever thought about it later he would realize he never was in control of the situation.

My immediate response was to flip the tables on him and go full aggressive. Without any hesitation, like I said I knew this would, or at least could happen and when he walked up I’d already sized him up, figured out where and how hard I was going to hit him, and was just following the plan in my head on how to deal with him. Had he seen me hesitate he would have taken that to mean he still had a chance to control the situation in his favor. But …

I didn’t physically attack him. He had not yet attacked me so that was not yet warranted. I just encouraged him to go ahead and try and I never once took so much as a single half step back.

His little reptile hindbrain was going “Oh crap! This isn’t going right! What should I do?”

My friend showing up and saying what he said was just icing on the cake. I’m actually glad we didn’t get into a physical fight. Mostly. I had no doubt how that fight was going to progress.

I was concentrating on seeing specific muscle groups activate immediately preceding an attack from him. That was the next decision point and the decision was already made. I knew exactly what I was going to do if I saw that happening. Among the things I was going to do one thing I was not going to do was let him hit me. I didn’t have to think about it, I didn’t have to think about anything but catastrophic disassembly of an attacker once I saw the “GO!” signal.

If he had sent that signal there is very little doubt that his reaction time would have been any help to him. It wouldn’t. Because the instant I saw it I would be in motion. Motion that would leave him choking and bleeding on the pavement.

That’s not me being a “tough guy”, it’s not empty bragging. I had some excellent training in close combat and anyone else who had been through that could do the same. It’s simply fact.

I could have done that to this bum without any significant exertion. Even now in my old age and in terrible shape I can still do that. It’s a matter of muscle memory not might, though might is always good to have too. I’ll never lose that muscle memory. Just like I’ll never forget how to touch type and that’s little more strenuous than typing. Which you can see I clearly have no endurance issues with.

This is all proportional and correct for this situation. It was also damned satisfying to face down a human rat and make him scurry away in terror.

Physical combat might have been more fun but there are also consequences for that. Those consequences are not easy to control and may be severe. The danger of those consequences won’t stop me or cause me to hesitate because I will just do my best to negate them afterwards. Even so, if you don’t need to deal with that sort of consequence that’s the preferable outcome.

If some SOB threatens an innocent, though cowardly and stupid woman, in my presence I’m going to have fun with that human rat too. Because I already know exactly what I will do. I know because I’ve done it before more than once.

Your mind is your primary weapon. You have to wield that weapon and keep it sharp for it to be effective.

Lol, what you experienced was the “Berserker Blackout”. It’s not a real common phenomena but it does happen. Your mind abandons rationality and goes into maximum fight mode. People sometimes actually die without realizing they’re mortally wounded in that state.

It’s thought that the Viking berserkers cultivated and applied that state of mind, that’s where we get the descriptive name. Vikings were not the first to discover this but are the most famous for it.

This is also called “seeing red”, though I think the “seeing red” state is a lesser gradation.

It’s caused by a massive adrenaline dump into the bloodstream that overwhelms the reasoning centers in the brain, putting the hindbrain in the saddle for a few minutes. It’s exhausting because you’re burning all your blood sugar in one big bang and is usually followed by a significant adrenaline and sugar crash.

Did you get the shakes and chills when it was all over? That’s usually how that sort of thing ends.

I have witnessed but never personally experienced this sort of thing. I’m sort of happy about that, it sounds and looks pretty scary. Not only for the people being assailed but for the person doing the assailing too.

As you got older and more experienced you learned to control it. That’s normal and applies to a lot of things. When you’re in the younger phase of life there’s a lot of things you come up against that you have no experiential reference for.

Without a baseline to anchor your behavior things can sometimes revert to an almost feral wildness. Sex and aggression are the two biggies that we as men have to learn to deal with.

There is virtually no normal man living who at sometime in his past would not have done almost anything to get a girl to open her legs for him, or to find a girl who was willing to do that. That period of life stage is thankfully brief for most of us and we grow out of it. Hopefully before we ruin our lives or the life of some girl or girls. Some never do and spend the rest of their lives with a distracting, obnoxious primary preoccupation with sex.

As an aside, this is BTW why conservatives should be anti-abortion but very much pro-contraception. No matter how “good” or well raised children are they come into physical maturity before they come into anything resembling mental wisdom. In the past society not very successfully tried to throttle that sort of thing down by preventing the occurrence of opportunity. We don’t even have that going for us anymore.

Any thoughtful, intelligent, responsible parent should be aware that there are things driving children that are out of their control and take appropriate measures. The real trick is to thread that needle without coming across as condoning inappropriate sexual behavior.

Just like hormonally induced young lust — Personal combat is also something that must be faced in order for sufficient learning experience to allow a man to deal with it successfully. There’s a learning curve driven by terror and pain involved which makes it abhorrent to innate cowards and organically stupid people.

So what have “we” (not you and me, society as a whole in the West. I generally hate it when someone says “we” in this context.) done?

Put the innate cowards and organically stupid in charge of our social and legal systems, that’s what. Who would ever have thought that would become a problem?

An inbuilt component in the psyche of innate cowards and organically stupid people is a nearly unlimited capacity for rationalization. Which means they’re masters at creating and unconditionally believing excuses. Which is a foundational issue that has led to our current social and political dilemmas.

It’s also why you can’t argue reason into the minds of innate cowards and organically stupid people. That’s a “tell”, when you see that you know that’s who you’re dealing with.

Sadly, the Left does not have a monopoly on that sort of thing. We have plenty of that on the Right too.

That said, the Left has learned to capitalize on that sort of thing in the pursuit of power. The innate cowards and organically stupid are not per se evil people. The vast majority of such start out with the real intention and desire to be and do good.

Evil takes advantage of their lack in personality and personal integrity, seduces and corrupts them. Evil has no scruples about manipulating people for its own agenda. That’s also a “tell”.

It’s also pretty bad from a socio-political viewpoint to give in to something like experiencing Berserker behavior. Both for the person experiencing it and those who will suffer from the result of that around you. It’s the same thing as giving in to lust and as I understand it if you and your victim survive it actually feels pretty good. It can be seductive. I’ve known case studies of men in prison who never learned what you learned and applied.

So you did well to recognize that in yourself and deal with it successfully. Bravo, Harry. Telling that story increased my already considerable respect for you.