I Got a Craving and All I Have to Show for it are These Darn Rug Burns

So there I was, innocently shopping for mint chocolate chip ice cream.

There was nothing on my mind except the embarrassment of paying for my purchase with four dollars in dimes and nickels.

Outside, it was quintessential fall day. Leaves were saying goodbye to the tree limbs where they'd lived for so long, and coating the ground like crunchy brown feathers. The wind was swirling their brightly colored corpses into irregular piles. The sun had a golden, tranquil quality that it only seems to get during the fall. If I tried really hard, I could smell pumpkin, cinnamon and wood smoke... though that may only have been my jacket, which usually hangs next to the mantelpiece...

Regardless, I was relatively calm and happy.

Well, I was... until HE came in.

You know the type. You've been out in the back woods, haven't you? If not, allow me to describe this phenomenal specimen of humanity. He was six feet of swaggering redneck. Chippewa boots, Carhartt jeans, a denim jacket, and a John Deere hat, crammed over a greasy buzz cut. The man was a walking cliche. He looked like he'd just stepped out of an LL Bean catalog from some other, less suave dimension, and he was not at all impressed by this world.

However, I don't want you to think that I judge solely by appearances.

The problem was not in the way he looked, but the way he carried himself. He had the affected slouch of a sullen teenager, though he was clearly my age or older. His feet clomped hard on the linoleum of the store, as though with every step he was showing it who was the biggest bad ass who'd ever sauntered across a floor. His upper lip seemed to be fixed in a permanent sneer, and when he paid for his gas, he called the cashier "Honey," though the woman was old enough to be his grandmother.

I found that his mere existence irritated the piss out of me. He reminded me of every bully I'd ever gone to school with, every skeezy construction worker who'd ever wolf whistled at a woman minding her own business; every snarky comment I'd ever heard from his type was as fresh in my mind as though it had just been uttered. I felt my stomach knot up with anxiety. Though uneaten and barely out of the freezer section, my ice cream seemed to be melting already from the heat of my sweaty grip on the carton.

I put the innocent cardboard box with the minty treat back in the cool, refreshing freezer, walked up to the counter, and asked to get 4 dollars in gas on pump three instead of snacking.

I had a premonition you see.

That Man was bound to do something... and I wanted to see it. Perhaps if I were lucky, I'd find an excuse for kicking his ass and making him cry like a little girl.

Ahh... hope springs eternal.

Well, fact is, he DID do something.

Unfortunately, the something he did was to turn the tables on me... Hence the rug burn or rather felt-burn.

I never should have followed him into that billiard place... My current psychic condition is not what it once was, and my Herculean self-confidence has been lacking of late.

Perhaps I should have eased back into my pirate persona by doing something less dangerous, such as punching a shark in the eye or eating four-day-old Chinese food out of a dumpster.

But no... but no.

By the way, these ropes are really starting to chafe. I wish I could rely on some superheroes to save me, but most of them are MIA. Guess I'll have to do this myself...

More updates to come.