Yesterday, this guy nearly runs me over at a crosswalk-- only inches from the hood of an SUV speeding around the corner, it follows:
“Crosswalk asshole!”
— he would have clipped anything crossing that street: Joggers, baby strollers, power walkers, unicyclists.
So he actually stops the vehicle and gets out to confront me, and in my experience, 1 in 10 assholes will get out of the car to confront you, but this dosen’t mean anything because it’s still only the sizing phase; I’m 6’, 180lbs, and I like to fight when it comes down to it, this likely dosen’t occur to him until he’s stepped down from his driving platform- I look smaller from up there and my “data management” attire invites a false confidence from the bratty 20 year old.
Now standing in front of me, he stops short of crossing the vehicle, in our situation that would be the event horizon where upon getting back into the driver’s seat is further than where I stand. He no longer seems committed to the confrontation: There is an internal assessment that has to be made in the seconds that lead into this sort of thing: He must control his emotional output and ego projection, the estimates he made of himself while aggessively detached and isolated in his vehicle, because he has entered into a uncertain reality and, once the process has been initiated, there’s only a limited set of variables left within his control.
He won’t cross the SUV unless I give him a clear invite. He wants me to confirm his emotional perceptions and re-create the tension that convinced him to stop in the first place, justifying the action, but it’s not my place to make that decision for him, I’m not there to fulfill his emotional needs, I’m there because his self-absorbed negligence created a dangerous situation for me, a projection that could have been anyone in my neighborhood.
So he stood there yelling, the guy that wants to be angry, self-actualized in this anger, but he can’t manifest this “cool aggression” identity without some encouragment-- father issues, but the microcosm of his social network is beyond “dad” and he’s probably well entrenched in the pop culture/fashion statement that his “heavy metal” clothes communicate. He needs affirmation to fight.
As a short story winds long, there was no vindication. I didn’t call him “gay” or call his SUV “gay” or add anything to the creative banter. He was having a tantrum. I told him what he did wrong and he wanted it to be my fault, he wanted my emotional support and he wanted to find himself as more than the image of his worth. This didn’t happen. He wasn’t emotionally affirmed in any way, angry words mean nothing to a stranger. I stood there waiting and nothing happened. He couldn’t cross the space and I wouldn’t hold his hand, put on the training wheels, or pull up his big boy pants; I wasn’t his father.
And so it goes: