The Lame Game

 There's always that temptation to come down on people like the Hammer of Thor.  Last night Michael Bryant, Ontario's former attorney general, had an altercation with a bicyclist and ended up killing him with his car.  Conflicting reports aside one fact seems to stand out: Bryant could've just driven away or run into a nearby store when the altercation turned nasty.  He didn't.  Instead, he chose to drive along Bloor St. and crush Darcey Allan Sheppard between his car and a mailbox until he was satisfied the man no longer posed a threat.

Although this is an extreme case it's obvious Bryant got frightened, panicked, and eventually angry at the person causing him distress.  Not to absolve the man or anything like that but to recognize that we've all been in his case.  We've seen somebody make a mistake after we just showed them how to do it or got asked a question by somebody in the middle of an important phone call.  We wanted to snap, to clench our fists and scrunch our face and, perhaps, vent.  Sometimes we do and often we regret it but, in every case, we know afterward that if we had another chance we'd do it differently.

Shouting at a lover because of frustration and high-strung emotions, callous thoughts of self-promotion and the hot feeling of road rage are all examples of temptation overcoming sense, of pleasure overcoming virtue.  It's a tricky path we walk and although I don't mean to sermonize I think we can all learn from Michael Bryant.  We can all make these mistakes and only deal with the consequences of hurt feelings or guilt but, as in the case of Michael Bryant, at least we didn't kill anybody.

Today my brother finished the Scope in the second floor bathroom but left the empty bottle there rather than either taking it out to the recycling bin or, even, tossing it into the adjacent trashbasket.  It's not that he's not in the habit of cleaning up after himself, it's just that in some circumstances he "sees no rush" to get it done.  I'm not saying he's a degenerate person because he's not.  He’s easily the smartest and most diligent guy I know... most of the time.

It used to be, back when I was a small and silent, that I had an undiagnosed case of a not-so-severe obsessive compulsive disorder.  Today, the disorder has been self-diagnosed but not in that banal coffee shop type way where people say "Oh I just have to write good jokes down or it just bothers me" or “I just get fussed over things I’m so OCD (it’s not an adjective!).”  Back in those days I had some peculiar habits.  For example, I couldn't see an unintentionally open or partly open drawer or door and not close it.  I mean to say that if I watched my mother cook I'd walk behind her discretely closing drawers that she had only partly shoved to closed perfection.  When writing, (this one still gets me when in the mornings) I always lined up my writing utensils along the lateral line of my desk.  Or when I finished a popsicle the wooden stick had to be placed at the corner of a table, exactly my thumbnails width from both the tables edges.  Getting the stick to be precisely that far from the tables' edge is tricky but not so tricky as to warrant the level of "what the fuck is he doing?" looks that I've gotten over the course of my thumbnail-width measuring career.  See, when somebody's a kid they can get away with all kinds of weird things as long as adults don't realize precisely what's going on.  Yet, when watching at a small child looking extremely distressed at the precise placement of a popsicle stick upon a desk it's hard not to jump to conclusions and think to oneself "thank god that’s not my kid." 

Although these may just be extreme (or not?) cases of personal idiosyncrasies they're exactly the sort of thing one must get used to when cohabitating - particularly with a relative.  However, even with this sense of empathy in mind I'm not precluded from occasionally saying "what the fuck is he doing?" whenever I see an empty bottle of Scope.