In which I am called a "young punk" (and an asshole)

Friday 7/4/25

The temperature is a bit cooler today, there's a breeze and less humidity, so I ran ten circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument.

As I was coming down the ninth time, a man was going up with a teen-aged girl. She moved to the left, he stayed on the right with the railing.

Why? Because people are idiots. They only care about themselves, and not only don't they think, they are incapable of thinking if they wanted to, and believe me, that's not what they ever want to be doing. I'll put up an entry later detailing the examples of idiocy from one half hour session in the Monument alone this week.

Anyway, this created a situation in which I had to slalom between two people, on steep stairs; meaning, put my feet in about, oh, four or five inches of space, without falling, which could, I don't know, severely injure me, paralyze me, hell, kill me. Do you think people care? Nah.

I get to the bottom, I go back up, and I pass these two. I hit the top for circuit number ten, I turn around, and down I start coming, when again I encounter this guy. He's on the wrong side. That is, the side with the railing. It's very, very, very simple. The railing is on the left when you're going up, because it's for the people coming down. If you fall going up, it doesn't. mean a whole lot, does it? But if you fall going down, that's a problem.

As we pull up to each other, people are passing him on the left. So he's created this wall-to-wall people situation. I can't go around him if I wanted to. He says to me, "Move."

I respond, "You're on the wrong side."

He goes, "I'm on the wrong side?"

You know who he reminded me of with his demeanor of "I'm an out of control, delusional, crazily entitled, angry person"? Our buddy Joshua Boger. The guy who thinks it's cool for someone to say that the disabled shouldn't have jobs and then has a total meltdown like a dumb, spoiled, simple, rage-fueled child.

He expressed this like there was no way he could be wrong, or had ever been wrong.

I said, "Because you want the railing going down, too, right?"

He glares at me.

"So it's yours both ways? Is that how you think it works? It belongs to you? It's your railing?"

The rage that darkened across this guy's face. All I did was apply the tiniest bit of irrefutable logic. Because what can you say? What's the counter argument? What your refutation?

It's like with publishing people, where I say after like ten years, um, I know why you're publishing those people, those are friends, this is their work next to my work, and there's nothing they can say. Because it's all true. And they lose their minds with their anger.

You know what this guy said?

"Yeah, I guess it is then."

I mean, wow. By now, the people on the left have made their way past. I'm not here to fuck around, and I also don't want to kill somebody, because if it becomes physical, it won't go well for the other person, and that means it won't go well for me with Larry Law. I have enough to deal with right now. This wasn't some octogenarian. He wouldn't have been getting up, though.

I step around him, and he goes, "You young punk." Like he had just come from 1981.

Then, when I was about fifteen steps away and around the corner, he called me an asshole. Yelled it down the stairs. All these kids in there. To my back. Once I was gone.

So, to recap: The guy who called me a young punk and an asshole acted like a total asshole to the guy who was in the right, didn't swear, didn't call him a name, didn't so much as raise his voice.

It's very similar to how it goes with publishing people. Uncannily so.

The guy was also so stupid that he didn't figure that he might be seeing me again. And he would have, if that wasn't my last circuit.

But: the good thing here is my fitness! Young punk! They don't say that unless they think you're like in your twenties. Nice. Along with the couple who asked me if I was special forces, the person who asked if I was training for the army, and the person who asked me if I was a professional athlete--all within the past year--that is one of my top four compliments--unintentional in this case, sure, but it still counts--that I've received in my Monument stair-running career.