i'm a pretty easygoing guy.

check that, i'm an extremely easygoing guy. now i don't say that in any sort of prideful way, because like any other personality characteristic, it cuts both ways, and on some occasions i've paid for it; mostly i'm saying out of an extreme, at least in this case,sense of self-awareness. i remember dunx telling me one time a few years back that i had a talent for "suffering fools," and i think that's the best that anybody's ever put it.

so given all that, the incidences where my temper gets lost, say behind a fit of rage or somesuch, are quite few and far between. in fact today is seven years to the day from the last time i lost it, seven years ago would put me at age sixteen. it's quite a story actually, those who've heard me tell it in person will likely recognize it as the story of when i got a girlfriend kicked out of her house. it happened during the summer before my senior year of high school, and you know how things are at that age, everything is so dramatic, even when it's not, you're young, lack perspective and are, for the most part, stupid.

anyways i s'pose the story starts a few months before that, in march of the same year. i started seeing this girl to whom a girl-friend of mine introduced me. things roll along for a few weeks, month and a half, maybe two, but after a while what became increasingly clear is that she was changing, and not so much in a way that was new, but more like she was reverting to something she was before, ostensibly because the means that she employed had acheived their end. i realize that it's a biased opinion, but i'm a pretty savvy guy and, as such, that development wasn't lost on me. on the other hand, however, she was pretty hot and the Y chromosome doing what it does led to a delay of another few weeks before i'd decided that i'd pretty much had enough of her being rude, inconsiderate and thoughtless, even if well, nevermind.

so right, july 11, 1997, it was a friday and me and her were s'posed to go to the mall, our friend, the one who'd introduced us was coming too. i had resolved that that weekend had to be it as far as me and her were concerned, as difficult as having that conversation would likely have proved, what i wasn't aware of was that evidently, she had a pretty similar idea but way different means of seeing it played out. anyway, i pick her up that evening, it seemed early because during the summer in texas, the sun doesn't seem to set before about nine, so i'm figuring that it was probably either a bit before or a bit after seven when i showed up at her house to pick her up.

we head off to the mall, walk around for a while and then run into some guys she knows, i didn't think much of it, i ran into people i knew all the time, and didn't figure it to be a big deal. evidently, however, it was part of her master plan to get rid of me without any real effort or fuss on her part. see, she had been planning to meet these guys she'd met at summer school at the mall. it wasn't really enough for her just to meet them or whatever, i really would have been more relieved than anything else at that point, but she had to use me as a ride and then bank on the hope that i'd get pissed off enough to bail. like i said before, she wasn't at all a person who could be characterized by anything resembling genuine consideration for another, but in hindsight, even for her, this seemed excessive, it was like she was going out of her way to be rude, going out of her way to make me mad.

anyone that knows me knows what a hopeless and utterly foolish proposition waiting for me to get pissed off is. she had to have known the same thing because one of the things that she would say to me that she couldn't understand was that i never seemed to get nervous, that there was nothing that would rattle me. this night was really no different, at least in the beginning, because like i said, i didn't initially think anything of her running into some guys she knew, but as the night went on, the fact that the encounter wasn't a result of chance became more and more evident. i guess the fact that things weren't going the way she'd planned had sort of irritated her, and especially given what she knew about my personality, her whole plan seemed exceedingly ill-thought-out. so anyway, a bit later on somebody decides they wish there was a party they could go to, i happened to know of some friends who were able accomodate us as far as that went, i called to make sure that nothing had changed, nothing had, and we were about to be off.

around this point is where i think i started to get irritated, when we got in the cars to head to the party. she had decided that she was gonna ride with her new friends, and by that point clarity had begun to elbow its way in and i was realizing just how audaciously inconsiderate, if equally poorly thought out, what she was doing was. in any case, it had turned out that one of these guys wouldn't be able to make it to the party on account of he had to be at work sometime before six the next morning, so he had to be dropped off, he had to be dropped off in red oak. he lived in red oak.

here is where i give you a lesson about the geography of north texas, mostly because it's pretty relevant to the story. see, we were in arlington and planning to head to north dallas, which is about a forty minute drive. i knew my way around pretty well, so getting there wasn't gonna be a problem, but like i said, we had to drop this guy off in red oak. the thing about red oak is that it's named red oak only because it beat butt-****ing egypt by one or two votes in the election, it was also forty minutes from where we were in arlington, but forty minutes in the opposite direction. what happens is i have to follow these guys to red oak to drop this guy off, after which the guy that's left follows me to north dallas. so there we are in arlington, so renowned for its centrality that folks decided to put a baseball stadium in the place, but finding ourselves having to head to red oak, forty minutes south of there on top of being in the middle of nowhere, and subsequently another forty minutes north of there, which made for about two hours of driving.

we get to red oak, and by this time i'm pretty hot, not only because this girl seems to be going way out of her way to really and truly make me mad, but because i'm also working really hard to make sure that, no matter what, i don't give in. so we're sitting there, waiting for the guy for something or another, and while i'm there in the drivers' seat of my car, she comes to the window and tells me that i can go ahead on, she's staying the night there in red oak. it was at that point that i turned around on the whole thing, i mean i came to my senses and realized i better start being myself, well, i've always been such an accomodating person, and i realized just how hard she'd worked to get me to lose my temper, i mean i didn't want her to think that all her hard work would be in vain.

so i left, seemingly in a hurry to do so, because i figure that my distance from her would share an inverse relationship with my likelihood to commit, and subequently be charged for and convicted of, a felony. at that point i'm trying to think of something, and i'll confess to not really thinking too hard because i was so much smarter than her, and a good idea wasn't really long in coming anyway, because as i was trying to navigate my way back to a highway of any consequence the brilliant idea of going back to her house without her dawned on me. the idea was mostly motivated out of a desire for some measure of revenge, but also a pretty decent helping of a c(over) y(our) a(ss) since i figured that the combo of her not coming home that night along with me being the last person her parents saw her with would lead to a pretty healthy dose of people giving me crap that i didn't want or, given the circumstances, really need to deal with. the whole rationale there being that since her folks saw her leave with me, i'd be the person they'd call when she didn't show up at home that night.

a while later i show up at her door, her dad answers and summarily, if not understandably, asks me where his daughter is. i go ahead and tell him "well she's in red oak with some guys she met from summer school or something. she left, said she was gonna stay the night there, i couldn't really make her get in the car with me or anything," blah blah blah. he seemed pretty understanding, said that her doing that kinda thing wasn't really a shocker or anything and thanked me for coming over and being honest. at that point, i was pretty happy, i'd covered myself and gotten over on her. the last thing i said to her folks in no uncertain terms was that i hadn't been there that night, hadn't talked to them, and didn't really care how they explained it to them.

the best laid plans, blah, blah, blah, you know how it is, because she calls, which i figure happens pretty much immediately after i leave, and tries to tell her parents she's with me, which they know isn't true, you know, having just seen me in their living room moments prior. the urge was obviously too much for her mother to resist because, from what i hear, she said something to the effect of "bull****! he was just here!" and then told her to be home in half an hour or not to bother coming home at all. so genius she is, she decides she'd rather find me and yell at me for getting her in trouble than go back home and actually have a place to, you know, live. it didn't last, because that was friday night and she stayed with a friend for the weekend, but then the monday or tuesday after that her mom picked her up and read her the riot act before taking her home.

i'd figured i'd heard the last of her but sometime that week, she must have had a (slight) revelation because she called to apologize, i guess that's what it was, to be really honest i don't at all recall what she said, which is just as well i guess, because i do recall that her whole schpiel had this really perfunctory tone about it, as though she was being forced to have the conversation, which i don't really doubt was the case. that's really about it, i guess, i haven't talked to her or seen her a single time since then.

also on the plus side, i haven't been to red oak since then.

feeling: like i should have been terry tate, the office linebacker
thinking of: 1987 toyota corolla
music: "trailer park queen" the rosco villa band