Great Friends, & One Varmint

I drove to the teahouse yesterday, to catch up with my beloved law school support group. An evening of pure joy, spent catching up with lots of younger friends who kept me going through my years at Boalt. Many smiles, much laughter, & warm hugs. You know it's a comfortable group when even the guy-guy hugs aren't awkward.

I felt a little silly calling ahead before driving up, but it would have been really sad to take the trip and, by happenstance, not manage to run into anyone. Even so, it was a slightly self-conscious endeavor - rather like being the class drama queen with delusions of grandeur. "M. Mellow's visiting! Everyone drop what you're doing and come visit moi!"

And so I got to chill with the regulars, and had a few chance meetings with other friends and personages over the course of the 7-hour visit. No laptop, no books, no cramming for me... I did bring my backpack, which made WiseYouth suspicious. "I demand to see what you have in there. There better not be any books."

Out comes the pineapple. WiseYouth manages not to let on surprise, if indeed he is surprised at all. But we agree at least that it was random and unanticipated. The pineapple was an extra left over from ZLS's going-away party. These hawaiian gold pineapples are really yummy, though, so I brought it to share at the teahouse.

The one downer of the evening? Well, to even write about it grants it unwarranted dignity. DeltaFarce picked a fight with me! No, really, what an exhibitionist nincompoop. The guy has an internet fan club on the one hand, detractors on the other, and serious mental issues. He makes a spectacle of himself on a daily basis (the source of his rep, bad or good) and then decides that he doesn't like the bad rep that he has with the regulars. And then he apparently decides it's all my fault and that he can rehabilitate his rep by beating me into submission in front of the whole crew of regulars. I'll admit I don't like him, his mannerisms, and his affected arrogance, but he's not what I'd call an evil person. He's at once very self-absorbed and insecure... it's just sad more than anything else. Especially sad that he means to cure a bad rep by beating up the oldest man in the bunch, as though I were the source of it all. Have I voiced negative opinions of him? Sure. I don't claim I haven't. There's a lot about the guy that's just wrong.

No, we didn't fight. I wasn't interested, and DeltaFarce's eagerness to throw down struck me as absurd. Bandannaboy and Languidgenius stepped in, waved me off, and eventually talked DeltaFarce into leaving. And after that, we headed out for our midnight snack.

On the one hand, that put a downer into the evening. Pure and preposterous crap that nobody should have had to deal with. On the other hand, with DeltaFarce inches from my face and itching for a fight, threatening to "fuck with me" in a transparently indirect tough-guy way, I felt something I haven't felt for most of my life. Perhaps I never deserved it before. But emanating unseen, past the field of my peripheral vision was a unfamiliar but comforting sense:

We've got your back

It was past closing time, so only the regulars and the crew were still there. Eight in all. I felt completely safe. Even had I been physically helpless, I would have been in no danger at all. Of course I feel that my good friends have my back, this was just a context it hasn't had to face before. Languidgenius spent five minutes explaining to a thick head that threatening customers with physical violence is a good way to get permanently banned from a restaurant. Bandannaboy, who has a friendlier relationship with DeltaFarce, walked the big lug outside and eventually, amazingly, got him to leave voluntarily.

I don't think DeltaFarce quite appreciated just what he had done to himself. Maybe he wanted to make a big show of publicly picking a fight with me in order to scare the other regulars. That's his usual modus operandi in everything, anyway. Maybe as far as he was concerned, this was just between him and me, and didn't believe that anyone would want to intercede between me and his ridiculous muscles. But if he had a bad rep before, it's really in the hole now.

I think I've said before that often you don't quite know how deep a friendship runs until it's been tested, and the sad reality is that often, such tests involve bad circumstances. But a midnight snack and two hours after the fact, the day ended on a fine note. Just me, my friends, and a fond farewell to Hawaii.