Fleshed Out: Fist Fights

In referring to my previous post, the one with the survey (titled “Return To Those Surveys”), I answered each question with the intent to take into consideration whether I had performed said action at any point in my life, whether this was in adulthood or even in my formative years. Even though I’ve been around for many years, I hadn’t done a whole lot in the years that I have been given thus far.  This is what led to my referring to myself as average and plain.

User “chaoticbeauty” seemed to take interest in my survey and the responses I posted, specifically with the one regarding the extent to which I had ever been in a fist fight. I suppose I can elaborate, although in doing so, I want to say right now that the story is hardly exciting and nothing I thought I would have to flesh out. But I guess with these damn surveys, one may have inquiries to any one of the myriads of questions I have answered.

In a nutshell, the last fist fight in which I was involved occurred in my childhood. I was in my elementary school years and probably around the age of 11 or 12.  I grew up with a kid named Maurice, who for all intents and purposes, would have been considered my rival, even though in those years, I never saw him that way. He was just a kid my age who was always in some form of competition with me, even though I never played along.  We spent many of our elementary school years in the same classes.

Everything to Maurice had to be a competition. He always wanted the better grades, the majority of the teacher’s compliments, and the furthest kicked ball in kickball.  If there was any chance of something being competitive and something he thought he could beat me in, Maurice wanted to compete and do his damnedest to beat me.  Truth be told, as a kid and even now as an adult, I’m not that competitive. That doesn’t mean that I don’t engage in competition. It’s just that I don’t get bent out of shape or overly upset if I lose at something. I lose in fantasy football all the time. Sometimes I end up on bad teams in Call of Duty and find myself losing multiple, consecutive games. Losing doesn’t turn me into a raging ogre, set on destroying my immediate environment.  I just don’t care that much when I lose at something. So typically, while Maurice would be competing with me, more often than not, I never noticed or ever cared. Now, maybe he would sometimes get the better test score in any given subject or maybe he would happen to kick the ball harder than I did, but the one thing he could never compete with me in would be penmanship. Hands down, he’d lose this battle each and every time because, not to toot my own horn, but yes, I had and still have to this day, excellent penmanship.

Maurice didn’t beat me all the time.  At least, I don’t think he did.  I never paid that close attention anyway. I would learn of his losses and shortcomings because he would tell me. Actually, to be more accurate, he would bitch and whine about he almost beat me or how he was that close to beating me. I never noticed. I didn’t care that much.

So, maybe two or three times while we were growing up, Maurice would provoke me and try to get me to fight him.  I was never the type to want to involve myself in any kind of physical fight, brawl, or melee. I wasn’t that kind of kid either. But Maurice would provoke me and suddenly I’d find myself in the midst of a fist fight. It would start off with Maurice talking shit about how he could whoop my ass.  I’d ignore him. He’d keep running his mouth. I’d stop talking and eventually ignore him. He’d get mad and then start pushing me. He’d have to push me a second time because I didn’t budge after his first attempt. Then after the second, I’d get up and either push him or start swinging. Maybe we’d exchange punches, in that we would take swings at each other, though I don’t think any of these ever connected, to where anyone got hurt or even remotely grazed. It was an act of futility really, throwing punches that never reached their intended target. So, those are what I would refer to as fist fights. We swung our fists at each other, and in the end, we never landed any of our intended punches.  These fist fights would then devolve into wrestling matches, in that we would be on the ground trying to put the other in a headlock or some other kind of wrestling clinch.  Regardless of what these fights or wrestling matches might have looked like, I never cared enough about them to declare myself a winner or a loser in any of these.  This sort of thing was dumb and entirely avoidable, though apparently I couldn’t completely avoid it as a kid.

So, there you have it.  The Visionary in a fist fight.  A pretty bland story overall and nothing I would have written about.

I’ve never been in a fist fight as an adult, nor have I come close to being in such a confrontation as a grown man.  I don’t surround myself with such people, nor have I been in a situation where something like this was even a possibility.  Again, and to quote Rockwell (from his lone hit song “Somebody’s Watching Me”), “I’m just an average man with an average life”.

I don’t know what ever happened to Maurice through the years.  We parted ways after we graduated from elementary school and never ran into each other again.  I’m not devastated by it, nor had it ever crossed my mind that maybe I should look him up.

I wouldn’t have cared then.  Today, I still don’t care that much.