Knights

So this one time in college I was standing outside of this pizza place trying to explain something to a friend of mine. The kid just wasn't getting it. I wasn't really yelling at him because I wasn't really mad at him, but I had to seem sort of mad so he got the point. While we're standing there I notice there's a black BMW rolling down the street...with no one behind the wheel.

Now it's not moving very fast at all. I mean it's rolling down a flat street, looks like the guy forgot to put it in park when he got out to run in and grab a slice. It's not going to hurt anyone, but it will likely bounce off the next car parked down the street or roll over the curb and into the building. So I tell the kid I'm yelling at to hold on a second and I do what sort of seems natural at the time and step out into the street directly in front of the car, plant my leg on the ground and stop the car cold. Leaning against the car so it doesn't roll away again I turn my head back towards the kid I was talking to and pick up the lecture without missing a beat. The guy in the BMW comes running back out of the pizza place, thanks me profusely and drives away.

I was feeling pretty good about myself after that, I'd sorted a problem with my friend. Saved some guy the headache of his car banging something up, and actually did something while a whole bunch of people stood around doing nothing. But later on that night (this night actually:What I Didn't Do Tonight) I had a bad feeling about something and did nothing about it. Even though nothing came of it I chastised myself for not being more courageous. For not trying to guarantee nothing went wrong. I was pissed because I did nothing when I could have done something.

You don't get many chances to be brave or daring when you're a god damn desk jockey at a school bus company, but I like to think I make the most of mine. And it pisses me off when I don't. You need look no further than my post from last month when I chickened out and couldn't say hello to Whitney Matheson when she was standing three feet away from me as an example of my still lacking sense of courage.

Friday night I had another chance to be brave and instead I was just fucking apathetic. Shame on me again.

We were in the diner a little after two in the morning and all of a sudden a fight breaks out near the entrance. At first we all think it's just a little scuffle but then some kid comes back in with his shirt covered in blood. We hear shit breaking out in the hall. There's a lot of yelling. No one seems to be all that concerned yet. This is New Jersey afterall.

But then the lady who works the register starts getting all worked up and starts to get in between these four or five guys who are fighting. Now we have a problem.

We were all perfectly happy to sit there and watch the fight, no one was going to get involved. And here's this short little older woman with a metal serving spoon diving head long into the melee. At this point we're all standing, one of my friends (who is a bit tippsy) decides she's going to stop the register woman from getting hurt. Noble idea. Stupid too. Now there are several of us trying to get both women to back away from the fray. Now one of the bleeding guys is standing next to me screaming he's getting ready to throw chairs. Everyone there just sort of looks at him like, "Really?" Now I'm standing right near the fight with a waitress, the register lady, and two guys I've never seen before in my life. We're all trying to get the register lady to back away, but she's still dead set on diving right into it. One group of guys has now been pushed outside the diner door and the register lady is trying to hold the door shut from the inside so they can't get back in. I finally manage to pull her away and one of the other guys gets her back inside. Of course now I'm stuck holding the door shut as this one guy repeatedly tries to pull it open and/or kick the glass in. It was sort of amusing. But now that I see these kids up close my first thought is that if any one of us sitting inside had gotten up a few minutes earlier instead of sitting and watching it would have never gotten as out of control as it did. As the kids take off I stand in the parking lot with a waitress and an off duty cop and read off his license plate number. Then I go back inside and shake my head because I failed to do my part yet again. I could have done something and instead I did nothing. Fuck.

Didn't seem like anyone got hurt too bad, not too much damage to the diner either. So it's sort of a no harm, no foul situation. But I still feel shitty about not getting involved. Maybe it was the smart thing to do, but that doesn't make it the right thing to have done.

Today was a pretty iffy day as well. If it wasn't for the radiating swell of last night and the curiosity of the post midnight going ons this day might have been the first in the loss column in awhile. Instead the streak lives on...but barely. I was hoping the guys would be around tonight, but they weren't. I could have gone and visited an "old friend" for their first day at a new place, but there were a few mitigating circumstances and I was a bit beat (and sickly to boot). Instead I slipped and slipped and got worse and worse up until I got a call about a breakdown and had to run out and try to fix things.

Funny how trying to fix things makes me feel better.

So now it's getting late and I've got an early morning and a long day ahead of me tomorrow, so I'll shake my head once more at the strangeness that is my life and call it a night.

What a waste of an entry.

Shit.