Sunday, May 18, 2008

On my way to a party...

As I strolled the streets, a ruckus, a fuss snared my ear drums. Cranking up a sense of expatriate awareness, as if I could possibly find this life in potential jeopardy, my spidey sense honed into a rioting crowd flailing about down the hill. Wings awkwardly flapping with intent to strike sense into the head of an agressor met no opposition from the bleached officer amid the fight club. Living here has allowed me to see how contagious anger raptures the mind of innocent bystanders. And in this chaotic moment, as I resumed my seat on the front row after darting onto a safer sidewalk, to my astonishment, a graying elderly woman transformed her purse into a weapon of Egyptian destruction rebuking one of the young combatants with a purse-fist-verbal assault combo. A chuckle somehow slipped from my throat, countered tactfully with a somber and pompous head shake of attempted disapproval. "You'd never see a fight in the middle of the day like this in the States," I boasted. "We would do it the sophisticated way - wait until dark and gather a gang of roughnecks and vandals to secretly destroy the property of our caviling foe. Face-to-face, fist-to-fist, nose-to-nose, is just to close; we need to respect others' need for privacy and personal space.

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