Peace can be Unsatisfying

At about 9:30 on a Wednesday night I was already in bed, watching The Larry Sanders Show on DVD. The children had taken my energy from me and used it to tear apart the art room, pieces of string hanging from the ceiling, the caps taken off of alll the markers and used to make some sort of elaborate marker-top-castle where Lilly the Puffball Queen (a purple cottonball with glued on googly eyes) lived with Prince George the Popsicle Stick on a carpet of shredded construction paper and needlessly straightened paper clips. Beer and Garry Shandling were helping me to forget when my phone rang and a new acquaintence from the day before invited me to go swimming at Brown's Island. And I thought, "Why let the children turn me into an old man before I am thirty?" So I went.
I knew one person there pretty well, but everyone else I had just met. I had also (don't mock me) never been to Brown's Island, and there was a feeling of new life, as though by doing something outside my routine I was defeating the children, taking my energy back from them and putting them in their place. It was like I had caught all 150 of them running and made them collectively go back and walk.
As we approached the river we heard hooting. A voice with a bit of a drawl yelled out "YEAH JUMP MOTHERFUCKER! WOO WOO!"
When we got closer we saw a group of half a dozen rednecks were there ahead of us, and that they were drunk. We could tell they were drunk because they were yelling things like, "WOO! I AM SO FUCKING DRUNK YOU NIGGER FAGGOT! HOOOOOWWEEEEE." They were something.
We decided to put off swimming in hopes that this group would leave soon. They did not, so we sat on the beach and made conversation and drank our own beer.
After fifteen minutes or so another group arrived wearing full-length black trenchcoats. One of them had a really long beard, and another was carrying a walking stick that I mistook for a sword. As they positioned themselves in a row by the water smoking cigarettes one of my new acquaintences pointed out that they looked like the back cover of an album by a death metal band. And then the rednecks, which was to our left, started yelling to the death metal band, which was to our right. For a moment, I thought we would be caught in a crossfire between them, but the Death Metal band failed to rise to the bait. They started to leave. As they did so a redneck yelled out "Silly faggot, dicks are for chicks!" Apparently because they had long hair. Everyone knows gay people grow their hair out because they want to look like girls. It's common knowledge.

Now I consider myself a peaceful person, and have in the past have been irritatingly smug and self-satisfied about it. I have looked at other people, people much mor reasonable than these rednecks, and thought, "They have no understanding of current events. They are narrow and cruelly self-interested. And blood thirsty. They think they can solve all their problems by bombing people. I'm so glad I am better than that." How strange then to find myself feeling disappointed to find out the sword was a walking stick, that there would be no blood shed. I was actually let down that the rednecks were just full of a lot of beer and epithets but basically harmless, let down that the young men in trenchcoats, while dressed unusually for a hot July evening, were sensible enough to avoid a conflict with someone who equates long hair with buggery. For a brief moment I had a great story to tell- "Yeah, it was insane, the redneck was swinging this broken beer bottle and this dude with a beard like Gandalf sliced him open with a samurai sword (no really, a SAMURAI SWORD) and we all had to run for it! I still don't know what heppened to that guy Kevin- I hope he made it out okay."- and then it evaporated in a cloud of reason and maturity. Life was once more boring. The children were running again, and my calls to them went unheeded.