No More Mr. Nice Guy

“It’s a mistake to think that error is anything but a constant in human life.”
—Philip Thompson


The winds were blowing this morning. I awoke to a loud bang. Then there was another. Then my neighbor called to say that my back gate had blown open. My neighbor’s gate had also blown open; the wind had pulled its latch out of the wall.

I got out of bed, dressed, went out into the wind, and closed and latched the gate. I suspected that it had not been properly latched by a workman. I gathered some ripe oranges that had been blown down and went back into the house.

Having placed the oranges in the kitchen sink to be rinsed later, I was going to look out the window of the kitchen door to see if there had been any damage on the windward side of the house when I noticed an earwig crawling on the white spiral cord of the wall phone. I decided to open the door, to bring the phone receiver outside, and to flick the bug off the wire onto the driveway.

After stepping outside with the phone, I looked for the earwig. It was gone from the cord. I looked down to see whether it had fallen off in the kitchen or outside. Just then the door, which opens outward, caught a heavy gust of wind, like that which had earlier blown open the back gate with a bang, and fiercely slammed into my forehead. The impact knocked me to my knees and also sent the fob of the key in the deadbolt lock flying onto the ground a few feet away.

I reeled into the kitchen, conscious enough to fear the shame of having been seen by any of my neighbors, dropped the phone on the floor as the wind slammed the door behind me, and fell to the carpet in the living room. The tensions pressing on my life—the illness and death of my dog, the invasion of my home by workmen, the end of the school semester, lack of sleep, a low-grade upper respiratory infection, exasperation at my stupidity, and the tragic condition of man—all piggy-backed upon the mental aftershock of the impact to my head, and I burst into tears like a four-year-old child.

The beep of the phone, complaining about being off the hook so long, pulled me out of my abjection. I hung up the receiver and then noticed that the key fob was attached to half the key, which had been snapped from the other half, still in the lock, by the same blow that had felled me. I spent some effort trying to pull what was left of the key out of the lock but failed, one of the needles of my needle-nose pliers having been broken off on some previous day of trial.

Giving up, I turned to put the tools away and saw, dark against the light background of the kitchen floor, the earwig. “And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall / On Mars’s armor, forged for proof eterne, / With less remorse” than my revengeful boot now fell upon that earwig.

Since these events, I have been stewing in a black cloud of rancor, which appears to bear the characteristics of a complete personality change. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Unless this act of writing tempers my condition through venting or sublimation or some other psychological process, anyone who wants anything from me, anyone who expects me to suppress my wishes or my autonomy or my government of my own household, had better watch out. Between the phone call, the neighbor, the workman, the gate, the misplaced compassion, the wind, the door, the vulnerable forehead, the fool behind it, the phone, the key, the tears, the shame, and the infernal earwig, I am myself become a Cyclops and will eat alive whoever has the misfortune to cross me today.


P.S., a few hours later: I’ve got a lump, but the headache’s gone, and the workman found a way to pop the broken key out of the lock. I guess things are looking up.