Cruel Moments

Pissant little vandals. Lost my third mailbox to some goddamn redneck with a baseball bat. It offends me that the poor treat the poor this way. I'll have to go into town and get another. Cheap, at Big Lots, and I don't want to spend the money on a seriously indestructible unit that would take the arms off anyone who hit it from a moving truck. I sputter around for a couple of hours, in a seething fit, get a drink and roll a cigaret, then actually start feeling a bit sad. A life in which smashing a mailbox with a bat is the high point. It's difficult for me to imagine the rage and stupidity involved. I've made it known locally that I'm home most of the time and that I answer the door with weapons at hand, mostly gardening tools but who could ever forget Billy Bob and his sling-blade? Frustration, existential angst? Makes me want to camp out under a camo poncho with a shotgun. Blow out their fucking tires. I might have two or three redneck assholes mad at me, but I'd have the shotgun. I don't want this to the escalate, so I just buy cheap mailboxes. It's really a minor expense. What is the motivation of people who just smash things? I don't think I've ever broken anything in anger, though I might have thrown a particularly bad novel across the room. WHY AREN'T THEY FISHING? There are better things to do than smash mailboxes with a baseball bat. You could be catching bats in a butterfly net, banging Mary Sue in the back seat of a '68 Chevy, reading an article in Outdoor Life, but smashing a fucking mailbox? I'm sorry, I can't remember ever feeling the urge to go around and smash things. I did once help wrap a house in toilet paper. I was working the night shift at a bowling alley, we stole a case, 96 rolls, and wrapped a place completely. I spent the night under a dock on the Inter-coastal Waterway, got away in the morning smelling like dead mullet, but they had to cut their way out with machetes. Good fun. Got up well before dawn again and read for a couple of hours, it's such a lovely time of day, quite cool, 55 degrees, and I have to find a light-weight sweatshirt (the sweatshirts from Florida are quite thin) to wear until the sun comes up. Make a list and head to town. A slow leak in one of my tires, so I get that fixed, then the library (Larson's new book on the sinking of the Lusitania) then to the hardware store for a new mailbox and numbers, then the pub for soup and a beer. When I got the mailbox and numbers and went to the counter at ACE Hardware, Chuck was there. Large and extremely knowledgeable in the broad field of hardware, got a shit-eating grin on his face and said that I must live on the west side, because he'd sold at least a dozen mailboxes this week. He warned me not to hide under a camo poncho and shoot them with rock salt. TR, on the other hand, felt that some violence could be excused. But I don't want to start a range war over a mailbox. B and Zoe were at the pub, and Zoe had some good advice, she's a very smart practical person. Also she can eat like a horse and still look fine; she advised I get a safe deposit box, deposit therein whatever might be of value. Give a key to a third party.