Take Backs

You know the phrase "If I knew then what I know now..."? Sometimes when I'm in a pensive mood, I think about things that happened a long time ago. When you've got kids, you start remembering things from a long time ago. I was thinking yesterday of an incident from Junior High. None of my friends were in my lunch hour so I was sitting at some random table with some guys I went to grade school with. Apparently they had deemed themselves cooler than I and some scrawny punk came over, asked me to sit somewhere else, and squished pudding on my shirt. He must have thought that I would sulk sadly away but to his surprise I came across the table at him and gave him a healthy helping of my cream cheese packet. Well, after a brief scuffle, he gave up, I finished my lunch, and they never bothered me again.

This is why I don't go to my high school reunions. If I saw punks like that again that gave me shit when I weighed a buck thirty five in high school, I don't know if I could resist the temptation to bitch slap all those idiots now that I top the scale at 204 and I've got 34 years of frustrated rage built up.

Anyway, I've got a partial list of other times from the past that I wished I would've done things a little differently. If I had a magic way-back machine here's what I'd do:

1. To that kid in sixth grade who sat on my chest over by the baseball fields: I should've kicked you in the balls. If I see you at the mall next time I'm visiting Detroit, I'm going to knee-cap you with the five iron I keep in the back of my van.
2. To that butt-hole in junior high who tripped me when I was running to catch the bus: You were a pencil-necked punk and if I wasn't running late I would have made you eat the three day old tapioca pudding I had in my backpack and then I would have shoved that queer "RUSH" t-shirt you used to wear with the gay white owl on the front down your throat while I pummeled your huge Adam's apple with my fists. And by the way, I pissed on your bicycle seat every time there wasn't anyone standing by the bike rack.
3. To that girl in high school who wouldn't go to prom with me: Why were you so picky? I wasn't when I asked you.
4. To that girl in college who made me take her home early on our date because she had a "paper" to do and then was never heard from again: I was the only one who would go out with you in junior high before you "blossomed". And even after that, you weren't that great looking.
5. To all the other losers I went out with....ah, I should just use the way-back machine to stop taking vengeance and use it for good, like convincing the Gore Campaign to spend an extra couple of million in Florida Back in 2000. It felt good to vent though...