fuck off, grandpa

I've been taking it up the ass from a lot of old men lately.

The first incident occurred a few nights ago while my friend and I were sitting in a movie theater watching "The Wrestler" (a phenomenal flick by the way). We were whispering back and forth, admittedly, when this prickly old bastard in a white-collared shirt who was sitting by himself in the row in front of us spun around and shamed us. He didn't "shush" us exactly, but he definitely threw his hands up in the air and let out this sigh of unbridled rage, like the red-faced Dad at the Little League game who disagrees with the ref's call.

Why am I the one who's miffed when I was obviously talking during the movie like an asshole and probably deserved to be chastised, you ask? Because a). We weren't talking that loudly and b). the breach of etiquette in question took place during a pivotal moment in the film when literally everybody else in the theater was talking, too. I mean, I'm sorry, sir, that I can't watch Mickey Rourke fish staples out of his bleeding flesh without uttering a single sound. And I'm sorry that you're obviously such a repressed automaton that you have no higher-level emotional reaction to a scene like that.

Whatever.

The second incident, the one that really provoked violent sex offender fantasies involving fish hooks and deep-fried scrotum in me, took place a couple nights later in Berkeley. I had just finished shopping and returned to my parked car on College Avenue. There I was sitting inside with the motor running, rifling through my purse trying to find my cell phone before I drove off, when I was surprised by a rap on the window. It was another angry old man, this time some professor-looking motherfucker in a tweed jacket. I couldn't hear exactly what he was saying through the window, but the gist of it was that he wanted me to shit or get off the pot. I guess he had been waiting for me to pull out so he could take my parking spot. He had this look of total righteous indignation on his face, like I had deliberately wronged him. His angry-old-man eyebrows were knitted together like two fat, gray caterpillars locked in a death match over a maple leaf.

Now granted, driving in any city sucks ass and Berkeley is no exception. College Ave. in particular is so irritatingly congested at all hours of the day and night that, at times, I myself have felt like beating the shit out of someone for their parking space. And yes, it is especially annoying when there's a long, angry line of cars forming behind you and you're double-parked with your signal on, waiting for the dipshit whose space you're after to stop jerking off and get the fuck out of there so you can park your damn car. But that said, when did it become a socially acceptable practice to actually walk up to a person sitting in their vehicle and demand that they move for you? I mean, how did this guy even know I was planning to leave my spot, anyway? What if I had just returned to my car for a second to grab a condom from the glove compartment and was about to head back inside the bar? Or what if I was waiting there for my paraplegic mother to finish using the ATM machine and roll back to the car in her wheelchair?

Anyway, my point is that he was a pushy, presumptuous old prick. And if I had had a copy of "War and Peace" handy, I would have turned off the ignition, rolled down the window and started reading aloud just to spite him.