The DarkFlameboy Rises

I’ve been pretty angry recently, about a lot of things. At the same time you will note (presents pie chart and bar graph) a meteoric rise in occurrences of me standing up for myself, fighting back, and just generally ‘telling it like it is’. Is there anything more annoying?

So far instances of this phenomenon have been fairly contained, and have ranged from me getting into fights with friends previously un-fought-with over a stolen brownie to more intense defence situations. What opened the floodgates has a lot to answer for, especially now that I’m fighting back and I’m taking it...

TO THE STREETS!

BOOM!

I love a good sound effect.

This morning I did what may count as the coolest thing I will ever do in my entire life, and that’s really saying something (coz y’all know I’m cool as a... okay, well I can’t say ‘cucumber’ at the end of that, because that is terminally UNcool). Let me paint you a wee scene:

Picture it. Sicily. 2012.

Please note that ‘Sicily’ here translates into non-pop-culture-reference-speak as ‘Glasgow’.

After waking up from what can only be described as a prolonged night of rest (or, alternatively, ‘sleeping in’), I threw on some might I say fabulous clothing and left the house for the last day of work at Glasgow Film Festival, which I have been spending the last six months working on (I know, playing catch-up on the story here, aren’t we? Gainful employment, living in the big city – it’s all go).

Five minutes out of my front door, and someone in a shell suit started taking the mickey. That’s TAKING the mickey, not to be confused with an amazing joke I made last week about a friend’s interview for a technician job on Disney Cruise Lines: “teching the Mickey”.

cough

Anyway, it seems that the hat I was wearing offended him. He was obviously out of sorts, and I could see why (if two of my friends had turned up to a social gathering in the exact same shell suit as me, I’d be mortified too), so he decided to take it out on me.

“He’s wearin’ a HAT!”

(Resist temptation to say “does anyone still wear a hat?” – not the time for Sondheim)

His friends, obviously also riled by their fashion faux-pas, joined in. I can still hear the seagull-like echoes in my ears even now (was I just tripping and this whole thing happened with a passing group of seagulls?!).

My instant instinct (yuk, that sounds awful) is like a leftover survival thing from high school: keep your head down, keep walking, pretend you can’t hear them because you’re better than them and maybe they’ll leave you alone. And I was happy to keep with that. I was. I’m incredibly used to it (being a geek AND gay is just asking for it, really). I could do that for the rest of my life, and was expecting to. I never planned on standing up to someone that could just as easily have a knife in their pocket and carve me up to look like... well... a very carved up thing. I was fine to just walk on by.

Until one of them pinched my hat.

“Geez yer hat!”

Now I’d like to say that the hat is not mine. I’m borrowing it from a very sweet friend who saw how much I liked it and gave me it for the weekend as a good luck thing for an audition (maybe that’s what I should be writing about?), and obviously I had to get it back. If it were mine to gee, I would gladly gee him ma hat, but, alas...

Suddenly, my survival instinct left me. Totally left me.  Left me cold, alone and so stupid that I very quickly shot back with:

“Geez yer maw!”

I can’t believe it! What did I just say! Think of a way out, think of a way out – FIX IT RIGHT NOW!!!

Shoved him. Grabbed the hat. Ran. All the way to work.

It’s all pretty awesome til I mention the running away part.

Damn it. My feet are still geeks.