Don't be an a-hole!

I am now frighteningly close to 50 years old, and that has caused me to undergo some serious self-examination.

No, I don’t mean looking for new places from where hair is now sprouting. (Seriously, what’s up with that? I think if men could live to be 200 years old, we’d be covered in hair like an ape. I bet Methuselah resembled a Tibetan yak when he finally kicked the bucket).

I’m talking about the need to examine the type of person I’ve become, or person that I was all along, and am just now really realizing it. Let me give you an example:

The other day, I was running on the trail at a nearby elementary school, when I see this guy with a big dog. I immediately got agitated, because dogs aren’t allowed at this park, and there are signs posted everywhere to that effect, but this guy apparently just ignored it. But I decided to let it go, figuring he didn’t know any better.

Then I came around the corner and his dog –a big one, probably around 70 pounds – was running around without a leash. I came close to saying something but was still going to remain quiet, until the dog made a couple of kamikaze runs at my legs and knocked me off balance. I snatched out my earbuds, turned around and yelled at the guy “Hey, there’s no dogs allowed here. There are signs all over the place.”

The man said, “Really? I used to be able to bring my dog here.”

“Well, you can’t now,” I said. “And especially not on a leash. You can’t let a dog run anywhere in the county without a leash, dude.” Yes, I called him “dude”. And having told this fella what’s what, I haughtily snapped my earbuds back in place and did another lap.

When I came back around, I noticed he was sitting on a bench, and his dog was nowhere to be found. Well, this was ridiculous, I thought. He’s just going to ignore me and the signs and let his dog run around and terrorize people. So I walked over to have a word.

As I got closer, I noticed this man was pretty old – probably at least 75. He was sweating profusely, and as I got close he looked at me with a very sad expression.
“I’m very sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been here in 7 years and I didn’t’ know they had banned dogs from the park.” I said OK, no problem, then he said, “I can’t get him to come back. I just adopted him from the shelter a few weeks ago and he doesn’t mind me yet. I’m afraid I’m too old to go chase him.”

Well, now I was feeling lower than a frog’s ankle. I saw the dog a few feet away, near a creek, and I was able to go over and grab him and hold him while the man came over. He thanked me profusely and apologized again, and I nodded and ran off before he had a chance to tell me that his wife had just died or his other dog had gotten run over or something else that would make me feel even worse.

So I got to thinking as I continued my run, and a very troubling question popped into my brain and it wouldn’t go away, even when I put Van Halen on my iPod and turned the volume up to 11, and the question was this: Am I an a-hole?

I think it’s quite possible. I certainly acted like one toward that old man. And it’s not the first time I’ve done that.

There was a woman who worked downstairs in the cafeteria in my office building. She would dip the vegetables, and she was frighteningly slow and confused most of the time. You asked for squash, she’d give you corn. You asked for butterbeans, you might get cabbage. You get the picture.

I would get very frustrated with this woman, roll my eyes, say things under my breath, and generally act like – well, an a-hole. I remember once I actually muttered, “Is it really that hard?” I must have said it louder than I thought, cause I looked around at the other people in the line, and they were all staring at me like I’d just stepped on a kitten.

So one day, I was going through the checkout line, and there was a framed photo of the woman by the cash register, and I heard the cashier telling the customer in front of me that the lady had died the previous weekend. Feeling a bit abashed, I asked the cashier what had happened.

“Oh, she had Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” she said. “Poor thing, she just didn’t want to be stuck at home, so she kept working for as long as she could. We sure do miss her. She was the sweetest thing.”

Holy Crap. Lou Gehrig’s Disease? What kind of an a-hole would fuss at a woman fighting Lou Gehrig’s Disease? (In my defense, I didn’t KNOW she had that – but still).

So maybe I really am just an a-hole. I don’t have a reason to be. I complain about my job, but I know some folks who have been out of work for a long time and are desperate to find a job. I get frustrated because my back and stomach have hurt every day for 3 ½ years, but I have some friends who are fighting cancer, and they aren’t letting it get them down at all.

I actually got angry the other day when the DVR messed up and I missed about 15 minutes of the golf tournament I was watching. Think about that – I’m sitting in an air-conditioned house, watching a TV screen the size of a billboard, a bag of chips on my lap, and I’m able to hit the pause button so I can leave the room and never miss a second of what I’m watching – and it made me angry that I had to miss 15 minutes of millionaires hitting balls around a big green pasture.

There are other instances. There are probably drive-through windows all over metro Atlanta with my photo on the wall and the words “Be on the lookout for this impatient a-hole” underneath. There quite likely are photos taken by traffic cams that could be used against me in a political campaign because of the gestures I used. And God help me if any of the other drivers are lip-readers.

Now, again in my defense, there have been some a-holes through history who accomplished some great things. These include:

• King Herod, who allegedly killed a lot of babies, but also built some really cool things in Jerusalem.
• Gen. George Patton, who slapped a shell-shocked soldier in the face, but killed a lot of Nazis.
• Musicians such as John Lennon, Neil Young and Elvis Costello, who often weren’t much fun to be around but who made some of the greatest albums of all time.

Of course, I haven’t accomplished anything, so maybe I really need to just stop being an a-hole altogether. I have no excuse. I might some day get cancer or Lou Gehrig’s disease or a big dog I can’t control – wait, I already have that one – and the last thing I’ll want to deal with if any of that happens is some a-hole.