Meltdown

I gave myself a full 48 hours to mull over The Meltdown, and have found, unsurprisingly, that there is no way I can tell this story without coming across as an actual lunatic; I have justifications, as you will see, but they aren’t exactly of the concrete variety for any right-thinking individual...the best way to encapsulate it is that I just snapped, and everyone is still around to tell the story.
No harm, no foul?
This little yarn begins on Saturday with an early-morning run to the coffee-shop before I started my workday; my coffee-shop is cursed with inadequate parking for the dawn-break rush of caffeine-addicts, so I took a back-road to circumvent the vulture-like circling for a spot commonplace on a Saturday morning. I found the road blocked by three parked city-trucks, a number of city-workers, and a one-man snow-shoveling vehicle that twists in the middle like a caterpillar...here on in, this machine will be referred to as a Bobcat-Lite.
Normally, with no "road closed" signs present, the workers will run around a little bit and then notice a car waiting to pass, getting out of the way with a modicum of expedience. However, as cars started piling up behind me, as I busied my mind with other matters assuming the blockage to be temporary, my pre-coffee daze allowed me to let FIFTEEN MINUTES tick off the clock - I double-taked the clock so violently that I had to go over some mental math to prove the possibility that so much time had been stolen from my life.
I slid my car into park, opened my door just enough to half-stand, and yelled, "move your ass!", followed by, "what the fuck are you doing?!" Here’s what they were doing: the grey-hair-mulleted foreman of the crew was snapping multiple digital-photos of a couple of asshat crew-members throwing salt on the sidewalk while the dipshit in the Bobcat-Lite twisted and wiggled his vehicle, doing little circles in the street and laughing with the photographer-foreman. After I yelled, Mr. Foreman gave me the finger, lit a cigarette, and continued laughing and taking pictures...this as the line of cars behind me snaked into the previous intersection, the occupants beeping and yelling out of their windows.
This, of course, is when I snapped like a city-worker’s neck under a car tire.
My car already parked, I turned off the ignition, got out, and walked over to the Bobcat-Lite, whereupon I lunged onto it like a puma onto a slow-footed antelope; feet on the base, hands on the roof, I shook this machine with the full force of my 178-lbs...I knew then that I had already gone too far and started to fully enjoy myself, thrusting my face to the sky and yelling "ATTICA!", craning my neck to scream "AT-TIC-A!" at the beyond-surprised Bobcat-Lite driver, shaking this glorified motorcycle until it was a stiff-breeze from tipping. I jumped down, and all frivolity had ceased, obviously...the only sound evident was my adrenaline-soaked panting. The beast inside the Bobcat-Lite pulled himself from the machine, and he was, almost-literally, TWICE my size; all I could envision was one of those meat-hooks he had hanging from his arm-socket swinging and belting me into a coma, so I did what any insane person would have done in that exact same situation: I screamed, "FREE JAMES BROWN!" at him.
To say that confusion followed would be a tremendous understatement; meat-hooks looked as though I had short-circuited his brain, stalling as he did in his advancement upon me; mullet-foreman tried to ask me something but I screamed obscenities at him until his body-language told me all I needed to know about how unhinged I looked. I made mention of how children playing hockey in the road at least get out of the way when cars approach, that these mentally-stagnant fuckjobs had less collective mind-power than a group of twelve-year-olds, the fairly-benign task of getting the fuck out of the way being too much for them to translate into action. There was a pause, as absolute a silence as that street may have ever witnessed, and they left.
They just left...reminiscent of the cop-incident a while back.
Meat-hooks got into his Bobcat-Lite and creeped down the alleyway behind the coffee-shop, the foreman and his salt-dispensing jackasses got into their respective trucks and, seriously, peeled away like a bunch of street-racers on a Friday night at Burger King.
I was left standing in front of a phalanx of beeping cars who were still in need of getting wherever it was they were going, sweating and stunned that the events turned out as they did.
Every day, incompetence rears its ugly head in the social-network of life, and if someone were to try and list such examples their hand would cramp up and their pen would run dry before they had even gotten through the previous week. This, though...this was the asinine behaviour of cushy-job-holding fucking morons who know that, above all else, the city would take the brunt of complaints against them, that they would get paid regardless of how poorly they did their jobs...I’ve thought this incident over long and hard since it happened, and though I feel a little guilty about losing my head, I can’t say I would’ve handled it any differently had I been fully-caffeinated and in a more logical state of mind, which, I believe, says more about my own mentality than I care to get into...
Moreover, if I was wrong in attacking the Bobcat-Lite to make my point, how did life return to normal directly after? Why did no-one call the police, why did the city-workers just leave, why did people in the coffee-shop smile at me while I waited for my turn in line? Is it because of the belief that "the ends justify the means"? Dangerous territory, that line of logic is...I think that’s why I called this "Meltdown" and not "The City-Workers Whom I Righteously Attacked".
Maybe, as my brother said, I’m in need of "marijuana-therapy"; I’m of the mind that maybe, just maybe, I need to knock this shit off.