Sunday Bloody Sunday

Last Sunday, I was negotiating to park at a valet parking slots of my usual mall.

Suddenly, we heard a loud and long blast of horn from a red car whose driver attempted to overtake from the right. I halted to a full stop, and when I saw that the red car had also stopped, I proceeded to take the parking slot.

The red car, I later learned, was driven by a man we will call Ignited Sunday (if you spoke Spanish, you can figure it out). He slowly moved his car forward and stopped behind our vehicle, blocking us should we want to back out of the slot.

After 30 seconds. I alighted from my vehicle, approached the red car on the front passenger side and knocked on the window. When Dr. Sunday opened the window, I cordially offered my apology.

However, Dr. Sunday exploded and accused me of being rude and that I was driving too fast. I argued that I couldn't have turned that fast, otherwise my vehicle would have hit his car.

As I was speaking, he jolted his car forward, rudely attempting to escape the argument he started. I flung an open palm at his car's right rear window, knowing that it would not do any damage.

When Dr. Sunday stopped, I told him that since he started to harass us by parking behind our vehicle, he better be man enough to stand up and fight. As he began to drive away again, I managed to land another open palm strike on the right rear window.

We later met at the customer relations office at the invitation of the mall’s customer relations office, where Dr. Sunday had the audacity to file a complaint against me. Accompanied by a younger man, he again started to make statements: like I was not supposed to park there, and that I was driving too fast. He even threatened to have the police pick me up.

I angrily enumerated how flawed his arguments were:
1. I was parking at a valet slot, where I always park and was not violating any rule.
2. I could not have been driving fast since the slot was tight.
3. He was wrong for trying to overtake from the right.
4. When I approached him, my first action was to apologize and avoid an argument but he was hot-headed.

Dr. Sunday was belligerent and abrasive, so I informed the security commander that I had no time for this nonsense, and then left.

What I hated over the whole incident was that I needed to posture superiority in order to stomp out Dr. Sunday’s need to be macho, which obviously turned to cowardice when he saw the size of me.

It was a senseless engagement borne of arrogant positioning. It makes me remember a certain lawyer whose response to our appeal to seek for the truth was to “impugn the probative value of the testimony.”

In my humanity, I sometimes wish I could do harm to these kinds of people, so forgive me:

What can you do?
What can you do?
With a brat like that always on your back
What can you lose?
What can you lose?
What can you lose?
With a brat like that always on your back
What can you do?
Do, yeah

Beat on the brat
Beat on the brat
Beat on the brat with a baseball bat
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh-oh

- Written by John Cummings, Douglas Colvin, Thomas Erdelyi and Jeffrey Hyman
   (performed by U2)