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So anyway, "Ghost World" is about this dorky middle-age loser who hasn't had a date in four years and starts hanging out with a teenage girl who met him by humiliating him...
I suppose you can see how this movie would "touch" me and even leave me a little depressed. Not that I wasn't depressed before I saw it, but afterwards, though I'd seen one of the best movies of the year, I was in a really somber mood.
Because the movie was playing five hours away, I sort of combined it with a vacation (first weekend I haven't worked at a theater at all since September) and attempted to go clubbing afterwards, but that didn't pan out because I wasn't on "the guest list" at any place. Still managed to get rejected by a few women while standing in various lines...
So about 1 AM I gave up and decided to head back to the hotel room through the beach. I passed about ten couples having sex in the sand and came upon the eleventh. They were no different than the others... except there was this guy crawling up behind them. At first I thought, hey, he's just a pervert trying to get a closer look, and I shouldn't say anything because even though I'm walking by, I'm still no better than this guy by looking at them.
That's about the time he snatched the woman's purse. It was so dark and happened so quickly I wasn't quite sure what he had done, so all I did was yell "Hey." The couple heard nothing. I ran over to the guy and cut him off: "Hey, what the hell do you think you're doing?" He looks me over and says: "Shut up, man and I'll give you half of it!"
And that just set me off. Why? The whole thing happened so quickly that it may have been more instinct than anything else but in retrospect I have a few ideas about why I was so pissed off at a guy who had done absolutely nothing to me.
So anyway, I tackled him at that point (he was about 5'10, 180 pounds or so -- for those newbies who don't know, I'm 5'2, 120 lbs), and starting punching and kicking him with the intention of killing him with my bare hands. After a few seconds of punching back he managed to throw me off, keep the purse and run off. I dashed over to the couple (who somehow had not noticed this whole thing even though we were only about twenty feet away!) and said, "Excuse me, I hate to interrupt but I think that guy just stole something of yours!" The man climbs off the woman so she can check for her purse, which is indeed gone, and he pulled his pants up and the two of us took off after the thief.
Unfortunately, he disappeared into the shadows of the night before we could catch up to him.
So it was the topper to the perfect evening. I beat myself up over the incident the entire night because I felt so bad that the woman lost her purse and so angry at myself for not using this valid opportunity to kill another human being and thus releasing a whole lot of steam. I could have done so much more: I could have yelled sooner, I could have kicked the guy in the balls, I could have used my martial arts skills (even if they are 15 years old), I could have scared him with a toy gun (suicidal people like myself shouldn't EVER have possession of a real gun), I could have stabbed him with my knife (if I hadn't left the damn thing in my car) -- I could have cut the bastard's liver and watched his bile leak all over the sand. I could have been a hero. I could have exorcised a lot of demons by washing away this dandruff flake of society. He could have died for everyone else's sins against me. Nobody would have missed him -- nobody would have cared. Johnny Cochran could have gotten me off on justifiable homicide. But instead, I failed miserably and looked like a fool doing so.
The whole incident immediately reminded me of my closest friend in Alabama. One night when the theater at which we worked had just closed, she walked right by me to the next guy on the staff, a big ex-military type, and she asked him, "Could you escort me to my car?" He said, sure, gimme a second, and walks away. I confronted her and said, "Hey, what am I, chopped liver?" And she responded, "No offense, but I wouldn't exactly feel protected walking to my car with you." I never let her forget that. But it's obviously rather true. My "protection" of this woman (and my mother previously) was absolutely worthless -- I can't protect any woman from most of the threats like these that most other men can. Just what good am I?
Am I truly an evil person for taking out all my frustrations and disappointments of the last few years on this scumbag? (He's the first person I've punched or otherwise physically harmed in a good decade.) Is it so wrong to kill somebody intentionally during self-defense if most people would think they deserved to die anyway? Did I handle this situation wrongly? Was I foolish for risking my life over that stranger's purse or does it not really matter since I'm suicidal anyway? Is my whole theory about women like being protected by bigger men ridiculous (reminder: I didn't make that one up -- my female friends did)? How would you have handled the situation?
I feel pretty low right now. Not to mention sore. He walloped me something good, lemme tell ya. Looks like those years of powerlifting and martial arts lessons were pointless.
BTW, if you skipped post 1 of this thread because of what I said, you should read the last couple of paragraphs now because I do say something about the movie itself there...
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