The Muddled Male

Crushed Ego

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

 

It has been a particularly rough week for your friend the Muddled Male.  No, I didn’t have a root canal, and I certainly didn’t get another speeding ticket, since I now drive the legal speed no matter the urgency of the trip.  My goal is to avoid another $165 speeding ticket even if Ann, my wife, is in the middle of labor, which luckily she isn’t, and I have to rush her to the geriatric maternity ward.  I might make an exception if I am asked to be the judge at a French fry cooking contest and am running late, but anything else will have to wait until I can get there at or below the legal speed.

 

      My rough week occurred as I was participating in a planning meeting for a Church activity.  All went smoothly until the duties were to be assigned to various participating groups.  Bring the food, check.  Reserve the park, check.  Line up the games, check.  Cook the hamburgers and hot dogs……no response.  And then my friend RA looked right at me and said, “Let’s have the little guys do the barbecuing.”  Now I must admit that age may have caused me to shrink a bit, as it has many of the guys in the group I represent, but really, little guys?  Well, I accepted the assignment, but my ego was crushed and I decided that I needed to have an eye to eye talk with RA about her obvious and unfair bias caused, I felt, by the fact that she is tall.  Statuesque, I think is the word. 

      So, as the meeting ended I followed RA into the hallway, stood on my tip-toes, stretched to stand as tall as I possibly could, and found that I could look her in the chin, but not her eye.  The only thing I had left was to jump as I made my point.  [Jump] “I” [Jump] “am” [Jump] “not” [Jump] “a” [Jump] “little” [Jump] “guy!”  Well by now I was out of breath and passed out.  I came to long enough to see the flashing lights and hear one of the Medics say to the doctor on the other end of the radio, “We are bringing in a little guy who passed out from oxygen deprivation.  It is almost like he was doing something stressful at an altitude where he should have been on oxygen.”  As they put me on the stretcher I tried to cry out, “It’s the tall lady’s fault.  And I am not a little guy,” but I was out of breath.

 

 

 

Ed: Note:  And RA's little daughter asked if she could bring cookies to the people on Old People's Hill which actually happens to be where the Muddled Male lives...as do I,  hmmm.