Something happened to me recently involving a child so surreal, I almost wonder if I hallucinated the whole thing.

But, no, this was real.

The other day I'm walking into a hardware store; This store, by the way, is packed with high-school kid employees, all of them good looking, all of them confident.  Every time I'm in there, I think, "what the hell are all the cool kids doing working at a hardware store?"  I'm about to walk into Hardware the Musical, and I hear glass breaking close by.  I turn my head and see shards of glass and a 10 year old boy holding the end of a broken bottle looking at me, making scowling noises: "Eeeeehhh."  He was about 15 feet away, eye-to-eye holding the jagged thing and looking straight at me, going, "eeeehhh, eeeehhhh, eeehhhhh." He's crouched down on the parking-lot blacktop right next to the sidewalk grey, glass on the blacktop, looking dead in my eye, and I could't figure out if it was a joke or he was serious. "Eeehhhhh Ehhhhhh, Ehhhhh." 

I just stood by the door to Hardware the Musical, looking back at him, trying to communicate the message of, "Allright; but I'm gonna treat you like a man.  Are you ready to be a man?" 

If a 10 year old boy threatens a stranger with a broken bottle, joking or not, he's not a boy any more.  He just became grown midget;  and I will fuck a midget up.  I think my face got the message accross, because the precious little psycho shrugged and walked off.  That, or he just got bored.  I also thought, "Man, I kinda' like this kid." 

If you're reading this thinking, "Why didn't you teach him a lesson?"  He had a broken bottle in his hand.  Lesson time over.  Unless the boy rushed me, I don't teach to get stabbed.   He was probably joking.  But, like I wrote above, who the hell jokes like that.?  To a stranger?

And, why is that hardware store filled with extremely well adjusted teenagers?  It's a goddam hardware store. 

When it was over and I finally made it into the store, I'm waiting for a key to get made. I see some other kid flashing his infer-red pointer light at various things in the store. Then he fixes it on me.   I look him in the eye and very slowly and seriously shake my head.  He turns it off and walks down another isle sheepishly.

Kids.