The warped philosophy behind the stare-dare hypocrisy

[FrankGSterleJr]

The following is yet another unconventional forum method of proposing a revolutionary societal concept ...


Citizen Lorne: Stare-Dare Game Master … Except at the Very End

Lorne Finster simply could not resist playing the ‘Stare Dare Game,’ as he himself coined the physically precarious act, when passing by a male of similar size—or even guys who are fairly larger—regardless of the fact that he had a strong hunch that the game indeed would, not might, eventually result in him getting severely injured or even killed as the direct result of his stare dare, or else the other guy paying the largest cost in every aspect of life. There’d be no real accurate way of knowing in advance; only after the game has been initiated and carried out to its extreme conclusion.
To play the stare dare game, its one ‘rule’ was typically very easily understood—though not at all so easy from which to physically heal should one be the ‘loser’—and it would be automatically assumed that the contestants didn’t fear getting thrashed or thrashing another human being:
In a nutshell, if two typically proud, hostile guys approaching each other, say, on a city sidewalk, or anywhere they’ll pass right by each other, the guy who looks and catches the other guy already staring at him, according to the unofficial rule, gets to stare back until the other guy looks away.
But Lorne usually did not play by the rule, and wouldn’t feel any more compelled to do so had it been written in a large, hardbound book available to read at any bookstore or public library. Indeed, he’d just as often as not initiate the stare dare and stick to his glare at the other guy, sometimes even at a non-consenting average-Joe (who, by the rule, had the ‘right of way’ to stare back and maintain such until the initiator himself looked away), as the guy looked at Lorne staring at him, didn’t feel like getting into a verbal then likely physical confrontation, and then looked away as the two passed by each other (and as Lorne perhaps even continued eyeing the guy, just for good measure).
Perhaps obvious, Lorne was really pushing his luck—especially considering his extremely-near-sightedness and expensive, special-feature glasses—when he’d play the game but blatantly break the rule; for, one day, maybe even imminently, the other guy or participant would also brazenly break the rule or simply respond in kind to Lorne’s audacity in regards to his ‘illegal stare dare.’ And, sure enough, on one overcast Monday afternoon in downtown Vancouver, Lorne met one of maybe many such future matches.

Conceivably, one can refer to this very imminent incident as “the perfect storm,” a situation in which (in this case, two) unique and anomalous conditions (e.g. pissed off over a perceived-unfair firing) collide together, like at a crossing of a very bad point in ‘time’ with that in ‘space.’
Not to be mistaken, however, Lorne had always known that such anti-social behaviour of his was the result of the Rubic’s Cube sized chip on his shoulder, which itself was the result of Lorne’s compulsion to over-compensate for all of the bullying he’d endured in his youth, though likely well blended with a pinch of clinical obsessive-compulsiveness. But if Lorne was also in a bad mood or simply ‘had an attitude’ on a particular day on which he’d end up in a stare dare, it of course considerably exacerbated the entire tough-guy situation (regardless of the fact that deep down, he knew that such a dish was best served cold).
In this particular case, it involved as one significant element Lorne being totally unjustly tongue-lashed by an unruly, female fellow bus passenger; and even worse, one against whom he, and quite likely also his verbal assaulter, knew that he couldn’t retaliate satisfactorily, in the physical sense because he was always the chump type to take fisticuffs from females, young and old, while doing naught but his best to manoeuvre around or deflect their swinging fists. Thus, that Monday afternoon, Lorne was left with only bitterness and burning, angry frustration.
The other, significant element, the approaching guy who was slightly larger than Lorne in all three dimensions but not a ‘fear-factor’ problem for the latter; and inside the now-fast-approaching guy’s boiling-blood brain was a mind infested with fury over a cheating common-law wife who also took him for virtually everything he had, including every penny saved up in their (now empty) joint bank account.
Indeed, at that point in space and time, he actually detested his entire corporeal existence “on this lousy bitch planet, not surprisingly referred to as ‘Mother Earth’!”
Although Lorne’s approaching to-be stare-dared opponent’s misogyny was not the norm for the guy’s overall attitude, he was quite angry at the entire female gender as well as men who knowingly have had affairs with other guys’ girlfriends, common-laws and/or officially-wedded wives; thus, he was more than willing to teach-a-good-lesson to the next male who’d just look at him atypically to the societal norm of a quick glance before looking back forward.
There were about four metres between the two angry, young men when Lorne—once again willing to break the game rule and push the envelope of his luck for yet another time—initiated a stare-dare with the other guy, who, when noticing Lorne’s stare, in just turn locked his glare with that of Lorne’s. The two were closing the final metre-gap between them, but neither, although the game rule dictated that Lorne break away from the stare dare, gave in, instead turning their heads to maintain the stare as long as possible.
The other guy stopped, still glaring at Lorne, and rhetorically asked (for he’d known the game rule himself), “Do you have a problem?”
“Yeah, I do,” replied Lorne, as he’d always say in exactly such scenarios. “You’re staring.”
“You were staring first, pal, and kept on staring,” the guy explained for the last time before challenging. “So either you walk away with your tail between your legs, or I bust your head.”
Lorne grinned as he lifted his silver necklace and two crucifix trinkets and dropped them down the inside of his T-shirt—the irony of the crucifix’s symbolism of ‘Christian peace, compassion and pacifism’ seemingly totally lost on him—before doing his own explaining: “You see, I need my specs to see the location of your face as I’m beating it, so if you break them, I’m going to break your two, front teeth in recompense with my ‘knuckle buster’…”
As Lorne said this, still grinning, he twisted from side-to-side a large chunk of silver ring on his right hand. It indeed could easily break teeth, and Lorne went on to explain a little more: “And just so you’re not mistaken, I’m not intending to knock out your two front teeth—which can relatively-easily be reinserted by any competent dentist—but rather to literally break each of the two, leaving their nerves bared and you in pain until they can be expensively capped.”
“Well dittos on that,” the guy answered Lorne’s bold threat with a smirk and twist of his gold ring, though clearly not as large. “A ‘knuckle buster’ of my own … I’m sorry to disappoint you,” returned the guy, apparently quite unfazed, “but I’m going to bust your ‘specs,’ and your teeth plus, like I’ve already said, your head.”
The guy stepped up to Lorne, putting his face but five inches from Lorne’s. “It’s your move,” he uttered his physical challenge, to which Lorne uttered back even more brashly, “I never play white and move first … In a psychological sense, I fight much, much better when I’m forced to react.”
The two tough-guy-wannabes stared, deeply glared, into one another’s eyes for no more than 15 seconds before Lorne’s opponent chanced ‘playing white’ and gave his foe a solid shove to the chest, procuring Lorne’s slight stumble backwards. The latter stepped back forward and returned the initiating physical-contact assault with some due interest payment.
And that was it.
The guy not only pulled himself back forward into his standoff position (i.e. face-to-face), but he threw a lightning headlock onto Lorne, knocking his glasses a half-dozen feet towards the ground on which stood gawking bystanders, both the bloodthirsty and the just-curious. Adding to his headlock on Lorne were the guy’s four blows to Lorne’s face, one that would leave Lorne with a day-after shiner.
But that would be all, as far as he was concerned, for he ‘saw red’—not red as in blood (not yet, anyway), but red as in his own blind rage: He pulled his head, or forced it, out of the oppressive headlock so suddenly that the guy who landed four punches against its face soon found his own head held downwards in a solidly-stiff and soon-damaged position; with the guy’s head’s hair held tight by Lorne’s unrelenting grip and a steady flow of seven uppercuts, matters were promptly halted by a couple of guys larger than the two scrappers, who acted as Good Samaritans. Splitting the two up, they’d actually spared Lorne’s brief-nemesis from receiving, besides his somewhat bloodied nose, a would’ve-been sight of naught but bright, streaking stars from the rage-filled hammering to his eyes along with the bouncing about within his skull of his brain.
“Mind your own f——g business, you a—holes!” Lorne, breathing a bit heavy as was his opponent, blared at the two, self-anointed referees before bellowing rhetorically, “Are you only going to stick your big noses in the ring when I’m on top?!”
“Hey—enough’s enough!” insisted one Samaritan, holding out to Lorne his intact glasses. “You’ve bloodied him up … What more do you feel the need to prove?”
“Well he moved first—he shoved me,” Lorne retorted. “The ‘last move’ is therefore rightfully mine.”
The Samaritan then went silent for a few seconds before continuing as he looked down at Lorne’s T-shirt’s chest area where his crucifix-trinkets necklace was hanging just minutes before: “I notice you conveniently hid your ‘Christianity’ under your shirt when …”
“It’s not ‘hid’,” Lorne interrupted. “I put it there so as not to have it torn off in pieces—it’s quite expensive, you know, for me to fix every time I get … into … whatever.”
Then another three seconds of silence. “But why do you even wear it? You’re obviously not a true follower of Christ’s teachings, especially not His pure pacifism.”
“I wear it first and foremost as jewellery and secondly as a symbol of what I’d choose to be had I in me what it takes to even bother trying.”
And that was definitely one of those times that Lorne was a million miles away from having Christ “within [him] to even try” to be Christ-like, a state of humane being that those silver trinkets would typically, though erroneously in Lorne’s case, suggest: for, he motioned his body to appear to be calming down, but he instead leapt at the already injured guy and sucker-punched him to his left temple just as the guy was finishing wiping clean the mostly dried blood from the facial area under his nose. The guy, however, seemed to instantly see far more red than the blotch of dried blood on the back of his hand; indeed, he lunged into Lorne’s torso area, slamming his back and head into the cement-block wall of the Sears department store next to which they had been scrapping.
Then, armed with his 10K gold ring, the guy thrust his fist at Lorne, literally cracking him into his mouth, and the latter’s head again struck the cement-block Sears wall.
They both stopped, and Lorne could be seen feeling with his tongue what was left of his left, front tooth: “Ooww! Shit!” he practically squealed, before again emphasizing the excruciating nerve-hit pain inside his mouth. “Ooowww! F—k me!”
He then felt the busted stub of that tooth with his finger to confirm through non-tongue means what he readily expected. “My tooth’s broken ...,” he whined, just before sucking in cool air through his mouth, which ignited the raw-nerve sensation in the broken tooth’s stub like a firecracker: “Oh, f——g Moses!!” he bellowed, inadvertently blaspheming a very significant figure of his implied faith, before immediately placing his hand over his throbbing mouth.
“F—k this!” Lorne succumbed to his ‘victorious’ foe. “I’m outta here.”
Lorne indeed walked away with his figurative tail between his legs; he was the one who’d gotten his tooth knuckle-busted, just a moment before swallowing it away (not that it would be of any use, regardless, he noted to himself).
But “just for now,” he tried to convince himself, he’d swallow his pride and wouldn’t be focusing on his rage for a while ... Actually, for a very long while, as it would turn out. Lorne, from then on, played the “Stare Dare Game” strictly according to its noble rule.


Frank G. Sterle, Jr.
White Rock, B.C., Canada