Insult + Injury

You can always make a bad situation worse.

I'm not positive that you can always make the situation that you're in better, but I do think you can always make something worse than what it is. I sometimes find myself wondering how I could make a situation go terribly wrong, right while I'm sitting there, supposed to be listening to someone else. I'll be at a gas station or something, waiting in line, and wondering what the clerk would do if I just slapped him in the face when he told me the total for my chips. Or what the elderly woman in the Honda Civic next to me would do if I just rammed her for no reason as we both merged onto the highway. What would my boss do if I threw a battery through his office window while he was watching? I mean, he probably should fire someone for that, but he might be so confused that he just talks to me about it for an hour and then lets it go. I don't know, I usually don't do the things I'm imagining like this, but I imagine these things quite often.

I wrote a post a while ago about giving into the random impulses that come about for no reason, and this is kind of like that. But not quite. This is more about taking a bad scenario and going for broke on making it worse, since you're already 'in it' and you don;t lose anything by being that much more of a jackass.

Back in middle school, I was involved in both sports and marching band. I mean, marching band is kind of a stretch, we really didn't have that much marching that we did. High school had a marching band, but middle school band did a single parade around Christmas and played a few pep rallies, and that was basically it. But the combination of the two was rarely convenient to accomplish side by side, because most kids were not doing sports and music at our school. In fact, with one or two possible exceptions in the choir program, I may have actually been the only one. Not even trying to brag, I don't think anyone else went through the sheer headache that was trying to coordinate between the two sets of schedules, practices, and expectations. And it was fun, I guess, but mostly it just kind of sucked while you were doing it, because you couldn't enjoy anything right then and there, you had one thing to leave and another thing to join, it was a lot of keep track of. Just ask my parents.

My mom, to her eternal credit, was always so positive about these experiences. However she made stuff at her job work around my stuff, my little sister's convoluted schedule and whatever the hell my brother was doing, she just had a smile and a few jokes for any situation we faced. My dad... well, that's the thing about my dad. He'll be right there with us and support and cheer for us and all, but he will also point out a ridiculous situation. Usually in hilarious fashion. For example:

I once had a track meet take place at one school at the exact same time that a band concert was taking place about a half a mile away at the local high school. Now, conventional wisdom would say, okay, which one are you going to. But no, that's not how the Dupuy's do it. I ran at the track meet, did 3 of my 5 events, and then started warming up on saxophone in the parking lot just before the 4x100 relay. I then proceeded to run the relay, run to the car in track spikes, and then run across an open field to get to the performance hall where my band was just about to go onto the stage for the recorded performance (audio recording, not video. But still...)

One of my friends, who we'll call Clay for this post, gave me a funny look when I sat next to him in my track uniform and skimpy running shorts. I just whispered to him, out of breath but quietly, "Not a word. Not one word from you." He did his best not to laugh. But I composed myself, despite the fact that the performance hall was absolutely freezing, and played a decent part for the circumstances. I then packed my saxophone back up and ran back to finish my last race, which didn't go that well, but I got through it. And I was happy with the overall experience. Because I took a not great situation and made the best of it. Because that's what you're supposed to do in those situations.

Or you can do the kind of thing I did a few weeks before that.

It was the end of the basketball season, and I was pissed off at how I had played in the last game, which at the time I thought might be my last game in organized basketball, period. Not just because it was the end of the season, but I didn't know if I was going to be good enough to play in high school, and like I said, I was pissed at how I played. I sucked that night. And I had a concert that I was going to be just in time for at best, but probably late for, which also has always pissed me off. I hate being late, even if it's my fault. So I'm pissed off, and I'm in the car with my mom, God bless her as always, and she's trying to tell me how well I played, and trying to get me to eat some Sonic while changing into my band uniform but not spill, and get over the game because at least we won and I played good in certain parts, blah blah bladdy blah. So I'm eating and changing and stewing, and we're absolutely flying down the road to try to get to this concert on time.

Now, the concert is going on at a different high school than the first one I mentioned, and it's farther away from where we were coming from. What I had planned is that my band director would brig my instrument from our school to the performance, since there were a lot of other equipment that needed to be transported over. So when I got to the high school, all I had to do was locate where they had placed my instrument, and put it together to start warming up. Well, I went through all the trouble of hightailing it from half an hour away, tired and pissed off, and they could not locate my god damn instrument when I got there. So I went from being pissed off to what I considered was enraged, even though it probably was just smidge more annoyed than before. I mean, I was a middle schooler at a band concert performance, how much damage could I really have done?

Well, just hang on there.

So I hd been looking for my instrument for a good 20 minutes, and my band is warming up and getting ready to go out onto the stage, and I just can't handle it anymore, so I storm into the hall where the band is warming up right as they stop playing and are listening to the guy conducting. It would turn out later that the guy conducting was not our band director, but the director at that high school. He had literally just told them about one of the marimbas near the back, where the percussionists were standing (Marimba is a big ass xylophone that's wooden and sounds slightly different, for those of you about to open another tab to google it) And this particular marimba was from Africa, and was very special, very expensive, and was made of special wood that was sensitive to the oils in our hands, and the guy specifically told everyone not to touch this particular equipment. Like, you can touch any other instruments, but please not this one.

Enter Victor in a pissy mood.

I storm in, determined to prove a point as I walk around the side of the room where the percussion section is. And I swear, I didn't actually mean to touch anything. I just meant to walk in, make some gesture in the air, and then tall the guy that I could not find my instrument and that he needed to help me fix it. I had this image in my head of flinging my hand through the air, almost like I was throwing something away. That's all I meant to do, no real harm done. Well...I aimed a little low, and ran my hand down the exotic African marimba, and made loud de-chromatic sound in front of everyone. And I played it off okay, like I'd meant to do that, but inside my head I was already like, "Oops, ok, I know I screwed up already, please just don't look back here. Nobody look over here.."

And the band director stops in mid sentence, storms over to me, almost knocking kids over in the way, and asks me what the matter is. And I felt even more ridiculous trying to keep a straight face and complain that my tenor saxophone could not be located. And he very quickly offers me another saxophone for the performance, and I of course had no real reason to refuse, and after that there was nothing I could complain about, so I had to just sit there and look like a moron while this guy wipes off the sections of the marimba and literally 15 different kids approach me to explain how funny it was to watch that entire thing unfold. That was the extra insult to the injury that I had apparently inflicted on this special instrument. So yeah, I got crap about that one for a long time.

My band director never spoke to me about it, but I heard him apologizing over and over to that high school director after we finished playing. After the concert, they found my saxophone under a marimba on stage. I don't think it was under the same marimba, and frankly it was bad enough without any more symmetry or irony. But it serves as a reminder: you can always make it worse.