Friday, December 12, 2008

OBVIOUS REFERENCES TO STINSON AND ERIKSEN WILL GET YOU SLAPPED: Some weeks ago, Spacewoman and I were recounting the details of an irritating (do I use that word too much? I think I must be irritable) encounter she had with someone. The details are lost to me -- it could have been about an old roommate (she has crazy ones), a passerby (today I actually reprimanded a young man in a suit for weaving aimlessly while he walked slowly on a crowded sidewalk and talked on his cell phone; it was impossible to pass him and people were queuing up), a service-industry worker. But, we mused, what if the law allowed everybody one non-injurious slap against everybody else?

There would be some rules. You can slap as many people as you want, but you get only one slap against any one person. That one slap would bear no legal repercussion, but the law wouldn't require that people allow themselves to be slapped -- businesses could impose no-slapping rules; people could employ bodyguards. Thus, you could be banned from US Airways or Best Buy for using your slap (and would be, until they had banned so many customers that they'd have to allow it) but you wouldn't be prosecuted. You'd never get close enough to Tom Cruise or Rod Blagojevich to take your shot. And just to keep this honest, I'm banning slaps-for-hire.

The best part of this fantasy is not imagining the crack of hand against the cheek of, say, the stranger on my flight two days ago who, while boarding, took somebody else's bag out of the overhead compartment and just left it in the aisle, but rather thinking about how you'd use your one slap with your loved ones. Strangers are easy -- you'll probably see them only once, so you'll either use it or you won't. But with your friends and family, you need to conserve your precious resource. How much regret would Spacewoman have if she used her slap on me that one time at the toll booth in 1996, when we were just dating, not knowing about the ear-reddening argument we'd have in 2003 about the Nike 17205 case? How much more valuable would my slap have been throughout middle- and high-school as a lingering threat, knowing that my impulsive sister would have used hers on me already, leaving kind of a slap-missile gap in our household cold war? Do I know anybody who, at some point, I wouldn't have slapped, and who wouldn't have slapped me?

Come to think of it, would I be proud or shamed to know, at the end of the day, that I had both suffered and doled out more than the average number of slaps? And which speaks better of you -- to have been more slapper than slapped, or the contrary?

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