Bad news first? Why not. Bad news is, with most of the swelling gone, it kinda appears that I somehow pushed the knuckle of my little finger back maybe half an inch. No kidding. When it was still swollen, I thought that was just a knot -- nope, that's my knuckle.

Whoops.

So of course, I am quickly becoming proficient at typing without using that finger. Hey, the pinky finger is kinda vestigial anyways, right?

So the good news? Okay. The good news is that a knuckle, even one on your right hand when you're right handed, is nowhere near as crucial to functioning normally as a weight-bearing joint -- like, say, an ankle.

So honestly, I'm still kinda wrestling with myself about whether or not I should go to the doctor. Well, okay -- that I should is probably kind of a given. Still don't know if I will.

By the by -- I suggest that I might be verbally hurtful, and for this I end up writing a whole fuckin entry -- with the hand I'd broken the night before.

Man, I'm just so mean to people. Really. One day I'll really have to try harder to care about someone besides myself.

Oh, and about that entry -- the point was not that any of those people did anything bad enough to actually provoke any kind of violence. I'm not an advocate of violence in any event.

It is not that our random comments to random strangers might necessarily carry all that much power with them. I mean they might, but that wasn't what I was on about.

My point was, for instance -- the old guy who lectured me like I'd thrown glasses through the window and lit the carpet on fire? What he needed to realize was that the thin veil of civilization that comes with laws and society and common sense can easily become quite irrelevant if someone has already been pushed to a certain point.

I'm not an advocate of violence. But rational or not, deserved or not, I remember very clearly how I felt at that moment, while trying to extricate myself from his company on the most civil terms possible: If he had tried to challenge me, and defend his right to say or do whatever he wished towards me? I really don't know when I would have stopped hitting him.

And no, I've never jumped anyone in a bar before. I've never jumped anyone before, period. I haven't even actually been in a fight in my adult life, honestly. But in my world, at that point? The question became: Are we justified to treat others however we wish?

I've no idea what this man's day, let alone his 60 odd years of life, had instilled in him up to the moment I spoke to him. Perhaps, somehow, his reaction made perfect sense, from his perspective.

But does our perspective give us the right to disregard where anyone else might be coming from? You see, there could only be one answer to the question. He could be okay to tell me to fuck off, yet if so then it must be okay for me to see how hard I could still hit with a broken hand.

I shouldn't beat up an old guy in a bar? Old guys in bars should be careful to spew their vitriol to guys who just punched a wall. Or is that just me?

And in theory, this goes for the "I'll kill you and bury you" guy and the "don't touch me" girls, too. In their experience, their casual rudeness never caused someone to lose it and explode in a fit of irrational violence ... but you kinda have to wonder if they really felt so strongly about it as to risk all that.