May 23, 2012

Get off my arm! I can't breathe!

When my brother and I were kids, we fought all the time.  We had many big, nasty fights involving various weapons.  Once, we used aluminum bats.  The thing is, though, we would quit fighting as soon as something broke.  We broke a vase while chasing each other through the house once.  Immediately, we sopped, picked up the pieces and hunted down some glue.  Beating the crap out of each other was one thing; having the crap beat out of us by a parent was another.  Or more to the point, the THOUGHT of getting beaten.  We rarely actually got hit as kids.  But, we were afraid of getting hit, and that was usually enough to keep us (mostly) in line.

One time, Brian (my brother) and I were fighting in the living room.  We were all over the place.  Somehow, we managed to get tangled up and were wrestling on the floor.  Invariably, our fights happened in front of an audience of friends.  On this occasion, we had a couple friends standing by as we rolled around, trying to beat the tar out of each other without breaking anything else in the process.

As we fought, I happened to break free of his grasp and tried to roll out of the way.  As I did, I rolled on my brother's arm.  He started flipping out!  He was thrashing around, yelling and screaming.  I asked him what was wrong.  He could only yell out, "Get off my arm! I can't breathe!  Get off my arm!"

It was the funniest thing my friends had ever heard.  They started laughing. Then, my brother and I laughed about it.

That was thing about our fights: In the end, we laughed about the fight more than we were angry about whatever started the fight.  In fact, we usually couldn't even remember why we were fighting in the first place.

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