Polyp Sportivo experienced a strange incident in the small town in which he resided. It all started when he was out taking a walk, something he was in the habit of doing for the sake of his general health and, more importantly, to clear his mind for the purpose coming up with inventions. You see, Polyp was an aspiring inventor, and though he hadn’t yet invented anything, he was certain that if only his mind was sufficiently clear, soon enough he would. And after that – riches galore! Not that Polyp was a money grubber, by the way. In fact, when the riches finally poured in, he had every intention of donating them in their entirety to the Order of the Azure Rose, a not-for-profit entity based in the state of Colorado dedicated to promoting a return to the Code of Chivalry, a code to which Polyp himself stringently adhered at all times, for example by sharing his umbrella with and refraining from belching and farting while in the presence of members of the distaff class.
Well, getting back to the strange incident. As it happened, it was a hot summer day, and having walked as far as he’d walked, Polyp decided he’d walked far enough, and crossed the street in order to commence the journey back to the small accessory apartment he rented from a local property owner. By chance, in so doing he found himself walking behind another gentleman, perhaps a few years older than he, with a bandana around his neck and a tote bag draped over his shoulder, who by all appearances was also out walking. Needless to say, Polyp thought nothing of this, mainly because, as noted above, he was doing his best avoid thinking about anything. Evidently, the gentleman behind whom he unwittingly found himself walking thought something of it indeed, however, for suddenly he stepped to one side, spun on his heels, and fixing Polyp with a cutting gaze said to him: “Are you just going to keep on walking behind me or what?”
At first, Polyp presumed the gentleman was joking – but the contorted expression on his face, as well as the cutting nature of that gaze, quickly disabused him of any such presumption.
“My good man,” he thusly said. “It’s broad daylight on a public sidewalk in the center of town, and in that context, I’ll continue walking wherever I please.”
“Out of nowhere, you’re like three feet behind me,” shot back the gentleman. “It’s just creepy, man!”
At this juncture, Polyp saw that he had no choice but to think things over, even if this meant abandoning his efforts to clear his mind and as a result arresting whatever progress he might have been making toward coming up with the invention that would at last allow him to offer his pecuniary support to the Order of the Azure Rose. On the one hand, he thought, he could continue the harangue, for instance by saying to the gentleman: “Screw you and the horse you rode in on.” But the problem there was that he had no concrete evidence the gentleman had ridden in on a horse, nor any reason to believe he would have, for he and the gentleman alike lived in the age of cars, and though people still rode horses, they mostly did so recreationally, either in the backcountry or areas specifically designated for equestrianism. Moreover, he did not actually want to screw the gentleman nor, had he really ridden in on one, his horse, and the aforementioned Code of Chivalry strictly prohibited lying, even if only by implication. Another possibility, reflected Polyp, would be to say to the gentleman: “If your brains were a stick of dynamite and someone lit the fuse, there wouldn’t even be enough of it to blow the hat off your head.” But here the problem was that the gentleman wasn’t wearing a hat, and furthermore Polyp couldn’t really figure out how a fuse would be attached to someone’s brain were that brain a stick of dynamite, nor where it would come out of the body for purposes of being lit if it were. Maybe the ear, he thought, but wouldn’t a nostril make just as much sense, and no less so the mouth? And if everything made as much sense as everything else, nothing really made much sense at all, which is to say, the whole concept of lighting the fuse on a brain that was a stick of dynamite was a completely nonsensical proposition from head to heels. That was when it occurred to Polyp that, as long as he was on the topic of fuses, the best idea would probably be to just defuse the whole situation. After all, was either of them ever going to bring the other around to his point of view? And even if one of them somehow did, how much satisfaction would truly come of it?
“I know it’s a hot one,” he therefore said to the gentleman, who was still gazing at him cuttingly, “but why don’t we take the temperature down a notch. For my part, I’d like to apologize if you felt threatened by my proximity. I can assure you that I was only walking along absentmindedly, as I’m wont to do, and at no point had any intention of harming you. In the future, I’ll surely take it upon myself to be more aware of how others might be impacted by my presence in homine.”
At that, the gentleman’s face softened. “To the contrary,” he said, “the fault is all mine. In retrospect, you did nothing whatsoever to suggest you had any intention of harming me, and I apologize sincerely for suspecting that you did.”
“I accept your apology,” said Polyp.
Then, because the same Code of Chivalry that demands that no insult to an honorable man go unanswered also regards nothing as more insulting than unjustly suspecting an honorable man of dishonorable intentions, he clobbered the impertinent fopdoodle right over the head.