A bully picked a fight that night — and now I’m dreaming about it

By David McElroy · April 23, 2021

I didn’t get into fights when I was a child. I never picked on other kids. I was taught to walk away from trouble if I could. So I almost never had physical confrontations.

But there was one Sunday night — when I was about 12 or 13 — when a small-town bully left me no choice. I hadn’t thought about that confrontation for a long time, but I’ve dreamed about it repeatedly lately. I’m not sure what my unconscious is trying to tell me.

I was spending a week with a friend who lived an hour or so from my home. His father was the pastor of Oakman Central Baptist Church in the tiny town of Oakman, Ala., so I had been to the church several times that week. And there was a bully there — a slightly older kid — who seemed to think it was great sport to pick on the visitor.

Sunday night was going to be my last time at the church for that week. I was going home the next day. And it was after the Sunday night service — on the front porch of the church — when the bully pushed me one last time.

If you’ve ever spent time in smaller churches, you know there’s a period after the service when many people are still standing around talking. Then the groups start breaking up and one family after another heads for home.

I was on the front porch as the social period was winding down. I don’t know where my friend and the various members of his family were, but I was among a group of young teens at the front of the church. And the bully was among them.

I have no idea what he said, but he was verbally taunting me at first. He was baiting me. He got closer and closer to me as he taunted. I realized uncomfortably that other people had backed away from us. He was poking his finger at my chest and mildly pushing.

I made the sudden calculation that I couldn’t avoid this fight. Without forming a plan, I suddenly threw myself into the bully. I pushed him back — and then I launched the most savage punch that my right fist could manage. I hit him so hard that he staggered backwards and then fell to the ground. I braced for his counterattack.

Instead, he ran away.

I was terrified afterward that I was going to be in trouble for hitting somebody. When adults were summoned, I had to explain what had happened and others backed up my version of the story. For awhile, nobody could find the bully.

The adults grew concerned when they couldn’t locate him, but someone finally found him — in a crawl space under one of the church buildings. He had gone there to hide. He was still crying when someone found him.

I didn’t get into trouble. In fact, not much was said about it. It turned out that the kid had a reputation as a bully, so the unspoken attitude among the others seemed to be, “He got what he deserved.”

The event wasn’t formative in my childhood memories. It’s barely even a footnote. I can’t remember the last time I had thought about it until recently — when the story started playing out again in my dreams.

In each of the dreams, I experience the same panicked feeling of being backed into a corner. I feel like a trapped animal who doesn’t like his choices — and suddenly has to choose the “least bad” of the available options.

And each time I dream about it, there comes a moment when I violently lash out with caged fury — and the bully runs away from me.

Each time I have this dream, I wake up with the odd instinct that it represents something in my life right now. I wake up feeling as though my back is against a wall and that I’m about to have to take a wild chance to strike back against something I’ve allowed to oppress me.

And every time I feel that way, I have that same triumphant feeling that I’ve vanquished the bully and I’ve broken free. It gives me a feeling of liberation and relief each time.

I don’t know what it means, but it feels significant. It was just last week when I was writing about being unhappy with my life right now. And this somehow seems related to all of that — in a vague way that I can’t quite put into words.

I feel as though my back is against a wall. I feel as though I’m running out of time. I don’t quite know how to fix things.

And something tells me the time is coming — in a way I can’t yet understand — when I’m going to have to take a tremendous and scary gamble.

Maybe I’m fooling myself, but deep down, I have a feeling that whatever “bully” is holding me back today — metaphorically speaking — will run away if I suddenly spring into action and knock him out with one mighty blow.

These dreams have reminded me to be proud of my child self — who came through when he had to — and it makes me feel that I’m going to do something similar when I need it most right now.

I hope I’m right. Something needs to change.

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I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

After Tampa Bay, Fla., musician Colt Clark had all of his gigs canceled last year for months on end, the entire family felt trapped at home as most of the world was on quarantine lockdown. His wife, Aubree, had an idea that would let Colt make music and involve the whole family in making music videos to share with their friends and family on Facebook. Aubree is a photographer and homeschooling mom to a daughter and two sons, who range in age from 6 to 11. After their friends started asking to share the videos, they made the performances public — and a few of them are now on YouTube, where they go by the name of Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids. The younger son, Becket, is on drums. The older boy, Cash, plays keyboards, strings and guitars. Dad supplies lead vocals and plays guitar, while 6-year-old Bellamy mostly dances but sometimes does backup vocals. There’s even a dog who makes an occasional appearance. The Clark family has just raised the bar for what I need to create with my future children. And best of all, they seem to be having a great time together. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

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