Would I ever like to shake the hand of the man who told me macaws make good pets. I'd pull his hand right off at the wrist. That damn bird is the second incarnation of Stalin.

You feed it, you teach it to speak, and what thanks do you get? Cockeyed stares and the occasional: "Hello?" -always asked, never spoken, and always with a sarcastic lilt. And when it rains the feathered fiend goes into a screaming fit like a dot matrix printer with a terminal paper jam.

But it's smart, I'll give it that. It's smart enough to know how to screw with my head, and enjoy it. I've shouted "No!" at it enough times that now it shouts it right back.

"Wanna cracker?"

"No!"

"Wanna shut up?"

"No!"

"Want I should wring your neck?"

Beady-eyed stare.

That's not all. Get this. At work, when I get phone calls, I'm required to answer by stating my first name. I've been at that office for fifteen years, so the custom has followed me into my home life.

The bird knows my name and mimics me perfectly. Worse, it knows the sound it imitates is my name.

You don't know the meaning of disconcerting until you hear yourself speak your name - except it's not you saying it.

There has to be a set of rules,
A formula that equals
An amount of clout displaced
When dropping one name or another.

Your name floats when you’re a nobody.
It turns no gears.
It moves no wheels.
It's worthless for the work it does.

When you’re a “Mister So-and-so”
You must be really important.
You need a prefix and a suffix
One in front and some behind
So your name doesn't capsize
But sinks evenly and fast.

And when you’re hot stuff,
You're “Sir”.
Dense little word.
Sinks to the bottom
And moves the fluid that gets those gears turning.

What does “Sir” mean, anyway?
I’m no linguist,
But isn't it Latin for
Stupid stuck up self-important bigoted jackass?

I've thought on it some, and I've found that I spend a lot of time in sandwich shops. (See: Fifty Dollar Cheese Sandwich Standoff). No matter how well stocked your local deli is, they can offer only so many combinations of bread, meat, cheese, and condiments before it gets boring. It's moments like these when you need to get subversive.

The deli I frequent makes the best egg salad sandwiches -- thick-sliced bread toasted until it achieves  the load-bearing strength for a half-pound of golden egg salad goodness inside. Add in a slice of yellow cheese and a dash of paprika, and you've got the best sandwich this side of New York State. Great as the sandwich is, man cannot live on egg salad alone, which is also why they offer foot-long hoagies. Having frequented this deli so often, it was only a matter of time before I ordered a foot-long egg salad sandwich.

The deli man's cocked eyebrow said it all: "Are you sure?" Without waiting for an answer, he got to work, piling into the hoagie bread three times as much egg salad as a normal sandwich -- and presumably a normal human -- should require. The sandwich was glorious, but I'm fairly certain that pain in my chest after eating it was not regret.

At lunch the next day the deli man shook his head as I stepped inside. He reached under the counter for the egg salad and started to made another foot-long, but I stopped him. Rarely have I seen more relief on another man's face. His expression was short-lived, however. It cut short abruptly when I told him I wanted a foot-long peanut butter and jelly.

With America being the land of the free where the customer is always right, it was a foregone conclusion that I would get my sandwich. Freedom to do such dumb things as this was practically written into our constitution.

Compressed into that one sandwich experience were all the summer vacation days of every year of grade school --  endless summers of days in the park, and always with peanut butter and jelly as a packed lunch. I might have lost a few summers -- you know, taken off the tail end -- by eating the whole thing in one sitting, but it was completely worth it if only to revel in the horribly perplexed look of the deli man.

Though I've sometimes been called extreme in my views (and that's being polite), if nothing else, my methods are effective. The reason for this is, when I encounter a problem (or problematic person), I'm enough of a creative jackass to devise a clever fix. Clever fixes, you see, are the best sort, especially when your problems are other people.

Creative people come up with solutions. Jackasses make other people feel bad about themselves. Therefore, infallible logic informs us that creative jackasses come up with solutions that make evil jackasses feel bad about themselves. They're Chaotic-Good on the alignment table.
 
If the world were populated solely with creative jackasses, it would be an obnoxious place to live... but everything would work. For instance:

Prison Violence
 Oh, so there was a stabbing in the prison cafeteria? No problem. Replace all the eating utensils with cotton balls and announce soup is on the menu. Bon appétit!
 
Deforestation
 Oh, so there's a paper mill in town stripping your pristine forests bare? Just call some arsonists and burn the forest down -- that factory will have to shut down! Wait a minute...
 
Healthcare
 I went to the doctor for an x-ray of my foot. He put the film up on the screen and said, "I see what's been causing your ankle pain. You see that there?" he asked, pointing to a dislocated bone splinter.
 
"It's that bone there, but we can't see it very well so we'll need an MRI. That will cost another $5,000."
 
I scratched my head and responded, "You mean you need an MRI to see that thing you and I can see is right there?"
 
Unapologetic, he said, "Yes."
 
So I handed him my glasses, saying, "Doc, maybe you need these more than I do."
 
Putting It All Together
 The gamut of societal problems we face -- crime, nepotism, workplace abuse, nasty neighbors -- all boil down to a simple concept: "My comfort or convenience is more important than your necessities."
 
Think about how true this is the next time you take grandma for a doctor's visit and some scumbag rolls his luxury SUV into the last wheelchair accessible parking space -- and then jaunts out of his car, strutting like he owns the place. Now you've got to park all the way in the back of the lot, struggle to get granny out of the car, then wheel her across several hundred feet of tarmac in blazing heat (or snow, if you prefer). All this, just because some self-absorbed ambulatory dirtbag considered himself too important to walk -- and took the spot reserved for someone who can't.
 
Things like this make a man's hand itch for a brick to put through someone's windshield -- luxury SUV windshield. Not that I've ever done that or would condone it, no... But still, I've seen this enough times, you'd think I'd have thrown enough bricks to make a house.

Be nice to people... or else.