Spitting in his coffee.
Back a few years ago, before Rush started going deaf and went away and then stopped going deaf and came back, a friend of mine was working in an office near another office where the radio was tuned to Rush’s show. And the people in that other office would listen and laugh and share the better bits back and forth and “Oh, yeah” and “That’s telling ’im” along with him (and I should probably interrupt this ghastly stereotype of an office full of dittoheads and allow as how my own mother listens to him, or did, for a while, because she thought he was funny), and anyway for my friend this was a constant, low-level irritant, as he walked the halls between that office and his own. “He’s just—always there,” my friend would say. “He’s this smugly arrogant, smooth-talking, oily twit, bombasting away in the background with that pompous voice, and he’s there in your day and in your space making your life that much more unpleasant. But you can’t touch him. You can’t tell him to shut up and you can’t call him on his shit and you can’t argue with him. He’s just—there.” And he’d sigh and glower off in the middle distance somewhere. “You just can’t touch him,” he’d say, his hands rising up, fingers curled in a dramatic impotence. And then he’d get this look on his face. “You can’t trip him when he’s walking down the hall. You know? You can’t even spit in his coffee.”
Well, actually, you can. It just takes a little work.
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