Born To Be Mild

I thumped a pit bull in the testicles once.  I was young, innocent, and hadn't yet learned about the equal and opposite reaction caused by pressurized contact to the testes.  Blue was the name of my grandmother's pit bulldog, and why he didn't rip my throat out after I did that, I'll never know.  He was enjoying a nice summertime snooze, lying on his side on the linoleum floor with his back legs crossed.  I wondered to myself - what's that dangling between Blue's crossed legs?  I calculated my aim precisely, followed through with the fiercest thump I could muster, and heard three distinct sounds - the "whoosh" of my finger whizzing through the air, the "fwap!" of impact, and a cartoonish series of "yelps" as Blue ran from one corner of the house to another exhibiting that mixture of pain, shock, and fury that males of all species can appreciate.  It was the closest I'd ever come to a potential mauling.

That lone incident aside, I'm not a dangerous person and have never taken to rough-housing or staring death in the face, but lately I've been considering turning over a new, harder-nosed leaf.  Gangland, a documentary-style series on the History Channel, has given me this new inspiration, and each weekly episode plays as a de facto recruiting tool.  The burning question, though, is how do I, with no "bad boy" experience, find the gang that's right for me?

Ethnically, I'm barred from the obvious gangs - Crips, Bloods, MS13, etc. - and am too much of a pansy for the streets.  I'd probably gravitate toward the gangs that offer incentives, such as motorcycles and cool leather vests.  The list quickly dwindles here.  The Mongols almost always require at least some fraction of Hispanic background.  The Hell's Angels are too chic and trendy at this point.  They're like the department store of motorcycle gangs, when what I really want is to be a part of a mom-and-pop club.  I thought I'd finally hit paydirt when I saw an episode of Gangland featuring the lesser-known, homegrown motorcycle gang the Devil's Diciples.  Everything sounded great - Harleys, chicanery, ol' ladies - but then I looked a little closer.  They spell their name wrong.  It is literally D-i-c-i-p-l-e-s, and everyone knows it should be D-i-s-c-i-p-l-e-s. 

As the 1986 Spelling Bee champion in Mrs. Simmons' 4th grade class, it's really my obligation to be troubled by the fact that they've left the "s" out of 'diciples,'  More importantly, shouldn't it bother the 'diciples' themselves? Has none of them noticed such an obvious grammatical faux pas?  As polarizing as their morals (or lack thereof) might be, there's still somebody somewhere that's responsible for at least a tiny bit of PR work.  Is the guy at Kinko's too intimidated to call their spelling into question when they drop their pamphlets off?  Does the sweet old lady that sews the patches onto their vests not have the courage to point out such an egregious error?  Allegedly, the 'diciples' misspell the name intentionally, but when I tried to copy an image from one of their affiliated websites, the warning window below popped up, proving that they're not only habitually poor spellers (carefull?), but they don't know their contractions.

And so, the Diciples  represent yet another gang of which I can never be a part. In the end, maybe it's a safer option to be a one-man gang, bound by both the laws of man and the King's English.  I hereby proclaim the inception of the Grammatics. Grrrrrrrr.