The first thing I recall is observing a scenario whereby there was an older Japanese man; his son had done something irresponsible and/or foolish, so the problem was that it was something that had caused a ‘loss of face’/dishonor/reputation-damage to the family.  Then suddenly I was standing in the goal as the keeper on a football pitch in the evening, and the ball had gone out of bounds over the end line for a goal kick.  This was during a match, but it seemed more like a rec-league, with guys of varying ages, adolescents and adults.  While I retrieved the ball and prepared to kick it, some kid came over to me as I was placing the ball, basically giving me shit about hurrying up. I was not in the mood to be playing that kind of shit, so I just responded with something about there being nothing in the rules about having to do it fast; I had the freedom to go at this pace. I think my tone was more like a “Fuck off!” but as said it wasn’t personal or directed like an overt retaliation.  So then I kicked the ball up field, and it sailed pretty far.  Then I just observed the nexus of the play was mostly in the central ⅓ of the pitch. 

Suddenly I just got the feeling like the mood on the pitch had gotten sour, like I’ve experienced before, but only on rare occasions in playing football where you could just sense that the guys were taking things too personally, allowing small jabs to get under their skin, starting to look for opportunity to become brutish, throw an elbow when going up for a header, or make a late-challenge through the legs, etc.  Suddenly some dude on the other side threw a piece of firewood right at my head, and I fortunately was able to catch it in mid air.  I considered retaliating by throwing it at one of the opponents, but instead decided to just toss it aside, not wanting to continue escalating the situation.  The dude who threw it was looking angry and got in my face, just wanting to tussle I guess. I was angry at him; there was some back and forth about him denying that he’d thrown it with the intention to cause harm, and that disagreement led to him wanting to have a physical fight.  I was able to defuse the situation by slowing him down, getting him to relax his grip for a moment, just saying “Dude, I don’t want to fight you; I’m just disagreeing with you about that piece of wood coming right for my head.” I guess he thought I was unjustifiably triggered just from  it coming close to my head, trying to paint my position as unreasonable since I shouldn’t have judged his intent as malicious, like I was getting mad at him for no good reason, so he wanted to fight me about that, etc etc.  So I seemed to be able to shift the focus of the conversation about the fact of whether it was close or not, so that took some emotion out of the situation; it became less intense, less heated, less volatile.  So although this had de-escalated and maybe taken the worst-case off the table, I felt like I had still contributed to a bit of further tarnish on grandpa’s family reputation, the family name, legacy, etc.

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