A man with a banana peel made me angry

Reporting live from a busy parking lot.

Photo by Milo Bunnik on Unsplash

A man holding a banana peel made me very angry recently. This isn’t my first run-in with bananas, and this time I didn’t fall on my face. Instead, I got a glimpse into human nature itself—which it turns out is much worse. Here’s the story.

These days, I spend most of the weekend trying to entertain my three-year old son. This is partly because I love him, and partly because if we don’t have activities planned to distract him, he turns into an attention-starved howler monkey. So Saturdays and Sundays now generally revolve around dodging an appearance from Bobo the Asshole.

Recently, that meant a Daddy-Theo trip to the kids’ museum near us, which shares a park with the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. This park is also home to a big aquatics center, tennis courts, playgrounds, and a college baseball field named after woke. It’s cool—except for once a month, when the Rose Bowl Flea Market pops up and ruins everything.

I say this only in my professional capacity as “Dad.” I used to like the Rose Bowl Flea, but now I see it only as an obstacle to my best-laid plans. That’s because Flea Market booths and shoppers¹ take up virtually every single parking spot in the entire park, which leaves tennis players, swimmers, and most importantly, me, competing for the remaining spots within a tiny sliver of the lot.

On this particular museum trip, I didn’t realize the Flea Market was happening until I pulled up behind a long line of cars waiting to turn into the park. That could have been frustrating, but I’m a mature adult who doesn’t get pissed off at stupid stuff.² So I resolved to be extremely patient and keep my cool.

Enter Banana Man.