I blame the economy. Rising gas prices, the housing market crunch, it’s got you people thinking backward. The very structure of our social network is all mixed up and something needs to be done. It’s as though one group of you climbed into some crazy machine and traded heads with another.

Confused? Me, too. These magic markers smell great, but I really shouldn’t keep sniffing them.

The man in front of the bar wore the sneer of one who eats fists for breakfasts and wouldn’t change his diet for anything. His brow was bunched low over his eyes. His arms were out at his sides as if to express: “You want to take a swing at me? Give it your best, fool. I am like a piece of iron.”

He was addressing a man in the middle of the street who appeared similarly agitated. The two men moved closer to each other, jaws grinding out bravado as they went.

“Fool, you don’t want none of this.”

“No, it’s you who doesn’t want any of this!”

“I tell you, I’m quite sure you are the one who does not want …”

Words doing battle like foot-clumsy soldiers and it seemed a clash of fists and bone was about to commence on the curb.

I went around the block and came back for a better view from a different angle. This is like trading bleacher seats for better ones along the base paths at Fenway. But when I got back to the bar, no game at all was in play. The two men were shaking hands and speaking amicably, like longtime friends who have rediscovered each other after a long absence. Whatever conflict had drawn them into a Wild Kingdom display of aggression had been resolved. They had become comrades who agreed that fighting was just no good at all.

Meanwhile, back in Marktopia, things are getting weird. Normally upright people are ready to come to blows all over the place. In the letters to the editorial page of our newspaper, it’s suddenly the Jerry Springer show. Writers feud back and forth with the literary form of chair hurling. Mild disagreements take on the violent tones of reaction to a well-placed mother insult.

Men who diligently watch their cholesterol and wear suits to work suddenly want to throw hands over minor disputes at Starbucks. Bill collectors are using terms like, “put a cap in your ass” or “beat you like a rented mule” instead of their typical threats of court action and wage garnishing.

Men and women who typically resolve their disputes in orderly, nonbruising fashion are all at once members of the Fight Club.

As a reporter who has covered crime in Lewiston for roughly three hundred years, I am accustomed to seeing tensions mushrooming into violence in particular sectors of the city. The bars, the crack houses, the basketball courts.

But those arenas are quiet these days. I think of them as once blood-soaked gyms that have been sold, remodeled and transformed into tea rooms, where inside voices are used and poetry readings are held on Thursdays.

It’s a matter of socioeconomics, I have deduced wisely, after looking up the term on Wikipedia.

If you have to spend half your paycheck putting gas in your car just to drive to the job you hate, a good mood is a tough thing to keep. If you canceled your yearly trip to Yosemite because all your funds went to heating oil during the nine-year winter, you might want to poke somebody in the eye.

Out here in the pay-as-you-go world of families and mortgages and household budgets, times are white-knuckle tough. Even the financial morons of the working class are influenced by things like pork belly futures and hiccups on Wall Street, even if they understand none of it.

If you’ve bailed out of the work force, choosing to finance your lifestyle through drug dealing or home burglaries, your economy is ruled by different factors. Your collect your pay in the form of sweaty, wrinkled bills that know nothing of soy prices on the open market. The cost of walking from the downtown apartment to the bar and back remains as fixed as the sidewalks you stroll to get there. The cost of fuel means nothing because you don’t drive and the landlord pays to heat your building.

It’s not a bad way to live if you go that route, the threat of arrest or dying in a knife fight notwithstanding. And it reminds me that it has been five years now since I became an adult, with a wife and an oil tank and related things that prevent me from living recklessly.

I get so furious sometimes at the state of my personal economy, I want to fire off an angry letter to the editor and pick a fight with a scribe there. In a language more suitable for the newspaper, of course.

“Sir, it has become abundantly clear that you do not want to engage in a physical confrontation that would force me to employ weapons with which to smite you …”

But I won’t do it. I’ll just keep sniffing these Sharpies, instead. The green ones are particularly nice.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal crime beat reporter. He can be reached at [email protected]