The woes of the chicken: Nice guys do always finish last

When Rick is riding his Harley Davidson and is cut off by a cabby, he dents the cab car with his boots and slashes the tire with his knife. Among a slur of cabby insults, he roars away into the sunset on his motorcycle.

I suppose that is relatively tame compared to the time a driver bumped the front wheel of his bike and Rick shot all the windows with his 9 mm.

"What do you mean?" I replied.

"What! That's ridiculous."

"Yeah, but at that moment, I was the bad guy and she loved me forever, dude."

"I can't believe that works."

"It's the god's honest truth, man."

At age 10, I was the meanest kid around. During recess, I pulled all the girls' pony tails, delivered wet willies and defaced the walls of our school with assorted Crayola color chalk.

When I came home, every GI Joe action figure ran for the bunkers. Some lost their arms in a Chinese firecracker explosion, and good old Snake Eyes was buried alive for months at a time.

So, one might think that everyone hated me. However, this was not the case. Flocks of raging adolescent females terrorized me at recess time. At the time, girls running to catch you was worse than eating paste from the jar. Nowadays, I could name a truck load of people who would eat paste just to have women notice them.

Unfortunately, as I got older, I became the dreaded nice guy. There's nothing wrong with being a nice person except that it's all too easy to become almost too nice.

Being a gentleman is great. Gentlemen open doors for people to be polite. They say "bless you" when someone sneezes and NEVER shove people while trying to escape Willard Building. Among other things, gentlemen are nice but not too nice.

There is certainly a differential equation that equates nice guys to writhing boredom. Because being too nice of a person is a sign of mental fragility and genetic destitution, right?

Consequently, I'm beginning to think that when god created the earth he must have said, " . . . and now for my final task of indisputable greatness, let lawyers be filthy rich, and let nice guys be as interesting as the chicken."

Let's face it. The chicken is a boring, flightless bird that sits around laying eggs all day. That's probably why we eat chickens as opposed to something graceful and aerodynamic, such as the eagle. Hence, when you score two under par in a game of golf, you scream "Eagle baby!"

On the other hand, while trying to insult someone's courage you say "chicken." And what was Zeus's bird? The eagle.

It's because the eagle is tough, agile and feasts on the cute, nice prairie dog, while the chicken eats its corn.

When we look at the eagle, we get a woozy sense of pride. What happens when you stare at the chicken? The wooziness is certainly accredited to accented hunger.

A classic bad guy (we'll call him Eagle) is arrogant, selfish, extraordinarily high on testosterone and believes that parked cars serve only one purpose -- to reflect his image.

Defying all reason and empirical methods of science, good girls fall in love with bad guys. Go figure.

Meanwhile, nice guy (we'll call him Chicken) is sitting in a dark corner of a smoky bar saying to his other good guy friends, "You're so cool and you don't even know it."

So what are nice guys supposed to do? The problem is inherent in the whole idea of trying to be something you're not. Chickens badly want to be eagles but never will be. However, we must realize that mother nature has attested in the case of humans.

Just like the cool guys in high school end up as garbage men, I believe chickens will win in the end. Therefore, I wouldn't go slapping your significant other just yet.