I'm Batman

No, really. I'm Batman.

I found out I'm Batman this past Friday in Salzburg. I had three hours to spend in Salzburg before meeting my friend Matt and taking a bus to St. Gilgen, a mountain town about 50 minutes east of Salzburg. Genuine "Sound of Music" country. Lederhosen and everything. You shoulda seen it.

But before I'd be teaching children of sexually overactive parents how to harmonize, there was the matter of passing the next three hours. Which I did in a park not to far away from the train station. With me I had the following items, ONE OF WHICH played the key role in revealing my role as new Batman:

• iPod
• Journal
• Frisbee
• Ulysses
• Poker chips
• Batmobile (not really)

Finding a comfortable-enough looking tree, I started reading Ulysses. Having filled my intellectual quota for the day (14 mins.), I started listening to my iPod. Feeling ancy from sitting down for almost an hour, I got up to play the "Throw-the-frisbee-to-myself" game – an individual game that's not quite as cool as kicking a soccer ball against a brick wall, but still less pathetic than throwing a football to no one and chasing after it. It's actually really neat! You have to throw it at just the right angle to get it to come back to....hey, where are you going?

As impressive as my angling is, running is occasionally necessary when playing this game, so I freed my pockets of any items that would encumber agility: wallet, keys, and iPod. These items were left by my tree. I scampered about forty feet away to get some open space.

After about ten minutes of whipping the disc around, I was getting pretty freaking good. I'd wing it twenty, thirty, forty feet in the air, file my nails for a little bit, and then snatch it out of the air as it torpedoed towards the earth. I caught it with the help of my eyes – on occasion. The killer was that no one was around to marvel at my greatness. It was a big park, but it was on the other side of a big, nasty-looking office building, which I assume encourages the locals to seek out more scenic space.

There I was all alone, but not for long. From the left-hand entrance of the park appeared an early twenty-something with hair cut close to his head and pants suggesting a potential need for instant pants removal. Finally having an audience, I casually peeked over a few times to see if he was admiring my throws. He was not. Instead, it appeared that he was admiring the personal possessions I left by the tree – as he made his way across the park, he made a pretty obvious double take at my goods. And then he walked on by.

"Silly Mathias," I thought. "This is Austria: They don't have crime here." I threw away my paranoia as I whipped the frisbee just inches away from the sun, and forgave myself by the time the disc was back in my hand. For good measure, I looked over to my stuff and to my nearly bald friend and saw that he was talking to someone on his phone. "Ah yes," I thought, "I talk on the phone sometimes, too. This man and I are one! Shame, heaps of shame upon me."

I pulled back the frisbee to see if I could get this toss higher than the last one, and just as I was about to let it go, the man with athletic pants made an athletic about-face and was sprinting towards my stuff. "There's no way he's..." But sure enough, he was. The next several things happened in a very short amount of time:

1. At about ten feet away from my stuff, he began crouching down the same way a shortstop does when he's getting ready to barehand a grounder before he rifles it to first.
2. With the frisbee already in my hand, I changed the grip from the traditional backhand style to the more advanced forehand technique, which, as frisbee aficionados are already aware of, is a throw that enables the frisbee to reach much higher velocities than the traditional backhand style.
3. I threw the frisbee.
4. The thief, having reached my stash, grabbed my wallet with his right hand and appeared to be reaching for my iPod with his left.
5. Frisbee already in flight, I shouted as authoritatively as I knew how "Hey!"
6. The thief looked up just long enough to present his forehead for the now trucking frisbee.
   
7. A noticeable "Thwup."
8. My wallet flies out of his right hand as the thief is knocked back into the mature oak behind him. He quickly falls to his hands and knees.

All of this took five seconds. Maybe four.

And it was in that time that I became Batman.

With adrenaline coursing through my vines, I was standing over my target – the would-be victimizer who fell victim to my Batdisc. (Batbee? No, Batdisc. That's it.) Panting a little, I managed to bark what inarguably Batman would say, were Batman German, and capable of incredibly ironic politeness in the heat of battle:

"Möchtest du mehr?"

(Would you like more?)

He did not like the idea of more. He scrambled to his feet and scampered away – nothing to show for his malfeasance save what I'm hoping developed into a fairly hard to explain bruise upon his brow.

Justice prevails,
Batman