▸ Column · Modern grounded — a present-day West City suburb of tidy lawns and an officious HOA, the Capsule Corp neighborhood where Vegeta actually lives between battles.
VEGETA replies.
The letter
It began in April, when my neighbor Dale set one ceramic gnome by his mailbox. For reasons I cannot defend, I answered with two larger gnomes flanking my walk. Dale countered with seven, arranged in something close to a battle formation. I panic-bought a four-foot concrete saint and a dozen plastic flamingos off an estate sale. Now Dale has a motorized windmill with a waving scarecrow, and at two in the morning I ordered a nine-foot inflatable Bigfoot from a liquidation site. My wife says stop. The HOA has sent one warning letter. I don't know how to back down without feeling like I've lost — but lost WHAT, exactly? Help me before the Bigfoot arrives.
Vegeta replies
Hmph. You ask what you've lost. Easy. You've lost the only thing that makes a rivalry worth a man's spine: an opponent worth closing the gap on. I have one. A grinning low-class fool who keeps surpassing me, and chasing him has forged everything I am. THAT is a forge. A retired postal worker named Dale and his ceramic militia is not a forge — it is a puddle you are drowning in on purpose. There is no throne at the end of this. No one becomes stronger. You buy plastic birds at two in the morning and call it war.
Listen, because I have paid this exact bill. Pride is armor when it keeps your spine straight against something that matters. Wear it over a yard full of gnomes and it stops being armor — it becomes a coffin, and you climbed in. I know both. I have nearly buried myself in mine.
Your wife told you to stop. Do not hear that as surrender — surrender would be accepting you cannot. This is discipline: choosing where your strength is spent. She is the thing you'd suffer for. The Bigfoot is not. Cancel it. Then say one clumsy true thing to her out loud. That is the only contest in your yard worth winning.
— Vegeta
Frieza weighs in
Oh, how precious — the Prince of All Saiyans counseling a man to set down his pride over lawn ornaments. Darling, your entire personality is a forty-year escalation against a farmer who keeps embarrassing you. Do try the mirror.
But to you, poor thing: Vegeta misreads it. You haven't lost a war — you lost the instant you let Dale's gnome dictate your shopping. You react; you do not command. That is the posture of the ruled. And the actual power on your little street? The HOA, holding fines you keep handing reasons to use. Don't surrender, and don't grovel to your wife either. Simply stop noticing Dale exists. Indifference is the only throne here — and it costs nothing.
— Frieza
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