* = The more you read the more this will make sense...I promise...
Have you ever been angry? I don’t mean irritated at someone who cut you off in traffic, or frustrated because that guy at work keeps sticking you with crap work, I mean bludgeon someone to death with a puppy angry. For the vast majority of my life I carried my anger around like a badge of honor, sometimes it was a good thing. It kept me from writing too many checks my ass couldn’t cash. At the same time it ruined a great deal of my relationships, romantic and otherwise. Once I got divorced, or more honestly, once I was ‘left’ I really took a hard look and decided to better process or deal with that sharp burning feeling of anger that swells within my gut. After an exhausting attempt of writing, processing, and evaluating later I came out in my current incarnation, something different, a better version of what I had always been.
That doesn’t mean that occasionally that thing inside me doesn’t rise up. It’s an indescribable feeling. The best way I can put it into words is it’s as if you have been told the most horrible thing you can imagine, or have been wronged most foul by someone and then are forced to look at that person, place, or thing and have it JUST outside your reach. Like being trapped in an ever-shrinking personal space. I feel a lot of times like I’m pacing in a room that is only two feet by two feet. The world becomes a cacophony of annoyances, a waterfall of events, moments, and real or imagined slights that seem to serve only one purpose, to give fuel to this fire inside you.
It’s a horrible feeling. It’s a feeling that any moment I’ll lose that carefully placed façade of control. Like my face, this thing I’ve built, will slide off and the thing beneath it will come out into the world in all its horrific glory. It’s frightening to feel the loss of control just on the edges, the peripheral of your life. Ninety five percent of the time it’s locked in it’s tiny box, inside a circle, inside a triangle, put away on a shelf in the back of myself. On occasion circumstance, stress, and other events outside my sphere of control conspire to allow that thing out of it’s shell, out of that carefully constructed prison, and loose. It makes me brood, it gives me an air of unpredictability, a sense of a melancholy veneer over something much more sinister. I hate it. I hate it as much as I hate looking myself in the mirror when I’m like this. It’s not who I am, not who I want to be, not who I want people to see.
The reality is though it’s a facet of who I am. I can never be rid of it. We are the sum of our parts. It’s the manifestation of my rage, my guilt, my ego, my addiction, and all those things that seek to circumvent what I build. Maybe this is why I find so much solace and peace in the black and white aspects of life, and struggle with subtlety, with the entire moral and intellectual gray the world has to offer. I understand create & destroy, I don’t do so well with foster, corrupt, grow, & trim. The world in-between where we have to live is where I struggle. It requires balance, and I don’t do balance very well.
All we can do, all I can ever do, is try to understand this thing just as I try to understand who and what I am. It takes time to do this.
SO, in order to buy myself that time, to process, and let’s be honest that’s what my blog has always been is a place for me to scream at the world as loud and as long as I want about the things I love & hate, I give unto you
TEN THINGS I WANT TO BURN DOWN AS IF I WAS MEL GIBSON!
1) Arguing For Arguing's Sake – Listen to all of you in my life who want to be right, you are right, there I’ve said it. YOU ARE RIGHT. We don’t need to discuss it till it’s dead & we don’t need to continue to part and parcel it down to it’s tiniest form just so we can war over semantics. I don’t care that much about ANYTHING to want to desperately engage in this activity. Be right. Enjoy it, touch it, taste it, SAVOR it. Just realize as you devour that most tasty of morsels that I don’t care.
2) Family Members – We are all fucked up. I understand that. Whether it’s mental illness robbing you of you’re reality, whether it’s emotional scars from the past that forever leave us at arm’s length from having a meaningful relationship, or whether it’s just the fact that we are born and bred to be stubborn asses, we all have problems. What I want from you, all of you is to attempt to get beyond that. I’m not Lenin, I will NOT drag you kicking and screaming into a brighter tomorrow, I will simply leave you behind and our relationship will become a shade of what it was, is, or could be. I don’t want that in my heart of hearts but it’s almost unbearable to deal with it in any other way.
3) Time – F’ YOU TIME! You have robbed me & mine of so many things. Opportunity, health, wisdom, so on and so forth, it was all there, but now it’s all something, well something less. The most frustrating thing I can think of in recent memory is to watch someone you admire memory or processing ability fails them. To try desperately to have a conversation with that person only to know it’s the same conversation you had the last time you talked to them. It’s seeing the light of life dimming, it’s humbling, and at times like these I wish anything but to be humble.
4) Angry White People – Listen man, ‘we’ve’ had a good run. We stole a country from an indigenous people. On a side note as a proud member of the Northern Cherokee tribe I just want take this moment to say, “Screw you crackers!” Ok, now back to my point ‘we’ve’ had a good run. ‘We’ have controlled the government, the corporations, the money, the flow of information, well everything for the vast majority of history, BUT every empire comes to an end. To be angry with other people just because they don’t look like us, but want what ‘we’ supposedly have isn’t healthy. I’m incredibly tired of this disingenuous indignity of white people like ‘we’ are owed or deserve better. You reap what you’ve sown, and the elite of the world have ridden on the back of the poor for to long. Every so often things change, but they can’t change without a little real or symbolic bloodshed. I really think it’s on the verge of that. I for one wish white people would realize that and get the fuck over themselves.
5) Rich People – Plain and simple I hate you. That is all. Let me clarify a bit. You philanthropists out there, you rare breed who endeavor to make the world a better place for no other reason than to be remembered a Sheppard of humanity, I applaud you, I laud you, and I wish you nothing but success in your plots, plans, and ruminations. The rest of you cocksuckers, I hope you get anal warts and die of dysentery.
6) Anger – Oh this one is ‘tricksey’. It’s difficult to be angry at anger, but I am. I hate the way it makes me feel, the way it makes me act, the way it chips away ever so slightly yet ever so persistently at my self control. Hell it even smells bad; it smells like fear and desperation. I don’t like it; it’s like wearing dirty clothes because you have nothing available to you that is cleaner. It’s raw, wild, untamed, and in the end counterproductive to everything to what I want to be. In the same breath it’s really hard to argue with yourself, and when I’m angry that seems all that I’m capable of.
7) My Body – Oh how you’ve betrayed me down the stretch. I’ve often said that the mind can be willing, but the body unable, and that is where I am. I have ridden this thing to its end point. It just hurts all the time, not unbearable pain, not that sort of “I’m DYING here” pain, just a dull never ceasing ache. It’s exhausting to never be free from the yoke around your neck, especially when that yoke is pulling on you’re every joint, muscle, ligament, and tendon. I won’t even get started on the seizure thing, because that’s just about the pinnacle of loss of control and frustration. The thing that gets me here is I put myself in this position. I rode this horse to long, to hard, for to long and now I have to pay for it. I have no physical outlet anymore. In the past if I got angry I would hit something or someone in some type of game, or sport, or sparring. That isn’t there anymore, and even if it was my body can’t do it anymore. I think I’m more pissed that I wasn’t smart enough to figure all this out earlier in life.
8) Money – Oh yes as much as I loathe the rich it doesn’t mean I don’t want to be one. Hell I already hate myself enough that would a couple million dollars do to change that? Nothing that’s what. I can’t give my wife the life she deserves, I can’t afford to give us children, I can’t pay for the health care of my father & grandmother, I can’t help my friends it’s the sense of helplessness, the sense that I’ll never get out from under this financial burden that leaves me feeling like Atlas. I want these things. I want to be able to make my wife’s dreams come true. If she desires something I want to be able to give it to her. I want children. I truly desire to be a father, to not make the mistakes of my parents, but instead make all new ones. I want to make sure my parents & my grandmother don’t live in poverty where they can’t afford health care or food. I want to be able to give my friends opportunity, to help them see through their hopes and dreams. It’s infuriating to want.
9) Other People – I think they anger me so much because I fear them. I fear what I don’t understand, and I do NOT understand other people. What I mean to say is understand the basics; motivations, body language, the communication within the communication, social climbing, etc. What I don’t understand is the deeper question of “why”. I have a hard time understanding my own deeper reasoning let alone the fleeting horde of faceless masses at Menards, or work, or on Highway 100 at 7:15am. The thing is I want to. I want to be in on the collective narrative of humanity, but instead I feel outside of that. I feel “other”. Does that make any sense to anyone but me? To feel within the throng but to feel outside of it? Is it a sense of self-important exile or is it simply that I see things through such a different prism that I’ve denied myself understanding? No answer will be satisfactory here. I just don’t care for other people as a rule, so if I do like you then you, to me at least, are truly exceptional.
10) Phil Collins – I’m not sure why. Somethings man was not meant to know.
Man, I have I-S-S-U-E-S-! BUT I do feel better getting that out there. Thanks black hole of information that is the Interweb(s), thanks for listening. In fact to show my gratitude I’m going to give you some
RANDOM CRAP!
- How do you feel about Flying Magic Ships in your Fantasy setting? See I’m not sure about it. I think it looks cool, and it sounds cool, but I’m not sure about it’s execution. What say you?
- Dave here is another image to continue to spark your interest in Knight & Squire;
- Tornadoes prevented me from chicken wings last night. Even the weather conspires against me.
- Wargames Factory just put out two sets of Saxon miniature’s sprues. One for Saxon Fyrd, unarmored warriors, & one for Saxon Thegns, those warriors who wore armor. You can get a set of sprues that will build you 32 of either for like $20.00, which is a steal. If I didn’t have a literal crap ton of minis that need to be painted right now I might drop an Andrew Jackson on it.
- After everything I’ve read I really want to see Inception in a theatre.
- The Sport’s Abyss is coming to its conclusion. NFL Preseason starts in like a month. I feel like a man who’s crawled through the desert only to be able to see the oasis just over the last hill. It feels good to know that in a little less than 28 days I can put baseball back in my rearview sport’s mirror.
- I also want to go to the theatre to eat Theatre Buttered Popcorn. There is nothing better.
- There won’t be any Friday's For Learnin' Blog tomorrow since I have to go out of town during the day. I might try and sneak a belated one in Saturday or something, but I most likely will be to busy prepping for the awesomeness that will be EMERGENCY MOVIE-A-THON!
Let me give a brief explanation of the above. Don’t freak out. Occasionally I have to give form and substance to the maelstrom that is in my mind. I’m not ill; I’m not going to go set fire to anyone, well maybe Phil Collins if given the chance. There is no danger to me or to you. It simply is easier for me to express myself in the written word than it is for me to grunt at people in my normal way. Take it for what it is, a brief glimpse into the way the cogs turn inside the machine on my shoulders, nothing more, nothing less.
Well I have other things to hate on…
“Disempowered, the scattering flock
Dances in a fever at the castle rock
Dust-devil cypress and ripening fruit
Ascending quick into the author's bathroom
Fawn, Jo, and Tootsie are out on a wire
Lettuce-toothed junkies all full of desire
Meanwhile, Rick James takes her nude
And there's nothing I can do
Meanwhile, Rick James takes her nude
And there's nothing I can do
And there's nothing I can say to you
I've got a lot of work to do
I guess I'll leave it up to you
Uninvited, we'll stay if we want
Searching through your closets for your grandfather's gun
We will swim in your kidney, kidney-shaped pool
Scratching at the bottom for another clue, yeah
Fawn, Jo, and Tootsie are out on a wire
Lettuce-toothed junkies all full of desire
Meanwhile, Rick James takes her nude
And there's nothing I can do
Meanwhile, Rick James takes her nude
And there's nothing I can do
(Meanwhile, Rick James takes her nude)
And there's nothing I can say to you
(Meanwhile, Rick James takes her nude)
And there's nothing I can do
And there's nothing I can say to you
I've got a lot of work to do
I guess I'll leave it up to you“
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