anxiety : 0 | agitation : 0
At ten past two in the morning, I find my mind to be awfully chatty so I decided to quiet it down by writing out (or in this case, keying-in) my thoughts. My thawts at this particular instance aren't exactly happy; in fact I think I'd like to do some confession.
For some reason, my mind strolled back to that time when I was six or seven-ish, because it wanted to remember my first murderous thought. I'm not sure if it was the first or earliest, but considering the single digit of my age, it must have been one of the.
Before I proceed, I must make it clear that I have never really killed anyone, save probably a couple hundred various insects out of necessity, and several house pets by neglect. I am not an actual, intentional murderer in the forensic sense of the word.
(However, in the New Testament redefinition of murder by Christ, oh, I absolutely am, guilty to the first degree!)
I was six-ish or seven-ish when I first fantasized about killing someone - and getting a twisted sense of satisfaction in it. The intended victim was my great-grandmother, because on top pf the way she smelled, she really made my blood boil.
At that time, her age was somewhere between eighty and ninety. She was a stereotypical old woman who meddled in everybody else's business because she no longer had a life. Whenever she had a complaint (which was often), she took it out on whoever was present and everyone was expected to listen. We lived in the same house for several years, and I was much exposed to her harangues on manners, morals and the evils of television and whatever she thought of preaching about at any given moment. She'd totally point fingers and let someone know what a low-down, good-for-nothing scumbag he or she is, and this in the presence of others including the house helpers. She didn't care if her audience was offended or uninterested; neither did she mind the fact that we couldn't understand half her words - she didn't only come from a different century, she spoke a different language. Man, she could talk angry for over an hour and I had to sit through that torture very often, and several times, alone and defenseless.
As a kid, I could never answer back because we were taught that was bad manners (i.m.h.o., that is a very emotionally and socially harmful Filipino value; telling kids not to answer adults breeds resentment and frustration and trains them to either be rebels or milquetoasts). Besides, she was nearly deaf, she hardly understood my language and I couldn't speak much of hers, so it wasn't worth the effort to try to communicate with her.
As a mechanism to cope with the frustration that brewed into anger, I would make little murder plots in my head. While she forced me to sit through another sermon on the lunch table, I looked at the dining knife and wondered if it could kill her. That modus would have been too obvious, I thought, and not to mention too messy, so I mused about an easier, less intrusive manner: poisoning her. As I was very young and knew little about poisons, the most accessible substance I could think of was the packet of silica gel that came in every bottle of Vitamin C. I had noticed that those tiny packets had "DO NOT EAT" printed on them, so I assumed them to be poisonous. I imagined myself secretly tearing the packet open and dissolving the granules (I don't know why, but I thought they dissolved) in her drinking water. I imagined that she would notice the difference in taste so thought maybe it would be wiser to drop the poison in her Coca-Cola instead. She loved Coca-Cola. She also loved bananas, so I tried to think of ways to employ bananas in her poisoning but didn't come up with any.
Fortunately I went to a Catholic School that did a good job of making kids feel guilty for thinking nasty thoughts about their grandmothers. Every teacher there was practically a religion teacher who felt it her life's mission to scare kids into heaven (that blasted story about the girl who went to hell and Miss Del Valle's illustration of a black-spotted heart are still very clear in my head to this day, darnit). So I never carried out any of my murderous intentions, and I didn't grow up to be a deranged sociopath.
At least, not a sociopath.
For all my queasiness around blood and raw meat, it was a sinful pleasure of mine to think of ways to murder people I was angry at. I never had any Hannibal Lecter-type fantasies, but I mostly thought of poisonings or kidnappings with blindfolded tortures or a sudden rush of mutant-power that could slice people's scalps off with a single blow. I never thought that was abnormal. As I got older and experimented with poetry, I would write about my murderous intent in repulsive rhyme (And speaking of Hannibal Lecter - watching Silence of the Lambs as a kid told me that a serial killer is a person in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood, in your neigh-bor-hood that you wouldn't want to grow up into).
Despite deciding to be a follower of Christ and learning about His teachings, I can't exactly say I'm over and beyond all the carnage. I still prolly commit at least one essential murder daily. That makes me guilty enough for an essential trial, and a death penalty. The wonderful thing about being in Christ is the assurance that He is a million times more tolerant than my great-grandmother; he won't sermonize me, punish me or scare me into heaven. With the comparatively small fee of forgiving those I have been angry at, I have the absolutely blessed opportunity to come clean, make it right, and be hidden from God's vengeance by the bright glare of Jesus' righteousness, so I'm spared from the cosmic guillotine. He has been known to pardon a repentant murderer even at the last minute, so I'm sure there's hope for me.
Okay, I just sounded like a junkie on acid right there ... but seriously, without sounding too religious, I'm glad for my Catholic upbringing and my Evangelical indoctrination, and the relationship I have with Christ. I'm all screwed up, but there's a way out.
Anyway, yeah.
Lately I haven't had any murder-fantasies, so I guess that's great. Coming to think of it, I haven't been murderous-angry these past few weeks (just hurt-angry, or protective-angry, which are very different). I credit the improvement to the trigger-drought precipitated by the resignation from Raven Co.*
*Raven Co. : A nickname I thought for "the biggest trigger". I figured if I should be mentioning it over and over, I might as well have a name for it. I thought of calling it Raven Co. because of the word that is used to refer to a group of ravens. That word is what was served me in that place, and was the cause for the massive triggers.
