The Buzz Kill Zone

I've been trapped in the Buzz Kill zone. He and Velvet have been painting the apartment, and after seven straight days of Buzz Kill, I found myself experiencing the exact feelings I had throughout our marriage.  Fortunately, I've been determined to be civil, so never once have I said, "I fucking hate you, Motherfucker."

By the second day of the project, however, I asked him if he was retarded.  He was pretending to Skim Coat a wall - which means putting a thin coat of plaster all over a rough and/or damaged surface in order to make the wall smooth for painting.  In reality, Buzz Kill slopped Spackle all over the walls in the living room, and then proceeded to sand said Spackle without covering the upholstered sofa, the CDs, the TV, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  I wasn't home at the time, but before he got started the next day, I started putting drop cloths over all the furniture and asked him how someone who has complained of asthma for over thirty years could be so careless about dust.  I had barely gotten a sheet over the sofa when he got up on the step stool and started sanding the wall directly over my antique cash register, letting the dust settle into the mechanism while I was standing right there fixing to put a sheet over it.

That's when I asked him if he was retarded.

As a teacher with nearly 25 years experience and two advanced degrees in Education, I can say with authority that there is a distinct difference between a person with cognitive delays and a Retard.  A Retard, in my view, is a person whose Standford-Binet scores are average or above but who is, nevertheless, fucking stupid.  Comparing Palins, for example, we see that although Trigg Palin has Downs Syndrome which means he has cognitive delays, it is wrong and inaccurate to call him a Retard.  His mother, on the other hand, is a Retard.

There have been instances in the past when I thought for sure that Buzz Kill was a Retard, but the reality is that he's the most passive aggressive son of a bitch I ever met in my damn life.  Passive Aggressive people get off by agitating others.  They behave in ways that annoy the living shit out of the people in their lives, then when that person gets pissed, the passive aggressive acts like an innocent bystander and often suggests the anger of their friends and relatives is unjust and/or crazy.

I had to be medicated into a coma while I was married to that man.  We'd been divorced about a year when I started phasing off my meds.  About eighteen months later, I phased out of therapy all together.  Although it's easy to see why I'd feel as if I were being persecuted under the Buzz Kill regime, the thing is that there's nothing at all personal about Buzz Kill's behavior.  He's so anxious about Life, The Universe and Everything that his spazz outs have rippling and crippling effects on everyone around him.

It's not that he was deliberately trying to antagonize me when he started sanding without a drop cloth over the cash register.  He gets tunnel vision when he's focused on something to the exclusion of good sense and practicality.  Velvet's academic record suggests he does the same thing - he jumps in without thinking or reading the instructions because in his own mind, he already knows everything he needs to know.

Sarah Palin could be doing the same thing.  She is so confident that anything she does is Right that she doesn't understand her behavior might not be greeted by universal applause.  Maybe she's not calculating and deliberately provocative.  Maybe she's just a Retard whose only focus is getting attention on TV.

If Sarah Palin is that stupid, and she clearly is that stupid, then somebody with a brain is behind her rise to stardom.  Somebody smart like Ginny Thomas. Say what you will about Clarence Thomas and Anthony Scalia - those Teabagging Activists are not stupid and neither is that world class teabagging fundraiser, Ginny Thomas.

What if Rupert and Ginny and the Koch Brothers decided to put Sarah Palin on TV with that publicity whore Glenn Beck so that they could wag the dog, effectively drawing attention away from all that judicial activism  other miscellaneous Teabagging conflict of interest like the lithium under the hills in Afghanistan?

Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have something to do with that Lithium and the War, and while I can believe they had something to do with Sarah Palin being the Vice Presidential candidate, I doubt they're enjoying her performance on Fox any more than I am - even though they are certainly benefiting from assholes running their mouths in the media.  Plutocrats have to put up with bullshit from their associates just like everybody else as one hand washes the other.

All peons like us can do is try to get some control over our own living rooms.  When we insist that the people in our lives clean up after themselves we are holding them accountable for their behavior as opposed to giving them carte blanche to fuck up our environment like our government gave those bastards at BP.

Maybe if there were more evidence of Accountability in Washington and on Wall Street, ideas of Violent Revolution wouldn't permeate the air, fueled by an impotent rage that seethes inside so many of us.  As a country, we are united in our fury regardless of our political persuasions.