A Hundred Billion Bottles

Yesterday morning Buzz Kill started yanking my chain.  It was typical Buzz Kill bullshit.  I asked him what his plans were for the painting project over the weekend, and he said he didn't know.  After five minutes of badgering, he finally said that he planned on being here at 8:00 in the morning both days and working for five or six hours.  We've played out similar scenes a million times - where he won't give me a straight answer even though he knows damn well exactly what he is going to do.  It's all about him and control.

Something inside me simply had enough of that bullshit yesterday.  I would say that I lost my shit - but it's more like I finally found it.  A scene ensued. At one point, he started to push past me to walk away, and I put my arm against his chest to stop him.  He cocked back his fist in a very threatening manner - but men often pull that maneuver, and I wasn't afraid he'd hit me at all.  I don't know what I said, but he backed off especially since Velvet was right there.  Then he started telling me to shut up and go to work over and over again.  We were both hostile and aggressive, and it was kind of scary because he stood over me, his face about six inches from mine saying whatever he said while he pushed me around with his stomach.  Like he was belly busting me or something.  That's when I realized that he treats me like that Israeli soldier treated that American girl when he crushed her to death with his bulldozer. I had something to say about it, and the next thing you know he locked himself in the bathroom.

It looks like all that anger I've been turning in onto myself finally got turned out onto Buzz Kill.

Until yesterday, I hadn't realized Buzz Kill, my grandfather, my uncle and The Narcissist were all bulldozers.  I always knew there must be some connection - but the image of a bulldozer crushing a protester pulled it all together for me. 

I haven't felt suicidal for an instant since I left the apartment yesterday morning.  When he came back yesterday afternoon, I told him I wanted to hire somebody to finish the job.  Now that he's done obsessively smearing joint compound over the walls like cake frosting and sanding it all to smithereens, the painting is not that big of a deal.  It shouldn't be more than a few hundred bucks, and I can afford that myself.

We'll see what tomorrow brings, but for the moment, it looks like everything is going to be okay.  Even though I'm still a little shaky, I'm pretty sure something has changed with my voice.  Years of therapy absolutely went into the process, but the support and encouragement I've found here in blogland have given my voice a hint of authority so that I'm not afraid to assert it anymore.  Not much anyway.

There's a difference between real life conversations and the way we touch each other on the blogs.   You take time to choose your words when you're writing in a way that rarely happens in the immediacy of conversation even when you're equally as honest and intimate.  You can also turn to your blog in the middle of the night when you would hesitate to disturb someone with a phone call.

I keep coming back to the concept of blog as message in a bottle like in the Police song:  I send an SOS to the world and thousands of bottles wash back on the shore.  The comments are like those bottles coming back to say, "You're not alone."  I'm hugely grateful, and overwhelmed, too, especially by the link Mad Priest put in his own blog.  He's done it before, a couple of years ago, and both times I have been humbled and astounded because people I will never, ever see in places where I'll never, ever go are suddenly thanking God for Trish.  Lots of people think there is no God, and the jury is still out on that question as far as I'm concerned - but theological and philosophical debates have no bearing on a human hand that reaches out to you, grabs on and holds so tightly for a crucial instant that you don't fall.  You can pull yourself up and tell those Bulldozers they can't crush you anymore.

Thanks, y'all.