Stranger Than Fiction

When I would get really angry - too angry to want to let myself go and yell all the horrid things I was thinking and feeling - I would picture any one of several scenarios I had created in my mind for dealing with such intense emotions and really let loose inside my head. I would scream as loudly as I could without making a sound. As it happens, one of those scenarios involved a dungeon room with a moat full of acid, chains, whips, cat-o-nine-tails, and antique swords and axes, battle pikes and maces. You know, just your normal, everyday torture chamber garb with a little modern tech in the form of a fire hose - for cleaning up afterwards - also included. This was one of the "rooms" in which I dispatched some of my very intense emotions by imagining, in an implausible way, dispatching those who had inspired those emotions within me. (Don't worry, I usually let them walk away - or skulk off - reasonably intact...imagination can be so much fun!)

So wouldn't you know that today I came face to face with a form of my "ragercises" made real. Some pathetic, vicious, waste of skin and space used an "antique axe" to slaughter a four-month-old baby boy and severely injure his mother after having used that same axe on his mentally impaired sister-in-law. It seems that all of the adults survived. The infant did not.

I have never owned, nor wanted to own, an antique battle axe. My tears tonight have been slow and painful; tired, weary, heart-broken. This man's sick and twisted reality has impinged upon the self-therapy that helped me deal with too many emotions that were either inappropriate or inappropriately intense given the realities in my life that seemed to spawn them. As my heart and mind were able to heal I visited these "rooms" less frequently, finding a new peace and calm within myself once the feelings I could not understand had been dealt with and sorted through; filed properly in the correct spaces of my mind.

Have you ever wondered why someone couldn't have just harmed themself instead of others, particularly those unable to defend themselves from such onslaughts? How do we, as a people, deal with such things within the contexts of our individual lives? Usually we just shake our heads and go about our business but, perhaps, we need to pause for a moment and think about this baby, his young mother, and the aftermath of the actions of a man who claims now to remember nothing of the incident.

Dear God!