Something about the between-times makes me restless. The whispering of dry leaves on the topmost branches, the sunlight filtering from warm orange to cool yellow, the crisp, spicy smell in the air…all of these things, these faces of autumn, play around with my sense of beingness. Perhaps because it is a time of transition, a time when one season shifts toward another, perhaps that is why I sit uneasily, unable to focus, unable to find stillness.
Accompanying this changing-state is a low level of annoyance with pretty much everything, and that’s not fair, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles, as it were. Little things begin to set me off, like ridiculous and badly made PSAs, like road construction, like terrible music and the people who say and do stupid things because they refuse to (or cannot) think before they act. I don’t *want* to be intolerant, but it turns out I’m really *quite* good at it. With the shortening of days, my patience wanes like a gibbous moon.
From the hooting mental health patient for whom I would normally have empathy or sympathy or some kind of pathy that isn’t soci- or pscyho- related, I feel all the horrible, nasty things I’d *like* to say burble to the surface of my brain. It occurs to me that this must be the moraine where the evolved, monkey brain (sorry; where the created, human brain) and the protean, lizard brain (sorry; the evil, demon-created brain) exchange telephone numbers and swap camp stories. The place where my internal editor *usually* hangs out. The place where, in rows and files and entire rooms full of index cards and a complex filing system even Melvil Dewey Himself couldn’t burrow his way through.
I start saying things Out Loud that I don’t intend to say Out Loud. In Simpsonese, this is known as “quiet part loud;loud part quiet”. As I ripen, not unlike an alcohol-soaked cheese, I begin saying the Out Loud things with more and more volume. Just today, I literally had to bite my tongue to keep from saying “either take your goddamned pants off or pull the bloody things up; make up your mind, son, because buckling your pants halfway down your thighs is seriously pissing me off, and by the way, I can tell by the state of your underoos that you need to do laundry.”
I shouldn’t drive.
I know a surprising number of racist epithets, and while I certainly don’t believe in the payload of hate and insufferable intolerance/lack of acceptance that they entail, I can’t deny I find it mind-blowingly funny to spit them out in a steady, nonsensical stream which condemns every single cultural, religious, ethnic, or special-interest group on the face of the planet. Things I won’t repeat on my bournal because I know you’ll get the wrong impression and someone somewhere will write to me and say, “you know it’s really mean to call Japanese people Nips because that’s what they called them after the war and it was racist, because they *should* be called Japs” or some such nonsense which will just set me off again.
For the record, the word “Nip” comes from the Japanese word for Japan, which is “Nippon”. So go soak your head, imaginary heckler.
I have more and more difficulty hiding the sarcasm in my voice when I’m talking to the person working for minimum wage who is telling me I can’t exchange the blue shirt for the red shirt because their policy states that if you leave the store with a blue shirt you can only make exchanges for red shirts on alternating Thursdays, providing Mercury is triune with the planet formerly known as Pluto and the sign in your ascending house is Pisces, assuming you were born in Thebes. Sure, you can chalk that up to idiotic merchandising/customer service policies, but normally I’d just laugh it off and insist on speaking to the manager who is most likely fifteen years younger than me, twice as educated, and who’s on a power trip because s/he holds in her/his hands the power to DENY ME MY EXCHANGE. But in the fall, I replace the laughing it off with wanting to stab people in the eye.
“I am seriously going to throw this phone through the goddamn window if someone tries to send me a fax on this line again”. Case. In. Point. Hair trigger. Please not to tease the cenobyte. Do not poke, taunt, or throw sticks. cenobytes are known to act poorly in public.
So if I’m doing something you find offensive, (regular cenobyte wishes to apologise and indicate that it’s just a phase and that we will return to our regularly scheduled programming shortly. That it’ll be over soon. That the ‘social retardation’ setting is overheating. That please, for the love of all that may or may not be holy, depending on your philosophical belief system, do not hold it against cenobyte) bite me.
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