(this post will come up in spurts cause I'm writing from mobile. such a bad image.) How did I end up grabbing a chair and throwing it at a guy who was insulting a friend, last night at Burger King? Rewind. Came back from YavinCon on Monday. All well. The usual fears and frustrations, but also relax and fun, especially with my Blood Memories friends. Danced the night away on Sunday. Met interesting people. Managed even to have a much needed heart-to-heart talk with Bro. (So, Hoster, don't start the old spiel "you get tired too much". I've been doing cons since 1989 and I've never tried to kill anyone on coming back.) On the final morning, someone offered me a translating job. Details are unimportant. I accepted, hoping the Sheep Curse was over. It was a test. I didn't notice, of course, that the test failed right there, because panic was already setting in. I DID NOT HEAR OR DID NOT UNDERSTAND when THREE PEOPLE told me the deadline was SUNDAY. The sh!t hit the fan at once. I could not even manage to understand what I was supposed to do. When truth dawned last night in front of the movie theatre, panic reached its peak. Or so I thought. I thought I had got away with it with some yelling in front of my friends and their irreplaceable help (thx); a couple of beers + Pirates of the Caribbean would have solved everything. I point out that MY BEER WAS ALMOST UNTOUCHED (had they been in my stomach, both of them, nothing would have happened) when we sat at a Burger King table, and a friend accidentally hit with a chair the guy sitting behind us. Now, she did do it a bit brusquely because the chair had got entangled with the others. The guy started protesting noisily. My friend replied sharply, she's like that (I love you, Damina). So they started ranting at each other. Now, the situation began getting on my nerves and pushing all my buttons. Button 1: violence, even verbal. Button 2: a MAN (bizarre dangerous species with which I'm not in the best of terms lately) using verbal violence against a girl half his size and age. He surely had issues, maybe against young people in general, maybe against women in particular: Button 3. Also this idiot had the charming habit of punctuating his sentences with blasphemy: Button 4. At one point I turned around and gave the man a piece of wisdom from my grandfather: "Who has sense, let them use it" (sounds better in Italian) and the guy went into higher gear: "Sense? She's an ignorant! An ignorant!" Button 5. "Why do you say this? You don't even know her!" I shouted, rather pointlessly, since it was like a line in my novels, but in my novels there are usually dialogues between reasonable people. The guy (and Damina) kept on. "Apologise!" "I apologised!" "It's not enough!" And I snapped. Next thing I remember, I was standing face to face with the guy, who was insulting and threatening me. You just don't do this. Not to ME. I grabbed a chair. Mari tried to prevent me from hurling it against him, and failed. (I love you too, Mari, and I won't hold it against you if you never want to have anything more to do with me.) I'm afraid I missed him. But I should really study carefully what happened in those moments, because Mari's restraint should have been a comfort; instead I was almost happy that I wrestled away from her and threw the chair, because, I don't know, it was like freeing myself from formalities and taboos, from logic and rationality (perfectly good and valid in normal circumstances) and do what I really wanted to do, that is KILL THE ENEMY BEFORE HE KILLS YOU. This is who I am. Anyway, the guy must have got the point by being narrowly missed by a chair, because, if he had overreacted so much to Damina accidentally bruising him with a chair, he should at least have thrown the chair back at me or called the police or something like that. Instead he didn't. And this brands him definitely as a small-dicked coward, as will be clearer later. I grabbed my bag and started towards the stairs leading to the counters. "No, come back!" my friends yelled. "Yeah, run away!" the guy growled. Oh, such a mistake. I don't run, not anymore. I went up and called the only two men in our company who were still buying something to drink, and told the whole staff that a man was abusing a woman downstairs. I must say the staff seemed to react rather matter-of-factly, as though they either knew the guy or were aware that this kind of things happens often. Then again I don't know why we still go there, since we've caught twice the smelly bum, once a thief who stole Gio's bag, and this time the foul-mouthed woman-hating doesn't-know-when-to-quit idiot. So our guys came downstairs with me, and my still foggy impression is that the guy quieted down at once. That's why I brand him as a small-dicked coward: because he did not quit until the MEN arrived. (Or maybe he had already quit when a woman shed the traditional female conventions and THREW A CHAIR AT HIM.) (I hasten to point out that having a small d!ck is not necessarily a measure of cowardice. I simply surmise that for people who usually refer to women as "c*nts", such a situation should be rather frustrating. I don't ask their size to the men I meet, although probably I should make a poll among the YavinCon men requesting to state their size. Excuse me? Scandalous? Slutty? Why, last year us women were asked how we groom our nether regions. People, sorry if I fan the fires of the war of the sexes, but men are still living in the Neolithic in regard to women.) Then the security guy arrived, a quiet but determined man who quickly assessed it was no big matter. Anticlimactic. That's what surprises me; I thought the guy would press charges against me for throwing a chair at him, instead I don't even remember him mentioning it (but the red fog hadn't dissipated yet). This reinforced in me the idea that he was the kind of bully who behaves abusively unless confronted by another man, or a woman with a chair. Guess what, I was ready to be arrested or something, because I would have made such noise about the incident to end up on CNN by the next day. I KNOW what I did was wrong. But I can't help thinking that if more people threw chairs at a$$holes, less a$$holes would go around bothering people, fearing they might meet the crazy woman who throws a chair at them (or bites them, or stops her car in the middle of the road to tell them off, etc, etc.) I know, this seems like vigilantism, but I've had enough of these people who have no respect for others. Just call me Rorschach. Then the evening went on apparently quietly. We ate and drank and went to see "Pirates". It was ok. But all through the evening a terrible understanding began growing inside me. Not just that my medications aren't working anymore; I knew about the antidepressant, but such a failure of the mood stabilizer was new to me. Today I talked to my doctors about this. The scary thought, that my therapist confirmed today, was that it had happened because of my panic and terror generated by my new job. Once again feeling judged, fearing the failure, the shame, the humiliation, the frustration. And that if I tried to do the job in this state, next time I might hurl a chair at my mother, or f*ck up my conference at ParmaFantasy. The only option was quitting at once and leaving my friends in the sh!t, thus more terror, failure, shame, humiliation, frustration, yeah. I told them that if my refusal to work hurt them financially, someone pressed charges on them or something, I was ready to refund everything. Hell, I'd pay for not working. It just hurts too much. Today I've come back to a family I can't stand, the only family I'll ever have. I feel empty, I feel nothing, and it's a wonderful sensation. |