A Letter to the Fat Lady Concerning the Freedom of Redefinition

Dear gigantic, life changing, gas station asteroid,

My day (which is your night) started off pretty typical today. I was at my local gas station getting my customary "enough gas to get me to work and back" fill up, and blaring music through my headphones loud enough to drown out the roar of putrid failure that rolls around this place like a frightening motorcycle gang. I was bored, so to pass the time I was watching an impossibly fat woman demand her children stop running away from her when she was talking to them, threatening, "iffen you t'aint quit haulin' ass 'cross this Loves station, you ain't gettin' Twix bars the rest of the trip!"

I absorbed this in, this Dr. Seuss created human, this obnoxious, tub-bellied hornwaddler, and I wrote her a little letter in my head. It went like this:

Dear horrible fat woman,

A) Your kids aren't running, they're walking at a normal speed. A speed that you've long forgotten as myth and only have psychotic nightmares about. Waking up screaming; rambling wild eyed about a past life where you could go up steps and bought pants with zippers and buttons. And the speed, children! Oh what speed! Like a Cheetah in the jungle you was.

B) Neither you NOR your kids need Twix bars, ever again. Stop by a Country Market instead next time. The last thing those children need is you exposing them to some kind of second hand fat-ass. As if you'd ever let chocolate pass by your face without your jaws snapping down like an Arklatex gator anyway.

C) You might actually look LESS ridiculous if you got one of those scooters designed for people who can't fucking control themselves, instead of attempting to travel under your own natural energy. At this point there is so much ground for your veins to cover I don't even know if blood is MAKING it to your legs so just sit down before you create a giant dead obstruction for traffic to have to get around.

Sincerely,
Go Fuck Yourself

A caught myself laughing out loud as I signed the mental signature to this undelivered correspondence in my head. A good clean laugh that seemed to knock loose some of the gloom that's been collecting in my blood over the past year. Like a big cough after a fever, delivering brown phlegm from your bronchial passages and allowing that sweet deep intake of breath. Something started to stir inside my head. Thoughts that have been simmering on low heat for a long time now started to separate and clarify.

You see, I've still been trying to focus on a more Buddhist path in life, and Buddhism says that I shouldn't feel superior to my fellow man. But, frankly, I've had suspicions for a while now that I'm too good for this hillbilly folk magic crap anyway, so, discounting it's teachings at the drop of a hat isn't a big problem for me. And, laughing at that idiot woman felt good. And feeling good, feels pretty good.

My mother says that happiness is something that comes from inside people. That you just have to relax and dial into the right frame of mind and you'll find it. I have been fighting her on it for a while now, telling her that the only thing that comes from inside a person is hate and anger, and happiness is the result of them either ignoring or learning how to deal with that darkness inside all of us.

In these discussions of philosophy and psychology we do tend to agree on one idea, which is the benefit of walking a middle path. The idea that answers lie between extremes. But, it hadn't occurred to me until this night at the gas station that I hadn't been applying that path to the very argument we'd been having. Maybe that's the key to this feeling of split personality. Maybe that's the clouded truth separating the sorrowful thought from the fierce rage. Maybe we're both right, and the darkness inside of me IS my happiness.

Maybe all I do have to do is dial into that channel of churning, molten, despising indignation, AND also learn how to handle the flow when it's on full blast, and then I'll be carried up into heaven on a powerful stream of concentrated rage. I'd finally have that last piece of the puzzle. Pack my bags tonight. Pre-flight.

Of course that all sounds very fine and dramatic, but the practical solution is really just to reassess how I look at my daily life. To start updating definitions until the world makes sense to ME, instead of me making sense to the world. So, I think that's what I'm going to do here, now. Let's redefine some shit up in this bitch.

We'll start with the obvious. From now on, mentally at least (because we still LIVE IN A SOCIETY and saying words out of popular context will just confuse these apes) I will think of Hatred as Happiness. I know I'll still slip up. Say things like, "man, I hate that bitch," and NOT mean that said bitch has just filled me up with joy. But, I'll know, deep down, that the active ongoing hate of anyone will keep the gears oiled and moving. That in the end I'll build up the anger and cast it out onto a page like a cleansing fire and at that point the hatred will make me feel alive. So it WILL be my joy, like grapes turn into my wine.

Next, I have to come up with a way to express pure happiness without associating it with hate, so that things don't get confusing. I'm going to go with Erection for this one. Partly because it's funny to think about how it means "joy that comes from within" and partly because this will have the least impact on my current way of speaking. It's really the perfect word. I didn't come to this decision lightly. It took long, hard thought. I really had to bang away at it, because I didn't want to look like a jerk. Eventually it just came. So, erection for joy.

Of course, now I have to do something with erection, and just the general idea of sexual desire. I've thought about this and I'm going to reallocate Vengeance to this duty. It seems the closest one on the list without being a sexual word in the first place. If you think about it I think most of you will agree. Think of other slang sex words: beat, hit, slam, pound, choke, stab, bury, pissed. They're practically interchangeable with the idea of Vengeance, so that seems like the logical successor. I haven't quite perfected working the Inigo Montoya speech into our foreplay yet, but, I still have pretty big biceps and a deep, sexy voice, so I think all I have to do is nail the "Hello," and I'm In Like Flynn.

The next one is tricky. If Hatred really eventually brings me joy, then it has to be re-categorized into a preferred state of mind, which brings a lot of friends along. A big one of these being humiliation. Humiliation is something we all have to deal with, and the way I've been dealing with it for years is oversaturation. I basically just replay every extremely humiliating event in my life I can remember, in my head, whenever I have some free time. This causes a certain, but not complete, numbness to 90% of future embarrassing moments. It's what allows me to take responsibility for fuck ups at work, it's what allows me to blow a chore off to get more sleep or rest, it's even what allows me to write. But it's not full proof. Well, maybe this little exercise can change that. Instead of numbing myself through overexposure, maybe just redefining wear it fits in the scheme will just erase the negativity. So for humiliation, I'm reallocating it to mean Teaching. Again, like vengeance and sex, vernacularly, they are almost identical. "Teaching" someone a lesson almost ALWAYS involves some sort of humiliation. The embarrassment is what makes it stick, and that's what you have to associate it with. You don't get red faced and want to "just crawl into a hole and die" when you're watching the History channel, right? So, what's the difference?

Love is going to share some of its meaning between hate, erection, and vengeance now, but true love will still remain in a reserved area for spouse, family, and close friends.

That's what I've got so far, and I don't know if I want to force any more out at the moment. I feel like I've gotten the big ones anyway. Now, in classic 5th grade review sheet fashion, I will apply what I've learned to the end of the letter. A little send off courtesy of my new burgeoning philosophy.

I just wanted to say, that, I hate you all, SO much. You have no idea. I give and I give, and for what? For what? Just so you can hate me too? Well if that's all there is then I'm fine with that. Yeah, I'm fine with it. Don't worry about me. You just keep on living your fucking lives, and if you can find some time in the day to pay attention to little old me than that's great. Yeah, because I know, and don't you dare deny it, because I KNOW that when a handful of you read my letters, you get erections. Oh that's right you get HUGE erections from these letters, and you know what? Knowing that I give YOU erections, well that just gives ME erections too. Because that's what it's all about in the end; giving each other as many erections as we can, in the short time we're on this earth. And my time spent here, doing this thing that I HATE on this site, well that just gives me the biggest erection of all. Honestly, it's all been really humiliating.

I'll write back when I can, assholes. It's getting hard to concentrate. I can't stop thinking about how I'm going to get revenge against my wife tonight.

Sincerely,
Chiggie Von Richthofen
Space Cowboy/Gangster of Love/Maurice