I grew up regarding all forms of aggression repulsive. Maybe I mistakenly thought aggression denotes idiocy; certainly all aggressive people I'd known had been dumb. Nonetheless, it was a wrong conclusion to reach. Problem is, there's no stronger correlation between "aggression and idiocy" than "humanity and idiocy". I suppose, growing up, the aggressors simply made more noise about themselves. It is hard to ignore the loud lout with his jackboot in one's ribs. Time to rethink and work around, though. What may've worked as a temporary survival strategy for a disturbed child doesn't pose viable means for attaining long-term benefits and making do with adulthood. Something clearly needs to be done.

I am somewhat passive-aggressive.

I won't be for the rest of my life. Previously, my method for clearing hurtful hurdles has been ignoring them unless right next to me and clearing any close-by ones spontaneously on the night. This doesn't work any more (not sure it ever did), and besides, whenever it is up to the passivist pacifist to stop a loud and angry antagonist, you're screwed by default.

Everyone likes to think they're doing the best they can, given the situation. I imagine this will be written on our tombstones. I predict hordes of revolting, thoughtless people declaring the very same thing at civilization's endgame: it wasn't anyone's fault - everyone did their best! This never helps, and the thought exercise is flawed in centering on effort instead of available tools. People aren't equally equipped to handle situations and problems on the rise, and a one-approach person clearly qualifies inferior to anyone with a wider-range bag of tricks, because while both indeed "do their best" the actual results vary like day and night. Somehow this appears hard to see, or accept. Why is that?

The shame of adaptation returns to the fray. If you've grown up masturbating to your superiority to keep you alive under threat, it may well be that your method of approach has stagnated into a dogmatic "only choice you'll ever have", any attempt at evaluation will collapse into defensive quasi-pride hostility - or a passive-aggressive packet loss jettison. "Who're they to suggest recompiling my sacrosanct, essential kernel? Those homos, that's an admission of defeat!

Yeah, and if the other guy doesn't understand what you're saying, you need to yell louder.

Now, what to do when you've killed off prospects for progress and everybody surrounding you is like that, as well? Still drinking the leaded water 'cause so have they always done. If it's a happy ending, it is only so because you're FUCKED in the end.

So, continuing on with my story. I have hated a lot of things, but there was I: an adult suffering, yet with absolutely no idea as to how to live my life. I hated a lot of things, but most of all I hated my life. This young adult was still helpless, in a complete and utter cul-de-sac with a bag around his head, for once in a Plato's cave of my own devices with no visible way out. Trapped in my childhood home with a serious depression and without any clue as to how to get anything right. Worse, I was there with the father I despised for the better (worse) part of my youth. Coupled with all that hate I had developed supposedly to shield me from agony, it's no wonder every solution started to look like a bladed weapon.

I find this darkly ironic even now: It's rather suitable that I saw Blade Runner the first time in a long while the day before I killed my father. Roy Batty and I have much in common. I'm not sure I could ever pass the VK test. And I guess the both of us found the thoughtless gift of life such an unbearable disservice that we promptly had to avenge it with the pain of death. Granted, Roy then proceeded to love life, but I'm still working on that.

Mind you, I'm painting the picture prettier again with literary reference. So here's the depressing, self-deprecating version: I pretty much killed my father just to get out of bed. I used to hate my father and mostly I could never love him, but what I did essentially constituted a final, sorry attempt at fixing a life not properly functioning, a desperate and selfish animal act from a person that could no longer even notice any real solutions.

The following bit may offend some people: it worked.

Fast forwarded into the aftermath of the kill and everything I've had to think and rethink of these last few years the prison sentence has offered me, I'm a million times better off than ever before. I've done a lot of work on it, and I'm not such a terrible social wreck today. I have plans and dreams, where for the longest time I used to see a pitch black future so dark not even the old joke about the true identity of the light at the end of the tunnel would apply. I don't hate my situation any more, nor am I helpless. Playing the "if" game rarely bears fruit, but I guess you can say my life is now for the better because I killed my father.

That's shades of grey for you - life rarely gets black and white. I used to see it in black and white, but not anymore. Maybe that's a vested interest. In any case, I'm not losing any sleep over this. I used to, because I'm not some psychopath, but it has passed. I'm not "nuts", nor have I ever been. Like my father, I've had a tremendous amount of emotional problems, but I don't think that either of us has ever been insane per se.

I'm sorry for all the pain, sorrow and the ripples caused. I was in a constant state of pain and sorrow for some twenty years myself, though, so a few hours of misery shouldn't in all perspective derail your lives, should they? I am sorry. But I'm not going to have to keep saying that. My father was no saint, and for the most part of my life nobody other than myself has ever seemed to shed a tear for me or my brother, so in my perspective nobody in the wide fucking world is going to be in a position to condemn me. I hope you'll agree.

So here I am, a survivor of sorts.

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