Sorry to sound melodramatic. That’s just the song I have stuck in my head right now.

You remember it? It’s this one.

Trigger warning : child physical abuse.

It’s things like that which make me realize that as bad as my childhood was, it could have been a lot worse.

At least I didn’t suffer physical abuse from a parent. I already regret the brutalization of the soul, the sapping of the civilized sense of safety and the resultant seeds of savagery, that I carry around from the schoolyard bullying I got as a child.

There will always be a part of me that is vicious and angry and scared and determined to destroy anyone who so much as raises a hand against me again, no matter the cost.

And I really wish it wasn’t there. It is certainly nothing to be proud of. I am a civilized person with civilized values. I value restraint, cooperation, order, progress, and the higher morality of true humanism.

But in the middle of it all is a very dangerous animal, crazed with rage and trembling with fear, capable of lashing out at any moment if it feels threatened or hurt.

That’s one reason I have avoided getting really close to people (besides most of them being, you know, outside). I am deadly afraid that if someone gets too close, they will come in contact with that animal and very bad things would happen.

It will sound absurd to those who know me, but I am convinced that this dark passenger of mine could turn me into a physical abuser under certain conditions.

The explosive rage kind, where afterwards I am incredibly apologetic and swear it will never happen again.

But it will, because I still don’t know how else to deal with my rage and so it just builds up till… POW. There goes a jillion kilowatt dam. And I’m not in control of myself until I run dry.

After all, it’s in the blood. That’s what my father did. He would take out his anger and frustrations on his family at the dinner table.

Granted, he wasn’t physically abusive like poor little Paul Hyde’s dad, and I am very grateful for that. Who knows what kind of savage thug I would have become if that had been the case.

But the pattern of abuse is the same. Unable to express emotions the normal way, they build up until it all comes out at once in a big ketchup bottle burst.

And coming from me, sweet mellow affectionate me, it would come as a particular surprise. One moment I am my usual laid back silly self, then I am yelling and crying and accusing and attacking.

It has happened before in my life. Nobody got hurt but a lot of people were shocked and upset. From their point of view, I am freaking out about some tiny thing.

They can’t possibly know the kind of emotional pressure that has been building up inside me.

And even if they did, who knows which pebble will start the avalanche? Certainly not me.

Certainly right now, as I am processing and integrating decades of emotional pain and suppressed rage and frozen bitter tears, I am in no state for a relationship.

I am a big bag of radioactive broken glass right around now, and nobody, absolutely nobody, could get close to me without getting cut to pieces, no matter what I’d prefer.

I feel so angry and vicious lately. Not all the time, but enough so that it worries me. I know that I will have to go through this in order to become a psychologically whole person, but that doesn’t make it any easier to endure.

The times I want to just smash everything are getting closer together. Yesterday I had a “I hate my life” moment, and when I start thinking that, I know things are getting bad.

Speaking of anger, here’s something that got me good and ranty today.

It seems that ur-retailer Amazon is going to start sending you things it thinks you might want.

That’s right, stuff will show up at your door that you never ordered and you will have to either buy it or go to the trouble of sending it back.

Presumably, they hope that once you are holding it in your hands, and it becomes easier to just do nothing and have the thing charged to your credit card than to send it back, you will end up buying all kinds of things you never would have ordered and profit will rain down on them like manna from heaven.

But they have gravely miscalculated. People loathe negative option billing. They might get a few extra sales but at the cost of generating enormous ill will. To send something just in case the person might want to buy it is presumptuous, obnoxious, and blatantly manipulative.

I predict that negative reaction to the very idea of this will be so monolithic and vehement that the idea will get dropped before it ever sees the light of say again.

In fact, Amazon might have deliberately leaked this story in order to gauge public reaction to the idea.

If so, I am sure the results will he very clear.

As for myself, like I said on Facebook, I consider anything sent to me to be mine. All the legal steps for giving someone a gift have been followed, and that is steel plated law from the days of the Napoleonic Code.

Compared to that, some silly sub-paragraph in some enormous and opaque user agreement that most people don’t even read and that definitely does not conform to the “reasonable expectation” test doesn’t stand a chance.

You sent it to me without my even asking. I consider it mine now, just like bulk mailings are mine.

And I encourage everyone else who ends up victim to this bullshit to take the same attitude.

See how long they keep up this nonsense when the legal precedent has been set that if you send it, they own it.

That’s all for today, folks. See you tomorrow.