Let me set the scene.
We are in some kind of rubber room. Padded walls, ceiling, everything. In the center is a simple wooden desk with a wooden chair behind it and another in front of it. Both chairs are centered relative to the desk.
Behind the desk is the man you all know from the television, Doctor Ewell Montaigne. His attitude is is one of friendly neutrality, like he’s waiting at the airport for a distant relative he’s never met before.
I, your humble reporter, am seated in a dark corner of the room, outside the eyeline of either chair, so that as long as I am quiet, I will not easily be noticed.
And having been very sternly warned that if I make the slightest of sounds or otherwise intrude upon the proceedings in any way, i will be eternally banished, rest assured that I will be the quietest girl in church for the entire affair.
Our story begins when an individual, who you all have heard of but whom for legal reasons I can only refer to as Killer, is led into the room and his wrist and leg shackles are removed, as is his gag.
Killer :(massing his wrists) It’s all quite unnecessary, you know.
Doctor : What is?
Killer : All the supposed “security measures”. The shackles, the gag, the snipers with their sights trained on my heart outside. It’s all just political theater. There is no need for it at all. I have absolutely no desire to escape.
Doctor : There IS the small fact that you have confessed to six murders, three rapes, and dozens of cases of child molestation.
Killer : I suppose so. But I insist that I am no threat to anyone. I like it here. It’s quiet and calm and orderly, and I feel quite snug and safe. Why would I want to escape that?
Doctor : We are not here to discuss the minutiae of your living arrangements, Doctor…
I hear the sound of a guard’s stool scraping against the floor as he got up and a soft click suggesting he had drawn his weapon.
Killer merely smiled and held up a restraining finger.
Killer : Tsk tsk, Doctor. You know the rules.
Doctor : I mean…. uh… Killer. We are here to see if you are treatable. If you are, then you may remain here in this secure psychiatric facility. If not, you will be transferred to a maximum security prison. I assure you, you will not find it as comfortable.
Killer : Of course.
Doctor : Now, for the record, do you still remain unrepentant for your crimes?
Killer : That depends. Which ones?
Doctor : Any of them.
Killer : That’s impossible to answer. Some I repent and some I do not.
Doctor : The murders, then.
Killer : I feel guilty about two of them.
Doctor : Why only two?
Killer : Because those could have been avoided. I could have achieved the same thing by less violent means. And I can never forgive myself for that.
Doctor : But the other four….?
Killer : I regret that they had to be done. But I do not regret having done them.
Meh. Fuck whatever I had going there. I have lost the thread, lost the point, lost the narrative, and hence have lost interest.
It started with some really great dialogue I had going in my head when I was making lunch, but by the time I wrote all that superfluous setup, I had completely forgotten the dialogue and the result is that stiff sack o’ crap up yonder.
Sorry if you liked it and want more. If it makes you feel any better, I have learned my lesson. If I am going to take dialogue from my head and use it to launch a piece of fictio n, I need to write the dialogue down first and worry about setup etc later.
Consider my ass taught.
Been pondering generalizations again.
To recap, the question is, “what makes one person touch a hot stove and get burned and say ‘Boy, I better not do that again!’ and another says ‘I now hate kitchens forever.”
I mean, presumably, both are snapshot moments in which a lasting association is created by a traumatic event, but in one case the snapshot is ever so much larger.
Obviously, the smaller snapshot is the healthy one. It makes sense both emotionally and rationally to learn not to touch hot stoves again.
But I have seen, in myself and others, so many examples of the big snapshot that I have to wonder, like, WTF, dude.
Could it be that things like that simply bother some people more than others, and hence the emotional impression is that much more powerful?
Possibly. But I am wary of ever comparing emotions like that. It’s too nebulous and it leads to people playing “who has suffered more”.
And that’s just… sad.
I think it has some connection to the thing I just decided is called the “safety seeking personality”. Some people, for whatever reason (usually bad), have a personality that prioritizes safety to an almost fanatical level.
What makes it pathological is that enormous areas of life are made unavailable to the individual by their destructive over-generalization.
I mean, imagine how crippling a hatred of kitchens could be.
It could be that there is a relationship between having a safety-seeking personality (as opposed to novelty-seeking, pleasure-seeking, challenge-seeking, etc) and having these enormous categorical generalizations in one’s psyche.
Although which causes the other is anybody’s guess.
My own safety-seeking personality was formed by being raped when I was 4 years old. That permanently altered my sense of safety and taught me that the world was a cold and harsh place where terrible things can happen at any moment.
Being bullied only cemented that lesson. So I became one of the people I described whose need for safety is downright pathological.
How pathological? It’s kept me completely out of the world for my entire adult life.
It’s clearly insane (natch) to have so much fear of the world that it keeps you locked away in your bedroom most of the time.
And yet here I am, living vicariously through my computer, with all this potential locked behind a wall of depression and despair.
Kinda sad, ain’t it?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.