I'd Rather Rip My Heart Right Out Of My Ribcage With My Bare Hands, And Then Throw It On The Floor And Stomp On It 'Till I Die

--"One More Minute", Weird Al Yankovic

In July of 1992 I began serving out the two hundred fifty hours of community service I was ordered to do as punishment for my misdemeanor hit and run offense. Sufficed to say, I hated every second of it. The logical part of my brain told me it could have been much worse. They could have convicted of a felony hit and run. I could have served jail time instead of community service. I could have also had to pay thousands of dollars instead of the four hundred I was ordered to. There are a million other things that could have wrong for me in the same situation that didn't. Whether it was my good grades, it being my first time getting into any kind of legal trouble, or from the sheer fact they believed my story that I didn't know that it was illegal at the time, I got away relatively scot-free.

However, while I was serving out my hours--eight hours a day, six days a week, for the whole month of July--I literally thought I was in hell. It wasn't just because it was one of the hottest Julys during the 1990s--hot enough to give me probably the worst farmer tan you've seen on an individual. It wasn't just because that they took away my license for the first summer after I had gotten it. It wasn't just that I was doing menial work that a monkey could do. It was the fact that I'd been ordered to do it. It was the fact that I could think of a dozen other activities I could have been engaged in, but had my options limited to just the one I was chained to. It was the fact I was trapped.

Serving out those hours also gave me another reason to call it Hell. While I was living the life of a young man under probation, my friends, who also had gotten their licenses the previous year, were out utilizing their newfound freedom the utmost. I hated them the more for it. I don't know if I ever told them, but pretty much 90% of my time cleaning up the park was spent me thinking of ways to "get even" with them. I know it was stupid to build up all this rage for them for merely doing what every normal teenager does, for doing what I would be doing if I hadn't been so stupid, but jealousy doesn't exactly lend itself to clearheaded thinking. To me it literally felt like they were rubbing my nose in the fact I was in Hell--telling me what exciting misadventures they went on, meekly reassuring me that it would have been cool if I had been there, &c.... I secretly despised them for their seemingly blind eye to my plight. How dare they have fun without me. How dare they not suffer like I was. How dare they not try and rescue me. Those are some of the crazy thoughts that were recycling through my head at the time.

Naturally, as often happens with me, thoughts of why I was being slighted gave way to thoughts of how to provide justice for myself. If I thought of one way to do away with them, I must have thought of a thousand. They ranged from the ludicrous, like running them over with a semi and then hauling the bodies off in the back of it, to the mundane, like shoving a knife in their bellies. That's where the practice in writing my martian murder comedy serial, Trails of Death: Murder in the 21st Century, that I wrote from 6th to 7th grade came in real handy. I borrowed a page from my compilation and started to devising ways to actually drown someone in pistachio ice cream, or maybe tie them to a flaming handglider headed to the ocean (so they, naturally, would die three ways--burning, falling, and drowning), or maybe just death from bad music. With eight hours of time, let me tell you, I could afford to be creative, elaborate, and melodramatic.

I didn't want to do the right thing and let my envy go.

I wanted to hold onto it and use it to get through my day. In fact, that's probably the only way I ever survived it. Without keeping my mind busy with plans and machinations how to subdue my friends, I probably would have gone stir crazy.

The truth was the whole time I was hating them, I really was hating myself. I felt stupid. I felt like an idiot who had made the biggest blunder ever. But it was easier to focus on how I was wronged and how to get right again rather than focus on how I was wrong and how to make it right again. I know how prisoners must feel--all that time with nothing but anger and regret swimming through their head. I know how it is to focus on how the system, somebody else, or even the world just has it in for them because that's where I was. I had two hundred fifty hours to think of two hundred fifty ways how where I was wasn't my fault.

And when I was compiling ways to kill my buddies, it was only to keep from getting down on myself. I very easily could have slipped into thoughts of self-defeat and into punishing myself further because I felt so violently frustrated. I don't know--Breanne says I lash out especially hard when I think I've messed up the most. She thinks I think if I can get someone to accept the blame then it really doesn't count that I messed up. Brandy calls it classic transference. I'm mad at being imperfect so I look for ways to pin it to someone else's imperfections. Me? I just think I'm used to getting my own way by any means necessary that I can't stop even when I've been caught.

After that July was over, I went back to being a normal person, but I don't think I've ever forgotten those feelings of vengeance. Those kinds of strong emotions don't ever really dissipate. Sometimes I fear that they're all still swirling aside me and that one wrong word will bring them out again.

Then again, I do have one quirky piece of serendipity to give me hope. You see, in July of 1993, one year to the month after all that happened, I chanced upon a piece of writing by Breanne.

And, that, as they say, has made all the difference.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers