Murder your TV
◊ Yesterday I fantasized about using a baseball bat to beat the shit out of a TV. It was all there, up to the wording on the sign I'd hang on my fence: "DESTROYING SMALL APPLIANCE, PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB." I could almost feel the weight of the bat in my hands, the vibration as it splintered the TV's plastic case. I could hear the glass exploding and skittering in fragments across the cement patio.
But halfway through one good, clean swing, the picture in my head jumped sideways and became my brother standing near a curb, smashing a stereo to pieces with a bat just like mine.
I never actually saw that happen; it was a fake memory created to match what my brother had told me. When I was about 12, I was walking down the street with him and he stopped, pointed out some splinters of plastic in the street, and told me with an almost satisfied air that they were from his stereo.
He had just recently become a born-again Christian with the fervor you tend to see in addicts, crazies and anyone looking for something to keep them afloat. For a very long time, he had been squarely in the "crazy" camp. The stereo represented the wicked part of his life before he'd converted, he said, so he'd dragged it into the street and destroyed it.
It's not the only violence toward inanimate objects I've seen in my siblings. With one sister, it was lemons.
She'd had something of a psychotic break and had gone from slightly odd even for a quasi-hippie to batshit crazy in only a couple of days. Because she was over 18 and not technically dangerous enough for the cops to intervene, my parents and I had to keep a constant watch over her until we could get her to a doctor in the morning. She hadn't been eating; her wrists were so thin they looked like they'd break under the weight of her hands, large like mine and my dad's. She hadn't slept for days but she was continuously churning with movement. She paced and twitched like a wild animal.
She mostly stayed in the kitchen, where my parents and I tried to box her into the small area between the center island and the sink. She would pick up a lemon, toss it quickly from hand to hand and then close her eyes and tip her face up toward the ceiling. She would hold the lemon in both hands and stand as still as she could, her body practically vibrating, and mumble softly to herself as she rolled the lemon back and forth between her palms. Then she'd open her eyes, sink her fingers like claws into the lemon and tear it in half with a twisting motion, like you'd use to wring the neck of a chicken. Then she'd fling the lemon pieces away from her, into the trash or the sink.
She said she was "channeling the negative energy" into the lemons and she went through half a dozen of them, maybe more. When she got through all the lemons in the kitchen, I climbed the tree out front to pick more. It was the middle of the night and I couldn't see much, but I tried to pick the ripest lemons I could find.
That was the one that scared me. All my siblings are nuts, but she's my birth sister, the one with the genes most like mine. When my mom found out that my maternal grandmother was probably bipolar, I couldn't stop thinking Great, now I know for sure it's in my blood.
Most of the time I don't think about it too hard. If I were crazy, someone probably would have noticed by now. But when I'm pushed a little harder than usual, when I'm already a mess, the definition of crazy starts to look much more fluid. What does it mean that when I'm alone and the stress peaks, I'll quietly and involuntarily chant a word or phrase to myself? Why do I hear music in white noise, in static, in the sound of clothes tumbling in the dryer? Is this a normal mood swing, or something bigger? How do I know if it's not?
Why do I want to beat the shit out of a TV and why can I imagine it so clearly?
And why do I know how good it would feel?
I don't have many answers. I tell myself that at least all the voices I hear come from identifiable people and appliances. Strange visions can be blamed on the mushrooms. And when I say my stomach is full of snakes and they're poisoning my blood, it's just a vivid metaphor, not an opinion.
And as to that talking to myself thing � fuck it. You can't win them all.