In May 2019, when Bob MacPhearson, while engaging in a fisticuffs with me in my basement, and to which I was merely attempting to grapple him to a neutral hold, picked up a crow bar he had stashed amongst the piles of his things (we later found a half dozen of them stashed around within reach), I knew that the game had changed, and that the fight had become lethal.
Now, just the sight of a crowbar might legitimately categorize the fight as lethal, but I had an additional reason for thinking so. In a conversation amongst a group sometime within the month before, Bob had raised the question about everyone’s favorite weapon. Since I didn’t have a favorite weapon, I didn’t respond, but when Bob got to listing his, it was the crowbar, along with a description of its capacity for maiming and killing. So when Bob pulled a crow bar, I not only had the cold hard fact of the crow bar itself, I also had the mental knowledge of the role it played in Bob’s psychology.
My best friend, whose betrayal I had mentioned in yesterday’s blog, had similarly backstoried his own lethality, with multiple tellings of how he has removed himself from certain situations to let himself cool down lest he do something and say something he might regret, with the obvious connotation of physical violence against other people (people that he deeply cared for) being a part of what he might regret.
I have experienced him in these rising rages 3 or 4 times, and have previously heeded his warnings to let him have time to cool down. The result, of course, being that when calm rational discussion of the issue might have occured following the calming, instead discussion was detoured into him getting his way and my issues being deemed not worth discussion. His rages were justified.
He used one of those rages during the previously mentioned betrayal sequence to bully himself into the house with my fears of being physically harmed, with him being able to say he hadn’t threatened such things to me at the time. Of course he hadn’t, he had backstoried himself into a reaction from me that he could count on while at the same time giving himself current plausible deniability.
In contrast to that I chose to take physical action to say, see, I can use physical force too, express rage, but the more rage I express the more cold and calculating logic and control I have as well. I use my force against things, against physical objects, my own, instead of people, and I take and will pay for the damages to replace my own things, and not threaten the things of others. But maybe for once something will break you out of your cycle of rage in yourself to actually pay attention to someone else instead of attempting to tantrum through your rage to get your own way.
But because he is unable to use self control in his rages, he was unable to believe that I had control in mine, and convinced my wife against her own better judgment not to trust me. She trusted him because of the great trust I had had in him and thus trusted his judgment, instead of hers and mine.
So I got his attention, but not attention to me, but attention to what I was doing, which he again interpreted without listening to or believing me, the same sort of action that were a part of his first betrayal, led him to betray me again, and convince others to betray me.
I have always hated bullying, and that I tolerated it in my best friend for so long is a statement to how much I value him and what a great person he otherwise is. If he will ever choose to actually see me as I am, instead of being sure he knows me so well, and thus ignores what he is seeing in front of him, I am sure it will come some day, but I may have to exercise more patience than I ever have before in my life to see it.
At The Rainbow 