Ah, kiddo. I do not know whether I can stay on with the extra blogs I have found on substack. You have setting mastered, you have Narrative hook down, and your authorial voice is the bomb.
It's very hard for me to think of you as a "coot."
But I could pretty much always use a hug.
I think that was exactly what someone wrote under me in a caption contest once. A less -charitable friend wrote "...is watching for Charlie on the wire."
I was up at my friend Matt Perry's house as a kid, and jealous I think when his next door neighbor Bobby Defore would come over to play with us. Bobby had an almost peroxide blonde buzzcut.
I just remember I had a general "not liking" of the kid which I think was also a year younger than me in grade school. As kids our not liking/liking of kids at times could be arbitrary. Sometimes I'd get on the outs with Matt Perry too.
I remember we were in Matt's backyard and digging in the dirt. He had a bunch of Hotwheels and Matchbox cars and we were doing things like building a race track or creating a large "junkyard" type environment for the cars. It didn't matter really. All I know is, Bobby Defore for some unknown reason annoyed me. It felt like he was disrupting our play, but Matt didn't seem to mind and was a "the more the merrier" type.
I was using an old bicycle axel to dig with. We would do that, take random implements, sticks, anything to dig around in the dirt. And I think at some point I must have called Bobby Defore a a name, most likely a play on his last name "Defore." And He said "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me."
I was holding a bicycle axel and thought I would do something clever. No, I didn't backhand him with the axel. Beating the kid senseless was not my intention, but giving him a moderate tap was me in a bullyish way showing him that I could test the theory.
The axel that I envisioned tapping him on the side of the head missed its mark when he turned. All I know is he was clutching his eye, and I did anything a kid my age would do when confronted with the prospect of blinding a kid.
I ran.
I highlight t is, because it speaks to your story of the golf ball as to what would have happened next if the golf ball had done as intended.
I ran and made it home and my parents should have known something was up when I was pushing to get a bath, or rather, I didn't resist. I thought to myself "if I can push forward the notion of bathing and then sleeping, this will all slip past. I'll be asleep before I know it and it will be the next day. Problem solved.
Bobby DeFore's older sister arrived shortly after I got into the tub at ourfront door. I was dragged out of the tub wet and clothed, and marched by my father up the street. I don't remember how we got there. Was I dragged? Did we drive?. All I know is, I was at Bobby Defore's door. And I was told to apologize.
I was sorry as soon as I hit him. The moderate tap in my mind had removed his eye. But it hadn't the cut was right next to it, but the point was, it had been close. I said I was sorry. And would continue to be sorry for the rest of a couple of weeks. I received the mother of all spankings and grounded (the first and only time I was grounded) for what felt like weeks. It might have only been a couple days.
There are times where I would do impulsive things like this in my life, and would come to immediately regret them.
I gotta be honest, I wasn't sorry about the golf ball. I was enraged and humiliated and was scared the whole time they were endlessly looming behind us. I was simply terrified of the imagined consequences of doing something much bigger than intended. If I felt guilty about anything, it was unintended overkill.
If I had been another 13-year old boy, I'd have probably slugged him. When I see bullying behavior today, it still brings a little boil up inside me.
I see ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, thoroughly disgraced for lying the country into W's jihad against Saddam Hussain, worming his way back into the political discourse, getting positively aroused when discussing WEF electronic IDs for fake-MRNA-potions-LARPing-as-vaccines and I'd have to ask;
"Are you some kind of cunt? A real bad one?"
Rhetorical question, ofcourse.
I've also never known anyone use "cunt" in any gendered sense. Same way anyone can be "a dick".
"Cunt" was always genderless; it was "dude" before "dude."
In the States, though, it somehow evolved specifically to be a derogative of vagina, and simultaneously became The Worst Thing You Can Possibly Call A Woman, making 'bitch' as strong as 'sillypants' by comparison.
It became the N-word of misogyny, and ruined a lot of fun. As usual.
Also, wtf happened to your other comment? I wanted to show my admiration for your Street Fighterness.
And yes. Blair is a cunt; a real bad one. But he doesn't spend any time wondering.
I believe it derives from Middle English "quaint", which does refer to the vagina. I know of an example in Chaucer, but I imagine there are many others available.
A lot of the olden words are like that, that they can have a positive appreciative meaning and a pejorative condemning one.
The swedish equivalent of cunt is fitta, which can be used the same way as in english, but is originally derived from an old word for a wet meadow/grassy wetlands.
Omigosh, yes...as I was growing up ( recall I have you by about 15 years. I turn 57 this may..wtf?!) The "c" word was the worst thing you could sling at a female, dude was always guys ( it wasn't until about a decade ago that it being used genderless stopped bothering me), and bitch as well as bastard were also gendered...
When I was in school someone I don't know would bring in a SuperNes/Famicom and we'd have SF2 tournaments. I later somehow got an early copy of Alpha 2 and was suddenly very popular.
I now have a Redbubble t-shirt with OG SF2 Guile's portrait and the slogan
"Go home and be a family man" which is funny as his ending sequence is him doing just that and being the happier for it. None of the kids nowadays know what it is.
It's enough to make you think the old ones were on to something with their physiognomy, the way a certain kind of mind seemingly always or often enough to seem like design occupies a certain body-type.
The chubby yet muscular heavy-set bully, and his lanky sneakily smart taller friend, and their third wheel; the runt that's only good for coming up with nasty stuff, and finally the dim hanger-on, always a "A-huh what?" on his lips.
Or the Alpha-bitch, her coterie, and their designated victim (re-watched 'Carrie' the other night so the stereotypes are a mickle americanised at present.)
I'm of the opinion thatwe don't really change no. But we become more in some ways, and may work to become less in others. Examples:
Girl I used to know (not in that way!) was a compulsive thief. You'd walk into the supermarket to get beer and smokes, and she'd come out with a frozen pot-roast or four rolls of toilet paper in her jacket, random stuff. It was unconscious for her, and she didn't have any poverty or trauma or something in her background, she was just wired that way. Took her years to channel that impulse into something else, but as fas as I understood, it never went away.
Friend I had (same circle of friends as the aforementioned girl), total martial arts nutter. Tall and gangly, topping two meters, which meant he looked skinny despite weighing close to 100 kilos. Wing-Tsun, judo, karate, shaolin, krav maga, systema, gesundheit, whatever. When that wasn't ebough, it was swords and staves and nunchucks. Then it was learning japanese, thai and chinese. Then getting tattoos, motifs from classical oriental art. Then going to China to train in some temple.
Point is, he didn't change from his starting template; he just levelled up continously following that template.
You could argue both examples show change and they do, if we mean change as increasing/decreasing whatis already present. But if we mean change as in actually becoming something else (insert chrysalis bursting or facehugger and chestburster or something), then the examples show it just doesn't happen.
The leper doesn't change his shorts, as the late Terry Pratchett put it.
The tree grows and as it grows it changes, yet it remains the same.
The only constant is change, as they say.
I think... I think some of us are born with too much empathy, which hurts when we are too young to think and mentally look at our selves from outside, so we fight the empathy to make it stop hurting.
And then we just keep on hurting, both ourselves and others because the only way we know to alleviate hurt is to hurt.
I think a handful of strong emotions, caused by events in our earliest years locks us into a set of reactions or skews the probability-template for how we react. AndI think when these events and reaction matches our familiar and family-surroundings, we thrive, but when they conflict we wither and suffer.
I also think that whatever we flee from, from within ourselves we can also charge towards and break through, or break down or hammer into submission and then revel in it. We can wrestle it to the ground, and take control of it:
I was made deathly afraid of hurting others when I wasn't even 6 years old, because I was so much bigger than the other children, and clumsy and emotional as all children are. So I think (I don't remember, not really) they subconsciounsly imparted in me a sense of having to be very very careful not to physically hurt others, which when I grew older started to chafe and feel as some kind of artificial limiter to my emotional reactions.
Causing me to choose to rebel against the inhibition, leading to all sorts of problems.
And then just a few years later again realising that obeying conditioning or consciously and purposefully acting counter to conditioning is being and acting due to said conditioning anyways.
Here I wanted to put something profound tying the above together neatly, but I can't think of anything really. Maybe that's fitting given the greater topic. Here goes:
Way to stir up old muck from the well's bottom with your post. Like All-Father's eye in Mimer'swell, our thoughts and feelings needs stirring up for us to appreciate clarity of thought.
The largest guy I ever dated was well over six feet tall and had a slight weight problem, but was mainly just BIG. I don't think much of it mattered how much he ate.
Like Fezzig in The Princess Bride, he didn't even exercise. Dude was just enormous.
But spiritually, he was TINY. He was shy, socially awkward, very soft-spoken, and absolutely terrified of using his strength or raising his voice, around either women or men.
He had a fairly strong fetish for being dominated to the point of liking being slapped. I wouldn't share such a private detail without omitting his identity and the fact that he'll certainly never read this.
Anyway, I always wondered if he had had a similar childhood to what you describe where he was overcorrected into coralling his physical power. I met his mom once or twice but could never figure out if she had been the one to discipline him in such a way.
It has long be bandied about among psychologists that a dearth of emotional developmental stimuli during adolescence can manifest as a coercive need for physical stimuli as a gateway to garnering an emotional response.
I have yet to see any proof of this, which is not a dig at psychology but just a note that how to prove that line of reason is probably impossible.
Personally, I don't think it's more complicated than whether or not someone likes spicy food. It's just that the socio-psychological factors surrounding s-e-x, especially of the more outré varieties, exerts a greater emotional pressure.
All of it stirred together makes it self-fulfilling: the emotional need finds release, and starts craving it more and more, leading to fetishism (in the psychological sense), leading to an addict-like behavioural pattern, leading to baseline responses being dulled, and so on.
First it's red peppers, then tabasco shots, then it's Carolina Reaper lip gloss, so to speak.
"It has long be bandied about among psychologists that a dearth of emotional developmental stimuli during adolescence can manifest as a coercive need for physical stimuli as a gateway to garnering an emotional response.
I have yet to see any proof of this, which is not a dig at psychology but just a note that how to prove that line of reason is probably impossible."
The framing is not quite how I would do it, which is probably why you don't see it in evidence.
If I were teaching a 15-minute lecture on it, I would say it as thus: everyone has drives, which get slightly more complex as we get older but are fundamentally the same: food, comfort, attention/intimacy (not being lonely), and sex. Pretty much everything else is an abstraction of one of these.
Food and comfort are the simplest ones, that we're born with. Very shortly after birth, as our brain continues developing, we develop a need for attention. As we become sexually mature, we develop the drive for sex.
We develop mechanisms/behaviors/techniques/games for obtaining these. Babies don't have many- if they're missing any needs, they cry. They learn with surprising quickness to use this very limited toolkit to communicate specific needs- without even realizing it, most moms will quickly understand a food cry versus a diaper cry. But it's an extremely unpleasant technique- on purpose- and parents want developing children to evolve beyond it as quickly as possible to the use of language, and then overlaying that language with cultural values of manners, consideration, sharing, and all that shit.
But language is far from the only way to obtain needs. You can steal stuff. You can use nonverbals to manipulate people's behavior or focus to give you attention or sex. And you can touch people, in good and bad ways.
We find what works, and when we have a developmental trauma (which can have a very broad meaning, simply that the developmental course of something has been redirected or blocked), we develop adaptations and coping mechanisms, which aren't the same thing: adaptations are behavioral workarounds (I can't get it this way so I'll get it that way), coping mechanisms are ways to soothe our distress at being unable to get something.
When we become adults this stuff has become so complex and abstracted- to say nothing of how far removed it is from its source stimuli- that teasing out a coping mechanism vs. an adaptation vs. unconscious conditioned responses, etc., etc. becomes extremely hard.
The reason why it's "impossible to prove," as you say, is simply because we don't have footage of anyone's entire childhood to plot the course of development.
Where much of this theory comes from isn't completely out of the butt, though. Lower animals with simpler ranges of behavior can and have been studied in this way, longitudinally, so we have a sense that if you condition a rat pup to be afraid of this color that it will do other weird things as an adult. We also have case studies of children that, while not RCT experiments, allow for mapping patterns.
I think it's a LITTLE more complex than your metaphor about spicy food. Not hugely, but a little more. I think "tastes" and "preferences" nearly always have a precursor, and the nature of that precursor will impact how the preference-seeking will manifest.
I mentioned my ex in response to your story about yourself, for example, because I get the sense that his childhood self associated domineering and restraint with attention (because it was always framed as being loving), combined with guilt about the power he could potentially exert over others with his size and strength. That he was a devout Catholic with a deeply developed sense of guilt helped. But plenty of this can be framed in simple behaviorist theory.
I used spicy food precisely because the social drama surrounding sex is/may be part of the problem. By removing the drama, the individual in question can learn more control and have more choice. (Control as in insight and self-knowledge, only.)
I'm big on psychology needing to provide actual testable proof largely due to the degree fluffy nonsense has poisoned education for generations, so it's very much a personal and consciously chosen stance (and bias) based on that.
What lovely dogs you have! One of mine is currently doing duty as feet warmer (it's -12C here, outdoors). A plothound/elkhound mix with a temper like a well-shook soda bottle.
Is “who we are” a DNA thing, personality thing, or is it a conditioning by parents, friends, teachers, etc? I found that my traumatic childhood (physical, mental & sexual abuse) caused me to use survival techniques to endure the pain. However, those survival techniques caused a lot of damage in my young adulthood when they were no longer needed. I believe the emotional pain will forever rear it’s ugly head when triggered by memory or an event, but one can learn coping mechanisms to live a fruitful and productive life. So are you changed by choosing good over evil? Or is the desire to do evil (or bad or whatever would you choose to call it) always there in you if you are evil, but you choose to tamp it down and not act on it?
As a side note, when I sent my DNA off to a lab in Sweden to analyze for medical purposes, one of the components of DNA they listed was for aggression. I was neutral which hubby laughed at). That surprised me then, but I know I have read research analyzing dangerous criminals as to the genetic components of aggression since then.
The trauma I endured as a child set me up to love people that abused (verbal/mental/neglect) me as my parents did. Friends included. I ended up married to a narcissist, that I can never please, just like my parents.
People can definitely change. In fact, I know a few who have made incredible transformations from alcoholics, criminals, and drug-abusers to upright family-centered individuals serving others in the community.
It takes a level of honest self-reflection that most people do not possess nowadays. And in our "I'm perfect just the way I am" world which stresses unwarranted self-esteem over critical self-awareness, such people will be harder to come across.
Oh, yeah, I agree, people can change. I think it's extremely difficult in many cases, but it's absolutely true and I think that potential is the essence of being human.
That said, I think we do have a fundamental nature, and when we see people "changing" from being, per your example, criminals and addicts, I think they're simply UNlearning things that disrupted their nature.
For that matter, though, I think some people are born addicts and have a very difficult road ahead of them in life.
Crumbs, Guttermouth. I can only imagine the endless waves of terror and forgetting that that episode put you through. I can understand your visceral loathing of bullies, too. It's such a pity that you didn't come across the alleged brain damaged "victim" sooner, to help put to bed the lie. I can imagine an even more intricate layer of bullying and deceit, where he would deliberately conceal himself and/or get his mate to taunt you in that manner. No. People don't change. They just start learning to lie to themselves better.
I can understand, too, that this whole psyop we're going through must have brought so much of that back to the surface. Perhaps, in a twisted way, it was your saving grace - as you at least had cultivated the resilience to resist it and to tell people exactly where to get off. That saved you a dangerous shot in the arm.
I'm curious. What would you do if you came across either of them today? Have you imagined the scenario? Would there be any redemptive act that would convince you that, possibly, there might be an exception to the rule? I ask myself the same about the whole Covid gene-jab bully-fest, when I consider what it has done to me. Never mind the billions of others out there - including Covid itself, and its GOF origins, or deliberately-mutated directed-evolution, whatever-they're-calling-it-now Shitshow. I know it has affected you deeply, too (last I had an exchange with you, your dad was deeply ill - dare I ask?).
I don't know if I would know the answer myself, to be honest. I would probably just be grabbing my knitting needles and start baying for blood. Or stabbing, myself. I'm no saint.
It and many other lessons of youth more or less led me to understand that there are no good guys.
I simply wonder how bad of a bad guy I am relative to others anymore.
If I met them? I'd probably just remind them of the story, make sure to do it in front of any family or female companions they had, and maybe slash their tires if I was unseen.
As for dad, check out my archives for my post "the father person" to see how dad's vaccine injury shook out.
He now lives about 50 yards away in a house that's now integrated onto our farm property, and is in the process of putting his life back together. Amazed it's been a year.
I'm so glad to hear that he's out and close by. Gosh. A year. I've been out of the Stack for a while. Dealing (badly) with my own shit. Glad to be back and to see your writing. It's very good. I'll comb back. I'm not sure if slashing tyres would do it for me, when it comes to my own personal encounters of the mandating and jabbing kind - but it could be a start. Actually, what WOULD do it for me, is required public jabs, thrice yearly in perpetuity, for all the mandators and all those elites suspected of taking the saline. With vials selected at random by trusted people. And witnessed by any and all who have been injured in any way.
My heart tells me it won't be long until the world breaks and all the rottenness of our hearts comes roaring out in an orgy of vengeance and a contest for who rules what's left.
Maybe righteous anger and a thirst for justice will give some of us an edge. Who knows.
Glad to see you're back, extra glad to have you aboard the Gutter, sorry things are shit. Hit me up private like if you ever need or want. I'm a surprisingly nice lady when the cameras are off.
Well, your story struck me as a very effective use of force to draw the line with some particularly mean little punk bullies.
And yes, I did read on through the description of the psychological torture you endured. I am so sorry you suffered such cruelty.
Non-headwound bully did have to confine his tactics to psychological after the golf ball throw, as it was probably clear you would retaliate in a physical way to physical aggression. So maybe you saved yourself from a serious beatdown later.
My perspective comes from having been rolled a few too many times by bullies of different sorts, and finally having to make some boundaries clear.
And yes, I've considered many times whether I'm an asshole (sorry, that word is probably equivalent to how cunt would be applied in this thread).
My entire point, really, is that if you don't act like an asshole/cunt sometimes in the face of aggression, then victim would be a pretty appropriate description, in my opinion.
One of the things I came to understand when I worked child abuse was that experience is always proportionate (normally). We say stuff to teenagers like "when you're 30 this will all seem trivial and stupid," and that's true, but where you are at a given stage of development is your entire frame of reference, your entire world. When stuff that's bigger us at our current stage of development happens, it's always some kind of trauma.
But kids have their scale-model versions of breakups, divorce, getting fired, all of it.
That's some top notch writing! And that ginger kid probably works as a homicide detective now, playing mind games with suspects and guilt-tripping and scaring them into giving confessions. Who knows? Maybe he's changed and is one of the good guys now, using his knack for psychological torture to help get dangerous criminals off the streets?
Love your random stuff. Gonna share a story. Was about 10 and a mean girl, Donna, picked on me daily. Pushed, stole my lunch, etc. Slammed my face in the snow. Finally ran into her back with my fist out like a sword lol. Never bugged me again. She called me a slut!! Had to ask my Mom what that meant😂
i broke a kids arm once, i was probably around 8 to 10 at the time. he was very small for his age and sometimes hung out with us playing football (soccer to you). for some reason i forget i was shaking his hand and shook it violently enough that he yelled out then ran off. it was a day later that his mother called mine to tell her that he wasnt allowed to play with me any more because i was a bully and had broken his arm. i felt terrible and went to apologise and explain there was no malice, i was just playing around but his mom never let him near us again.
about 15 years later i was in a nightclub draining the lizard and some big monster of a bloke next to me says my name and wouldnt you know it was him, i felt that instant guilt again but he was fine about it and was ok with me he said his mom over reacted.
as an adult ive never been very tolerant of bullies i guess because i was bullied as a kid a fair bit and even when they are much bigger than me will stand up to them, i guess i do a pretty good mean face cos they never want to fight me
not me! really, like i said i got bullied a fair bit as a kid i wasnt big for my age, i guess this kid had weak bones or something. somehow he became giant later tho
Thanks for story. Timely for me since my son, in 6th grade, just started getting bullied by 6-8 eighth graders.
I told him to make sure he figures out all their names and that if necessary you will have to do what you think is best to end the bullying - or make them think twice. Wink, wink; hit the biggest one of the bullies just to make sure they know you're not fucking around. Damn the consequences.
If he doesn't stand up now it will only get worse.
This piece makes me ponder that many bullies are skilled in the art of manipulating other people through words (mostly their words, and occasionally by their actions - my bullies of high school wielded words while mine in elementary school did the chasing and pushing - i use possesive but there were other victims besides me who shared in the outrages of my bullies). As such they have an intuitive understanding of the psychology of manipulation, and are probably predisposed to success in any endeavor requiring political savvy, such as politicians, leaders in business, top administrators in government, etc. Speaking for myself, we victims may be less endowed with political acumen, who are frequently blind-sided by the politics of others in the workplace, and have a difficult time surviving and flourishing in our team endeavors.
I hate that I have so many thoughts in my head ,and I text ridiculously slowly and poorly ( honest...if y'all think my typos are bad you dobt see how much time I spend backspacing and retyping what I DO catch) ...because I usually can't get out the multitude of responses that bounce around. I cant even get to return to state everything...because by then its gone. I'm a twit.
I may be ... naive. Ivecseen a lot of bad,and I've had an 'interesting' life...but I don't think there are no good people. I've met them. They remind me that I could be better.
I think people DO bad things ,and that there are some people who are just bad...through and through.
I don't know if they recognize it. Do they have the capacity to self reflect that way?
I know that I still torment myself about things I did should have done,or should have managed better...from as early as I can remember. I often wonder if my dad was an alcoholic to help cope with his childhood( of which I know almost nothing) or what a bad person he was.
People grow,and they can change..but within parameters ,I think.
Another ponder-ance from this piece is the topic of people don’t change. Accepting that as premise, I ponder the cognitive dissonance created by workplace team culture and performance reviews. This is also created on cancel culture platforms , when employers and recruiters and our professional network have visibility to what we say, particularly when our employer requires us to sign an agreement that we won’t speak ill of the company or an agreement that all social media postings comply with their policies of respect etc and/or be accompanied by an explicit disclaimer that views are our own not our employer’s. The cognitive dissonance between what we are and what we must project in these alternate lives must certainly lead to some degree of psychosis and dysfunction.
Ah, kiddo. I do not know whether I can stay on with the extra blogs I have found on substack. You have setting mastered, you have Narrative hook down, and your authorial voice is the bomb.
If I disappear, it's just that life is crazypants
I promise to keep praying for you.
Your prayers will always be appreciated.
You don't owe me your time. It's just nice to have you.
Consider this old coot reaching across the internets to give you a hug.
I told you this because what you feed will grow.
It's very hard for me to think of you as a "coot."
But I could pretty much always use a hug.
I think that was exactly what someone wrote under me in a caption contest once. A less -charitable friend wrote "...is watching for Charlie on the wire."
We all have the capacity for bad within us.
I was up at my friend Matt Perry's house as a kid, and jealous I think when his next door neighbor Bobby Defore would come over to play with us. Bobby had an almost peroxide blonde buzzcut.
I just remember I had a general "not liking" of the kid which I think was also a year younger than me in grade school. As kids our not liking/liking of kids at times could be arbitrary. Sometimes I'd get on the outs with Matt Perry too.
I remember we were in Matt's backyard and digging in the dirt. He had a bunch of Hotwheels and Matchbox cars and we were doing things like building a race track or creating a large "junkyard" type environment for the cars. It didn't matter really. All I know is, Bobby Defore for some unknown reason annoyed me. It felt like he was disrupting our play, but Matt didn't seem to mind and was a "the more the merrier" type.
I was using an old bicycle axel to dig with. We would do that, take random implements, sticks, anything to dig around in the dirt. And I think at some point I must have called Bobby Defore a a name, most likely a play on his last name "Defore." And He said "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me."
I was holding a bicycle axel and thought I would do something clever. No, I didn't backhand him with the axel. Beating the kid senseless was not my intention, but giving him a moderate tap was me in a bullyish way showing him that I could test the theory.
The axel that I envisioned tapping him on the side of the head missed its mark when he turned. All I know is he was clutching his eye, and I did anything a kid my age would do when confronted with the prospect of blinding a kid.
I ran.
I highlight t is, because it speaks to your story of the golf ball as to what would have happened next if the golf ball had done as intended.
I ran and made it home and my parents should have known something was up when I was pushing to get a bath, or rather, I didn't resist. I thought to myself "if I can push forward the notion of bathing and then sleeping, this will all slip past. I'll be asleep before I know it and it will be the next day. Problem solved.
Bobby DeFore's older sister arrived shortly after I got into the tub at ourfront door. I was dragged out of the tub wet and clothed, and marched by my father up the street. I don't remember how we got there. Was I dragged? Did we drive?. All I know is, I was at Bobby Defore's door. And I was told to apologize.
I was sorry as soon as I hit him. The moderate tap in my mind had removed his eye. But it hadn't the cut was right next to it, but the point was, it had been close. I said I was sorry. And would continue to be sorry for the rest of a couple of weeks. I received the mother of all spankings and grounded (the first and only time I was grounded) for what felt like weeks. It might have only been a couple days.
There are times where I would do impulsive things like this in my life, and would come to immediately regret them.
I gotta be honest, I wasn't sorry about the golf ball. I was enraged and humiliated and was scared the whole time they were endlessly looming behind us. I was simply terrified of the imagined consequences of doing something much bigger than intended. If I felt guilty about anything, it was unintended overkill.
If I had been another 13-year old boy, I'd have probably slugged him. When I see bullying behavior today, it still brings a little boil up inside me.
Thanks for sharing the memory, though. That's a hell of a story. :)
That was well told,Jimmy. Thank you.
I see ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, thoroughly disgraced for lying the country into W's jihad against Saddam Hussain, worming his way back into the political discourse, getting positively aroused when discussing WEF electronic IDs for fake-MRNA-potions-LARPing-as-vaccines and I'd have to ask;
"Are you some kind of cunt? A real bad one?"
Rhetorical question, ofcourse.
I've also never known anyone use "cunt" in any gendered sense. Same way anyone can be "a dick".
"Cunt" was always genderless; it was "dude" before "dude."
In the States, though, it somehow evolved specifically to be a derogative of vagina, and simultaneously became The Worst Thing You Can Possibly Call A Woman, making 'bitch' as strong as 'sillypants' by comparison.
It became the N-word of misogyny, and ruined a lot of fun. As usual.
Also, wtf happened to your other comment? I wanted to show my admiration for your Street Fighterness.
And yes. Blair is a cunt; a real bad one. But he doesn't spend any time wondering.
I believe it derives from Middle English "quaint", which does refer to the vagina. I know of an example in Chaucer, but I imagine there are many others available.
In swedish (and I think danish and norwegian) we have the word: Kånt, also spelled kont or kunt.
It's a basket, backpack or small hamper made from thin strips of wood and birch bark woven together to form a surprisingly strong material.
The Old Norse word kunta is a possible root for cunt, dating back to the 14th century.
So "tough yet delicate container" is a possible original meaning.
An image search using "näverkont" should show you what they can look like. No twoare exactly the same.
I like "tough but delicate container." :)
A lot of the olden words are like that, that they can have a positive appreciative meaning and a pejorative condemning one.
The swedish equivalent of cunt is fitta, which can be used the same way as in english, but is originally derived from an old word for a wet meadow/grassy wetlands.
As in fertile and suitable for grazing...
Omigosh, yes...as I was growing up ( recall I have you by about 15 years. I turn 57 this may..wtf?!) The "c" word was the worst thing you could sling at a female, dude was always guys ( it wasn't until about a decade ago that it being used genderless stopped bothering me), and bitch as well as bastard were also gendered...
You and I are in same age range. I still use dude for any gender. Did you hang out at the mall arcade?
A thousand times yes. But I didn't live near our closest mall, so not until I was a teenager and could travel.
I had a LOT of nerdy friends and the arcade was a social hub.
My Dad made me get a job at the food court when I was 15. Was always there. Appreciate how I was raised now. In that respect anyway
Same. Brothermouth and I both started working when we were each 14, respectively. It was a good thing.
Compared to our peers, we have weathered financial hardship and avoided debt far better.
I have had my moments where I said something I regret telling a woman.
Somehow I've avoided saying cunt to a woman.
Although I have no problem calling golfing buddies who spend several holes making excuses for playing bad cunts.
Ha, I deleted it because I thought it was a bit "meandering" and not entirely relevent!
To repeat;
When I was in school someone I don't know would bring in a SuperNes/Famicom and we'd have SF2 tournaments. I later somehow got an early copy of Alpha 2 and was suddenly very popular.
I now have a Redbubble t-shirt with OG SF2 Guile's portrait and the slogan
"Go home and be a family man" which is funny as his ending sequence is him doing just that and being the happier for it. None of the kids nowadays know what it is.
It's enough to make you think the old ones were on to something with their physiognomy, the way a certain kind of mind seemingly always or often enough to seem like design occupies a certain body-type.
The chubby yet muscular heavy-set bully, and his lanky sneakily smart taller friend, and their third wheel; the runt that's only good for coming up with nasty stuff, and finally the dim hanger-on, always a "A-huh what?" on his lips.
Or the Alpha-bitch, her coterie, and their designated victim (re-watched 'Carrie' the other night so the stereotypes are a mickle americanised at present.)
I'm of the opinion thatwe don't really change no. But we become more in some ways, and may work to become less in others. Examples:
Girl I used to know (not in that way!) was a compulsive thief. You'd walk into the supermarket to get beer and smokes, and she'd come out with a frozen pot-roast or four rolls of toilet paper in her jacket, random stuff. It was unconscious for her, and she didn't have any poverty or trauma or something in her background, she was just wired that way. Took her years to channel that impulse into something else, but as fas as I understood, it never went away.
Friend I had (same circle of friends as the aforementioned girl), total martial arts nutter. Tall and gangly, topping two meters, which meant he looked skinny despite weighing close to 100 kilos. Wing-Tsun, judo, karate, shaolin, krav maga, systema, gesundheit, whatever. When that wasn't ebough, it was swords and staves and nunchucks. Then it was learning japanese, thai and chinese. Then getting tattoos, motifs from classical oriental art. Then going to China to train in some temple.
Point is, he didn't change from his starting template; he just levelled up continously following that template.
You could argue both examples show change and they do, if we mean change as increasing/decreasing whatis already present. But if we mean change as in actually becoming something else (insert chrysalis bursting or facehugger and chestburster or something), then the examples show it just doesn't happen.
The leper doesn't change his shorts, as the late Terry Pratchett put it.
We become who we are?
Sort of.
The tree grows and as it grows it changes, yet it remains the same.
The only constant is change, as they say.
I think... I think some of us are born with too much empathy, which hurts when we are too young to think and mentally look at our selves from outside, so we fight the empathy to make it stop hurting.
And then we just keep on hurting, both ourselves and others because the only way we know to alleviate hurt is to hurt.
I think a handful of strong emotions, caused by events in our earliest years locks us into a set of reactions or skews the probability-template for how we react. AndI think when these events and reaction matches our familiar and family-surroundings, we thrive, but when they conflict we wither and suffer.
I also think that whatever we flee from, from within ourselves we can also charge towards and break through, or break down or hammer into submission and then revel in it. We can wrestle it to the ground, and take control of it:
I was made deathly afraid of hurting others when I wasn't even 6 years old, because I was so much bigger than the other children, and clumsy and emotional as all children are. So I think (I don't remember, not really) they subconsciounsly imparted in me a sense of having to be very very careful not to physically hurt others, which when I grew older started to chafe and feel as some kind of artificial limiter to my emotional reactions.
Causing me to choose to rebel against the inhibition, leading to all sorts of problems.
And then just a few years later again realising that obeying conditioning or consciously and purposefully acting counter to conditioning is being and acting due to said conditioning anyways.
Here I wanted to put something profound tying the above together neatly, but I can't think of anything really. Maybe that's fitting given the greater topic. Here goes:
Way to stir up old muck from the well's bottom with your post. Like All-Father's eye in Mimer'swell, our thoughts and feelings needs stirring up for us to appreciate clarity of thought.
The largest guy I ever dated was well over six feet tall and had a slight weight problem, but was mainly just BIG. I don't think much of it mattered how much he ate.
Like Fezzig in The Princess Bride, he didn't even exercise. Dude was just enormous.
But spiritually, he was TINY. He was shy, socially awkward, very soft-spoken, and absolutely terrified of using his strength or raising his voice, around either women or men.
He had a fairly strong fetish for being dominated to the point of liking being slapped. I wouldn't share such a private detail without omitting his identity and the fact that he'll certainly never read this.
Anyway, I always wondered if he had had a similar childhood to what you describe where he was overcorrected into coralling his physical power. I met his mom once or twice but could never figure out if she had been the one to discipline him in such a way.
It has long be bandied about among psychologists that a dearth of emotional developmental stimuli during adolescence can manifest as a coercive need for physical stimuli as a gateway to garnering an emotional response.
I have yet to see any proof of this, which is not a dig at psychology but just a note that how to prove that line of reason is probably impossible.
Personally, I don't think it's more complicated than whether or not someone likes spicy food. It's just that the socio-psychological factors surrounding s-e-x, especially of the more outré varieties, exerts a greater emotional pressure.
All of it stirred together makes it self-fulfilling: the emotional need finds release, and starts craving it more and more, leading to fetishism (in the psychological sense), leading to an addict-like behavioural pattern, leading to baseline responses being dulled, and so on.
First it's red peppers, then tabasco shots, then it's Carolina Reaper lip gloss, so to speak.
"It has long be bandied about among psychologists that a dearth of emotional developmental stimuli during adolescence can manifest as a coercive need for physical stimuli as a gateway to garnering an emotional response.
I have yet to see any proof of this, which is not a dig at psychology but just a note that how to prove that line of reason is probably impossible."
The framing is not quite how I would do it, which is probably why you don't see it in evidence.
If I were teaching a 15-minute lecture on it, I would say it as thus: everyone has drives, which get slightly more complex as we get older but are fundamentally the same: food, comfort, attention/intimacy (not being lonely), and sex. Pretty much everything else is an abstraction of one of these.
Food and comfort are the simplest ones, that we're born with. Very shortly after birth, as our brain continues developing, we develop a need for attention. As we become sexually mature, we develop the drive for sex.
We develop mechanisms/behaviors/techniques/games for obtaining these. Babies don't have many- if they're missing any needs, they cry. They learn with surprising quickness to use this very limited toolkit to communicate specific needs- without even realizing it, most moms will quickly understand a food cry versus a diaper cry. But it's an extremely unpleasant technique- on purpose- and parents want developing children to evolve beyond it as quickly as possible to the use of language, and then overlaying that language with cultural values of manners, consideration, sharing, and all that shit.
But language is far from the only way to obtain needs. You can steal stuff. You can use nonverbals to manipulate people's behavior or focus to give you attention or sex. And you can touch people, in good and bad ways.
We find what works, and when we have a developmental trauma (which can have a very broad meaning, simply that the developmental course of something has been redirected or blocked), we develop adaptations and coping mechanisms, which aren't the same thing: adaptations are behavioral workarounds (I can't get it this way so I'll get it that way), coping mechanisms are ways to soothe our distress at being unable to get something.
When we become adults this stuff has become so complex and abstracted- to say nothing of how far removed it is from its source stimuli- that teasing out a coping mechanism vs. an adaptation vs. unconscious conditioned responses, etc., etc. becomes extremely hard.
The reason why it's "impossible to prove," as you say, is simply because we don't have footage of anyone's entire childhood to plot the course of development.
Where much of this theory comes from isn't completely out of the butt, though. Lower animals with simpler ranges of behavior can and have been studied in this way, longitudinally, so we have a sense that if you condition a rat pup to be afraid of this color that it will do other weird things as an adult. We also have case studies of children that, while not RCT experiments, allow for mapping patterns.
I think it's a LITTLE more complex than your metaphor about spicy food. Not hugely, but a little more. I think "tastes" and "preferences" nearly always have a precursor, and the nature of that precursor will impact how the preference-seeking will manifest.
I mentioned my ex in response to your story about yourself, for example, because I get the sense that his childhood self associated domineering and restraint with attention (because it was always framed as being loving), combined with guilt about the power he could potentially exert over others with his size and strength. That he was a devout Catholic with a deeply developed sense of guilt helped. But plenty of this can be framed in simple behaviorist theory.
I used spicy food precisely because the social drama surrounding sex is/may be part of the problem. By removing the drama, the individual in question can learn more control and have more choice. (Control as in insight and self-knowledge, only.)
I'm big on psychology needing to provide actual testable proof largely due to the degree fluffy nonsense has poisoned education for generations, so it's very much a personal and consciously chosen stance (and bias) based on that.
And as usual...Rikard makes me think. You bastard!
Believe I have a crush on him💞🐾
He's quite the charmer, isn't he?
He's also blushing a bit reading this. Thank you.
What lovely dogs you have! One of mine is currently doing duty as feet warmer (it's -12C here, outdoors). A plothound/elkhound mix with a temper like a well-shook soda bottle.
Are you an Australian shepherd?
Wow. Gotta read that again
Is “who we are” a DNA thing, personality thing, or is it a conditioning by parents, friends, teachers, etc? I found that my traumatic childhood (physical, mental & sexual abuse) caused me to use survival techniques to endure the pain. However, those survival techniques caused a lot of damage in my young adulthood when they were no longer needed. I believe the emotional pain will forever rear it’s ugly head when triggered by memory or an event, but one can learn coping mechanisms to live a fruitful and productive life. So are you changed by choosing good over evil? Or is the desire to do evil (or bad or whatever would you choose to call it) always there in you if you are evil, but you choose to tamp it down and not act on it?
As a side note, when I sent my DNA off to a lab in Sweden to analyze for medical purposes, one of the components of DNA they listed was for aggression. I was neutral which hubby laughed at). That surprised me then, but I know I have read research analyzing dangerous criminals as to the genetic components of aggression since then.
The trauma I endured as a child set me up to love people that abused (verbal/mental/neglect) me as my parents did. Friends included. I ended up married to a narcissist, that I can never please, just like my parents.
People can definitely change. In fact, I know a few who have made incredible transformations from alcoholics, criminals, and drug-abusers to upright family-centered individuals serving others in the community.
It takes a level of honest self-reflection that most people do not possess nowadays. And in our "I'm perfect just the way I am" world which stresses unwarranted self-esteem over critical self-awareness, such people will be harder to come across.
Oh, yeah, I agree, people can change. I think it's extremely difficult in many cases, but it's absolutely true and I think that potential is the essence of being human.
That said, I think we do have a fundamental nature, and when we see people "changing" from being, per your example, criminals and addicts, I think they're simply UNlearning things that disrupted their nature.
For that matter, though, I think some people are born addicts and have a very difficult road ahead of them in life.
Cultivating good habits and unlearning bad ones go hand in hand, from what I can tell.
When I was reflecting on those I know who completely turned their lives around, I wasn't thinking of this person, who I know better than the rest. It's a remarkable story: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/st-anthony-messenger/october-2021/father-mj-groark-a-friar-for-broken-people/
Ignore the picture of him wearing a mask outside. He is completely on the same page as us, concerning the covid narrative.
That's why I'm on the teeter-totter about this.
Is it change as in the person has actually changed, or is it that they do some things less or not at all, and do other things more and better?
(And does the question matter except as a thought-exercise?)
" gesundheit" 😂
🙌
Crumbs, Guttermouth. I can only imagine the endless waves of terror and forgetting that that episode put you through. I can understand your visceral loathing of bullies, too. It's such a pity that you didn't come across the alleged brain damaged "victim" sooner, to help put to bed the lie. I can imagine an even more intricate layer of bullying and deceit, where he would deliberately conceal himself and/or get his mate to taunt you in that manner. No. People don't change. They just start learning to lie to themselves better.
I can understand, too, that this whole psyop we're going through must have brought so much of that back to the surface. Perhaps, in a twisted way, it was your saving grace - as you at least had cultivated the resilience to resist it and to tell people exactly where to get off. That saved you a dangerous shot in the arm.
I'm curious. What would you do if you came across either of them today? Have you imagined the scenario? Would there be any redemptive act that would convince you that, possibly, there might be an exception to the rule? I ask myself the same about the whole Covid gene-jab bully-fest, when I consider what it has done to me. Never mind the billions of others out there - including Covid itself, and its GOF origins, or deliberately-mutated directed-evolution, whatever-they're-calling-it-now Shitshow. I know it has affected you deeply, too (last I had an exchange with you, your dad was deeply ill - dare I ask?).
I don't know if I would know the answer myself, to be honest. I would probably just be grabbing my knitting needles and start baying for blood. Or stabbing, myself. I'm no saint.
It and many other lessons of youth more or less led me to understand that there are no good guys.
I simply wonder how bad of a bad guy I am relative to others anymore.
If I met them? I'd probably just remind them of the story, make sure to do it in front of any family or female companions they had, and maybe slash their tires if I was unseen.
As for dad, check out my archives for my post "the father person" to see how dad's vaccine injury shook out.
He now lives about 50 yards away in a house that's now integrated onto our farm property, and is in the process of putting his life back together. Amazed it's been a year.
I'm so glad to hear that he's out and close by. Gosh. A year. I've been out of the Stack for a while. Dealing (badly) with my own shit. Glad to be back and to see your writing. It's very good. I'll comb back. I'm not sure if slashing tyres would do it for me, when it comes to my own personal encounters of the mandating and jabbing kind - but it could be a start. Actually, what WOULD do it for me, is required public jabs, thrice yearly in perpetuity, for all the mandators and all those elites suspected of taking the saline. With vials selected at random by trusted people. And witnessed by any and all who have been injured in any way.
My heart tells me it won't be long until the world breaks and all the rottenness of our hearts comes roaring out in an orgy of vengeance and a contest for who rules what's left.
Maybe righteous anger and a thirst for justice will give some of us an edge. Who knows.
Glad to see you're back, extra glad to have you aboard the Gutter, sorry things are shit. Hit me up private like if you ever need or want. I'm a surprisingly nice lady when the cameras are off.
I think you're probably right.
And thank you. Consider the offer to extend both ways.🙏🏼
And I already knew that.
"there are no good guys" ...
it's possible that anyone that good would be such a perpetual victim that it would be difficult to see them as anything but a victim.
Interesting perspective.
Well, your story struck me as a very effective use of force to draw the line with some particularly mean little punk bullies.
And yes, I did read on through the description of the psychological torture you endured. I am so sorry you suffered such cruelty.
Non-headwound bully did have to confine his tactics to psychological after the golf ball throw, as it was probably clear you would retaliate in a physical way to physical aggression. So maybe you saved yourself from a serious beatdown later.
My perspective comes from having been rolled a few too many times by bullies of different sorts, and finally having to make some boundaries clear.
And yes, I've considered many times whether I'm an asshole (sorry, that word is probably equivalent to how cunt would be applied in this thread).
My entire point, really, is that if you don't act like an asshole/cunt sometimes in the face of aggression, then victim would be a pretty appropriate description, in my opinion.
Amen.
We think kids are resilient and sure they mostly are, but the torments of youth are so vivid and frightening that living through them is a feat.
One of the things I came to understand when I worked child abuse was that experience is always proportionate (normally). We say stuff to teenagers like "when you're 30 this will all seem trivial and stupid," and that's true, but where you are at a given stage of development is your entire frame of reference, your entire world. When stuff that's bigger us at our current stage of development happens, it's always some kind of trauma.
But kids have their scale-model versions of breakups, divorce, getting fired, all of it.
I literately thought I would die after being separated from a best friend and my autopsy would find her name carved in my heart💔
Right, and we can laugh at it now (maybe), but those feelings were 100% as big as they seemed.
I was the same when I got a rare pimple before going out.
The gods could not be more cruel
That's some top notch writing! And that ginger kid probably works as a homicide detective now, playing mind games with suspects and guilt-tripping and scaring them into giving confessions. Who knows? Maybe he's changed and is one of the good guys now, using his knack for psychological torture to help get dangerous criminals off the streets?
Yes. The good guys.
Probably.
Fuck no.
Indeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFL5DhXeWaA
I love Talented Mr. Ripley.
Love your random stuff. Gonna share a story. Was about 10 and a mean girl, Donna, picked on me daily. Pushed, stole my lunch, etc. Slammed my face in the snow. Finally ran into her back with my fist out like a sword lol. Never bugged me again. She called me a slut!! Had to ask my Mom what that meant😂
You never finished the story. What congressional district does this ginger kid now "serve?"
Amazing.
I should have done a fake epilogue like "Animal House".
It was Hunter Biden. 😉😊😋😱
Thank you, for the kind words and mention of my substack. Glad the article helped spark such a great story from yourself.
It's an honor to have a visit from the wellspring. I hope at least one other person discovers your stack this way.
i broke a kids arm once, i was probably around 8 to 10 at the time. he was very small for his age and sometimes hung out with us playing football (soccer to you). for some reason i forget i was shaking his hand and shook it violently enough that he yelled out then ran off. it was a day later that his mother called mine to tell her that he wasnt allowed to play with me any more because i was a bully and had broken his arm. i felt terrible and went to apologise and explain there was no malice, i was just playing around but his mom never let him near us again.
about 15 years later i was in a nightclub draining the lizard and some big monster of a bloke next to me says my name and wouldnt you know it was him, i felt that instant guilt again but he was fine about it and was ok with me he said his mom over reacted.
as an adult ive never been very tolerant of bullies i guess because i was bullied as a kid a fair bit and even when they are much bigger than me will stand up to them, i guess i do a pretty good mean face cos they never want to fight me
no im mostly not a cunt but i have met a lot
You shook a kid's hand and broke his arm? Holy shit.
Who's a big boy then,?
not me! really, like i said i got bullied a fair bit as a kid i wasnt big for my age, i guess this kid had weak bones or something. somehow he became giant later tho
Thanks for story. Timely for me since my son, in 6th grade, just started getting bullied by 6-8 eighth graders.
I told him to make sure he figures out all their names and that if necessary you will have to do what you think is best to end the bullying - or make them think twice. Wink, wink; hit the biggest one of the bullies just to make sure they know you're not fucking around. Damn the consequences.
If he doesn't stand up now it will only get worse.
get him in to jujitsu, it will give him confidence and discipline
Agreed, martial arts training is amazing for every kid of they have the temperament to stay with it.
This piece makes me ponder that many bullies are skilled in the art of manipulating other people through words (mostly their words, and occasionally by their actions - my bullies of high school wielded words while mine in elementary school did the chasing and pushing - i use possesive but there were other victims besides me who shared in the outrages of my bullies). As such they have an intuitive understanding of the psychology of manipulation, and are probably predisposed to success in any endeavor requiring political savvy, such as politicians, leaders in business, top administrators in government, etc. Speaking for myself, we victims may be less endowed with political acumen, who are frequently blind-sided by the politics of others in the workplace, and have a difficult time surviving and flourishing in our team endeavors.
I hate that I have so many thoughts in my head ,and I text ridiculously slowly and poorly ( honest...if y'all think my typos are bad you dobt see how much time I spend backspacing and retyping what I DO catch) ...because I usually can't get out the multitude of responses that bounce around. I cant even get to return to state everything...because by then its gone. I'm a twit.
I may be ... naive. Ivecseen a lot of bad,and I've had an 'interesting' life...but I don't think there are no good people. I've met them. They remind me that I could be better.
I think people DO bad things ,and that there are some people who are just bad...through and through.
I don't know if they recognize it. Do they have the capacity to self reflect that way?
I know that I still torment myself about things I did should have done,or should have managed better...from as early as I can remember. I often wonder if my dad was an alcoholic to help cope with his childhood( of which I know almost nothing) or what a bad person he was.
People grow,and they can change..but within parameters ,I think.
Another ponder-ance from this piece is the topic of people don’t change. Accepting that as premise, I ponder the cognitive dissonance created by workplace team culture and performance reviews. This is also created on cancel culture platforms , when employers and recruiters and our professional network have visibility to what we say, particularly when our employer requires us to sign an agreement that we won’t speak ill of the company or an agreement that all social media postings comply with their policies of respect etc and/or be accompanied by an explicit disclaimer that views are our own not our employer’s. The cognitive dissonance between what we are and what we must project in these alternate lives must certainly lead to some degree of psychosis and dysfunction.
Thanks. Really enjoyed this.