Stories
Posted By Caulimovirus on May 11, 2008
“Don’t Piss Me Off, Or I’ll Imagine You Pissing Someone Else Off”
.: A somewhat recent development: whenever somebody does something that affects me in less than desirable ways, I become understandably hurt, enraged, annoyed, or sad for a few minutes. Then, I imagine how the scenario might appear to an outside observer as if it were happening in a story, and I almost always laugh. I’m pretty sure it’s a coping mechanism, but I’m wondering if anyone else has experienced the same thing.
.: It’s becoming difficult to separate how I react when something bad happens to someone else from how I react when something bad happens to me. Nobody wants to be that guy after he falls and hurts himself on a comically misplaced rake. Nobody wants to be that guy after his computer crashes before he saves his final paper. Nobody wants to be that guy after his roommate sells his drum set without telling him. But everybody laughs at that guy, because all of those scenarios are funny.
.: And yet these kind of things happen to me, and they’re becoming difficult to deal with because I find them so damn hilarious. I carry around a moleskine in which I write down all sorts of bad things which happen to me. I tell myself I’m going to use these occurrences for stories in the future, but I hardly ever get around to writing them. It’s almost as if imagining them in stories is enough to satisfy whatever feeling I have that needs satisfying.
Sounds like someone is looking for some answers in the field of psychology. Coping Mechanisms are for co-dependent folks, getting even is where it’s at!
(Oscar is not a licensed practitioner of clinical psych. in the USA, all advice is relayed from the Cayman Islands.)
And yet all my elaborate revenge schemes involve corrosive chemicals obtainable only in chemistry labs.
Oh, I suppose I could drive my enemies insane by making them walk through mazes, but the imagery just isn’t doing it for me.
I have a theory that a lot of us nowadays are walking around in our own private sitcoms. Or if you’re the literary type, a novel by Garrison Keillor. It does soften some of the rough edges of life.
This is what happens when reflection becomes reflexive.