It was all I could do to keep myself from killing the woman with the kid in the Library yesterday. Her toddler was pulling books off of the shelves and laughing while the fat bitch, in a voice that could be heard in the coffee shop four blocks away, kept warning the child not to play with the books. What the fuck was she doing in a library if she didn’t want the kid to ‘play’ with books? Why in the fuck weren’t they in the children’s library just across the hall? And meanwhile, how in the hell can they call this a library anyway when there was only one book by John D. Macdonald? F’ Christ’s Sake the man wrote about a hundred books and they only have one. And it is a small one. I searched all the shelves around the M’s just in case they were misplaced or in case the librarian’s couldn’t spell…I just needed one but it would have to be a heavy one so I could hit that fucking kid and her mom in the head and kill them. No JDM.
I changed my socks this morning. That is a good sign. It is a sign of my good grooming habits. Sometimes I just get up three or four (or five) mornings in a row and pull on the same pair. Usually sock wear like that coincides with shirt-inside-shirt wear. That is when I take off all my shirts and sweaters at the same time when I go to bed at night. So when I wake up in the morning they are inside one another and I can put them all on with one action. Really, this has nothing to do with grooming (neither does the socks) it is just laziness associated with a lack of direction and a touch of depression thrown in. I am seeing a lot of little signs like this (killing mothers and babies with heavy books and bad wardrobe habits). Here are some more.
When I woke up this morning I noticed the skin around my cuticles is chewed off on my thumbs. I am pretty sure I didn’t do this while I was asleep but who knows? Now that I have noticed it I will keep an eye out for my chewing and I think I will find that I am eating myself all day long. When I was five or six I used to chew my finger nails but my mother put a stop to that. She used a pepper potion that is sold just for the purpose of breaking people of the nail chewing habit. It worked. It burned my lips and mouth horribly but I am completely cured of nail chewing. In fact I can’t even stand to see someone else chewing their finger nails. The sound of a bit of finger nail bitten off (you know that little “click” that it makes?) turns my stomach over. I still have a habit of chewing off the skin around the edges of my thumb nails though. If my mother was alive she would know what to do but she’s dead so I just struggle with it myself. It starts when I detect a tiny, little bit of calloused skin near the nail and I try to get it off with my teeth. Skin is not easily removed by teeth and it doesn’t come off neatly. It comes off raggedy. It leaves a little raggedy bit that turns hardish when it dries out and then I have to take that off too and pretty soon I have largish, red patches of raw flesh near my finger nail. They hurt and it isn’t until they hurt that I realize that I have been eating myself and then it is too late to repent. The damage has been done.
Similarly, I used to eat the soft tissue on the inside of my mouth. Nip off little, tiny bits of it with my teeth. I am not sure I still do that. I will have to keep on my toes and see. I know that smoking stopped that cold for a long time. Smoking stops a lot of these bad habits but a long time ago I heard that smoking is a bad habit all by itself so I stopped. It wasn’t easy but I am actually very strong (except for wanting to kill children and mothers with books and chewing on myself) and I am proud to say that I have not had even a puff of a cigarette in more than twenty-five years. It must be a very, very strong habit though as I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t see someone smoking and want to go over and bum one.
Nipping off bits of my mouth is not something that someone else would know I am doing while eating my thumbs is quite noticeable. I don’t want people thinking I am crazy or self destructive or anything so there is one other thing I do when I am stressed-Canadian muscle exercise. In phys-ed they used to call it something like “dynamic tension” or maybe it was Charles Atlas who called it that??? Supposedly the Canadian Air Force uses it to keep in shape. I use it to get out the tension in my body without anybody seeing that I am all messed up inside. I do it by tensing up a group of muscles in my neck or jaw or arm or leg and keeping it tense until a count of ten and then letting it loose. I move the tension all over my body and then, when I am done, I am loose. I think this is invisible to everyone around me but sometimes I am not sure. Maybe they can see it happening-especially in my face and neck when the tendons sort of push out like the strings of a tennis racket. And I think the neck thing might make my ears wiggle too. Sometimes my feet and hands might jump around a bit but I think most people would just think I am just a little bit nervous or a little bit spazzy, which is OK. That is what I did at the table at the library yesterday and when I was done the woman with the kid moved away from me and left the library. I felt good and she and the kid were gone so I didn’t have to kill them with a book.
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