Angry days. Placid days. Days of withdrawal. A response to responsive behavior.

[LSPoorEeyorick]

What happens to you when the penultimate straw nearly busts your hump?

Do you, Furious Beast, lash out at things and people that aren't really the things and people that are upsetting you? In an effort to unleash a rage that, built up, could cause your cells to mutate and degenerate and rot? Determined that your expulsion of roaring fury will create a protective shield unpenatratable by lightsaber or human disaster?

Are you a Quiet Man? A Zen master capable of absorbing the horrid and exuding only the calm-- like so many reams of gold spun from straw?

Or are you a Crisis Hermit? After you've dealt with one of life's regularly-scheduled struggles, does your post-traumatic brain scream at you to run and hide in a last-ditch effort of self-preservation?

I guess I can't boil myself down to one. Fiery Zen Hermit, I am.

Take, for instance, my life of late, which has been mentally oriented around my mother. Most of you know the drill-- auto-immune disease, on year eight of the ten years she was told remained, wheelchair-bound and, two weeks ago, suffering from a blood infection given her by a plant that didn't even have the decency to bloom this year.

When she slipped into shock, violently shuddering with a temperature of 104 on Tylenol, I dealt in rational Zen. Breathe in, Mom. Breathe out. Stop yelling, Dad; it won't make her change her mind. It's time to consider going in to the hospital. No, I know you don't want to talk about it. Breathe in, Mom. Breathe out.

By the time my sister arrived on the scene, the Zen had worn down somewhat, and I was slipping dangerously closer to fire. You want this to be the way you go? Well, you know how your foot hurts right now? That hurt will spread through your entire BODY and you will leave this world in AGONY.

After we negotiated with her-- birthday party before emergency room-- and got her out the door, I slipped into hermit, and I've not really slipped back out. No park, no games, I just want to sit quietly. Which, once back in California, evolved. No web, no friends, I just want to sit quietly.

Except in extenuating circumstances. I have a new freelance writing job, and that pulls me out of my crabshell long enough to research and write and be positively jazzed-- but only as long as I'm working on it. When Tom's around-- well, Tom feels more like an extension of me. So sitting quietly with him feels better than sitting quietly alone, because it's like there's more of me to balance the overwhelm.

And the rage comes back now and then. Like yesterday. There was Mom's voice over the telephone, even more ragged than it's been. She'd had an appointment with her doctor to remove the pick line that allowed input and output directly from her vena cava. The nurse, knowing that Mom likes to understand things in advance, gave her the IV fluids that the doctor would need to flush out the line. She gave Mom instructions of how the doctor would need to remove the line. Several inches long, it requires a gentle touch. Slowly, so that it doesn't get caught on the flesh inside. And if it did, pushing it back inside would contaminate her again and would, perhaps, start another blood infection.

Mom brought the fluids to her doctor. Who, not having removed these very often, asked my mother for advice on how to flush it. So mom talked her doctor through it, and added that the line needed to be carefully and slowly removed to prevent pain or infection. The doctor looked her in the eyes and said "slowly, eh? Watch me." And he proceeded to yank the line, as my mother put it, as though he was pulling a turnip from sticky wet earth. Except that it got stuck, and he had to push three inches of it back into her arm. So this infection that required a long hospital stay and much grief and pain... may return, all thanks to her My Dick of Medical Knowledge is Larger than Yours doctor. Who, as of today, will no longer be her doctor thanks to his history of terrible bedside manner and practice.

Lo and behold, upon hearing this story, I found my rage again. There I was, yelling about the doctor, freaking out at people who weren't really upsetting me and things that were overexaggerated in my head. As though exerting anger-control over other things would make up for the part of my life that is forever spinning out of control.

I guess, whatever way you react, it's completely about control. Furious Beast handles a disaster that is out of her hands by squeezing whatever's in her hands too tightly. Zen Master Quiet Man sees the chaos and declares that the only way to exert control is to control himself. And Crisis Hermit seeks to control how much of herself the world gets to see.

Unless you surrender control. And I dread the moment that Mom will do this. Maybe that's why my futile fight for Alpha Dog of my universe continues. I'm know that I'm death's bi tch, or life's, or god's or the amorphous entity's. I just like to pretend otherwise sometimes.