A Dark and Hateful Place

This morning, Lovely Wife woke me up.

She had just been talking to Sainted Mother.

It turns out that last night Younger Brother was at his girlfriend’s house, which apparently happens to be near a bar.

Some young woman from the bar had gone outside to have a smoke, two guys followed her out and started “messing with her”, I’m not sure how, but she was resisting enough that Younger Brother went outside to see what the commotion was about.

He saw the two guys giving the woman a hard time, so he told them to stop and leave her alone.

They came over and proceeded to beat the crap out of my brother.

He spent the early hours of this morning in the hospital, and has a broken nose, a badly bruised and cut eye that required stitches, and a crushed cheekbone that is going to require reconstructive surgery.

He had boot prints all over his body where they stomped him, and even on his face and neck.

So he’s probably in the worst fix of his life right now. Nothing life threatening, but it’s going to be a long slog of recovery and surgery and more recovery in the coming months.

I’m just sick about it.

I live a thousand miles from my relatives in Louisiana. Even if I were to fly to Monroe to be around, there’s absolutely nothing I could do.

Today I feel worse inside, than if the two guys had beat me up. You know how it is, it's easier to deal with life's knocks than it is to see someone you love go through them.

Helpless and frustrated; that's me.

When I was a kid, I would cry myself to sleep at the age of 5 because I realized that one day my parents would die. Things a five year old shouldn’t be worrying about, you know?

When I was seven, and Younger Brother was born, and they brought him home, I remember standing there looking at this baby and feeling this overwhelming sense of responsibility for him. At the age of seven, somehow I felt as if his safety and security were my responsibility.

So, even though we’re now 44 and 37, I’ve never lost that feeling of being his protector.

As a Christian, I’m having a tough evening. I so thoroughly hate the men that beat my brother, that I have thought of going to track them down and do the same to them, damn the consequences.

Of course, this is not fair to my wife, my daughters, Sis in Law, all of whom depend on me being relatively healthy and working to live their lives. Not to mention continuing a life of my own, outside of prison and as a productive member of society.

The upshot of it is, I won’t do anything but stay here and pray for him, and to pray both men are caught and brought to justice.

But part of me that I’ve kept constrained, closed off and hidden from the world most of my life wants to get out.

As a kid I had a hair trigger temper, to the point if I got in a fight with someone at school or on the playground, I “blacked out” in that the rage completely took over and I had to be told later what had happened.

As I became a very big man in my late teens, and after becoming a Christian, I knew that someone of my size could ruin his life by totally going off my rocker like that any more. As a Christian, I didn’t want to either.

Over the course of my adult life, I’ve made many, many, many careful steps to become a laid back, slow to anger man.

Part of my makeup has always been pretty laid back, but when my temper blew, it was never pretty. As an adult, I even have a reputation of being cool under pressure and a very diplomatic person in times of trouble.

But today, all of that is gone.

Today, I’m filled with anger and hate that I’ve never experienced in my whole life.

Why is the 6’2”, 300lb man the easy going one, and the 5’7”, 135lb Younger Brother the go-getter who doesn’t know how small he is and rushes into trouble when a call to the police would be a better choice?

I’m furious that I wasn’t there to defend the woman and Younger Brother.

This evening my heart and mind are so filled with anger and rage, I feel like striking out to Louisiana with only a change of clothes and a baseball bat.

I was always the type of person, who when I fought as a kid and teen, that I just let the world go, and though I might lose a fight, the winner was often as bad off as me. Once the bell rings, so to speak, I fight until I cannot fight any more.

Right now, more than anything in this world, I wish I could have been there for him and whomever the woman was.

In my heart and mind, I’m in a place darker than any place I’ve ever been. That little baby that has been my responsibility for 37 years just got hurt, and hurt real bad, and I wasn’t there to help.

I’m thoroughly screwed up.

I have no idea when I will post again, maybe tomorrow, maybe never. All I want to write is pure, deadly venom for the two men who did this. Writing and publicizing my hate doesn’t seem to me to be true to the reason I started this blog, so I’ll just back off until I can write on more pleasant topics, and with a little more peace and love in my heart.

If you’re the praying type, please pray for Mark. For his recovery, and for the men to be caught and brought to justice, he was truly trying to help a young woman in trouble.

If you have any left in you, pray for the whole family and for me too.

I know better than to hold hatred inside of me like this, but right now it’s all I can see, it's overwhelming me.

How can a person have such a complete, crystalline, and pure hatred for two people I've neither seen nor met?