Every so-often, I do find myself at ease with the world, and not particularly given to be at odds with any individual part of it. This now-majority of my mind is perfectly keen to throw up decorations, pass out favors, host a regular shindig. But off in the corner, face parallel to the floor, burning a hole in the toes of his shoes with a gaze intensifying ever greater, there's a kid who was unwanted, uncared for, unwilling to sacrifice whatever bits and bobs and oddities and peculiar-yet-unremarkable traits about himself in order to slip into the grain of the world around him. He paid for that with a thousand trips home, shuffling from one foot to the other, in his mental theater playing roles of barkeep and barfly, simultaneously hobbling to a ramshackle affair and running one. And what does he order? A pitcher of the finest memories of positive interactions with others, to forget about how utterly forgotten he was on that sullen, backwashed street. Only, when it's served, it's roughly full enough to turn a shot glass into an over-preached over-taught "lesson" in perspective, plastered onto posters which in turn were plastered along cold, uninviting walls of the halls of learning, where children go to grow. Christ, when did society get so fucking lame? That's our excuse for passing wisdom to the young? Must've ripped that page clean out of Mein Kampf. They loved posters.

Well, when the lonesome kid at the back remembers and reaps the pain, the agony, the soundless nature of his own voice way back when, he gets hornet-like. He rages. He grows to 15 feet in height and is perfectly content to smash, burn, and destroy any pretense of a positive time, and because the pain that makes him this way is felt, though faintly, in the centers of the rest of my mind's stage of today, they let him have his destruction. Anger be his staple of the bar today. Anger and shame, anger and unhappiness, anger and deep, deep sorrow that he could not bear to face. So all that is around him faces his fists instead. A nice cocktail of misery.

Tough break, but old habits, and older memories, die hard and die fighting. If they ever do.