You Should Slap The Devil & Sleep With His Wife

There is a strange dichotomy that lies between trying to bare your soul online without sharing all of the skeletons that make you look like a raging asshole in dire need of anger management.

Don’t know where this post will take me or what sort of truths I may or may not let loose, I can only tell you that I just popped open a single bottle of Shiner Bock and that it will be the only alcohol to pass through my lips tonight.

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Have you ever noticed how you can take an instant like or dislike to a person based solely upon a split second look at or introduction to them?

Well there is a pasty-faced fellow who is about two years younger than I am, a guy that I really only know of and about that fits that bill.

It might not be right or fair of me to feel like I could improve his appearance by kicking him in the teeth and punching him in the throat but that is just what his stupid looking expression brings out of me.

I have more than his “is so pale he would be sunburnt in a cave” looking face to help me feel like I could do a better job on him than any plastic surgeon.

Yeah, I have a solid reason for wanting to demonstrate what it means to get this kind of special attention from me but I am not going to share that here.

Not going to give you more specifics because if you have any ability to feel the energy radiate off of a page you already are blanching and if you can’t, well consider this one man’s hyperbolic expression.

I Just Wanted To Make You Jealous

Got my beer sitting next to one of the meaty paws I call hands, headphones streaming Ray Charle and Count Basie singing Come Live With Me and in just a moment they’ll move onto their cover of The Long and Winding Road.

Images of a girl/woman I once knew float through my mind, her voice telling me how she just wanted to make me jealous and the fire that flowed through my veins because of that.

A mix of frustration and pure anger knowing how and why she was trying to manipulate me and the awareness of how badly I wanted to rip him apart for getting in between.

Frustration with myself because what I knew I should and must do required more self-control than normal.

You see, I knew she wanted my attention, wanted a particular response but didn’t quite understand that in this particular instance it would set me on fire.

And I knew that if I was face-to-face with him there was a chance I would manhandle him in the kind of way no man ever wants to be handled.

He would be a rag doll and I would be the bear.

I never saw him. Never met him. Never spoke with him.

It was intentional.

I wanted to be angry with her.

Wanted to show her my back as I walked away. No response and no reaction for her.

She would learn the hard way I wouldn’t tolerate any of that nonsense, except I couldn’t be angry, at least not for any length of time.

I loved her far too much and the idea of just walking was more painful than saying we could work through whatever hiccup we had encountered.

So I sent her a note, thanking her for breaking my heart multiple times and for proving women weren’t to be trusted.

She told me I overreacted.

I told her not to try and make herself feel better by saying my feelings weren’t valid.

“I loved you before. I love you today and I’ll love you tomorrow. But I hurt. I ache and I burn. Maybe that is my fate. Maybe it is not. I don’t care. Don’t take advantage of my love. I see and know more than I say. You’re worth it, even when you are a giant pain in my ass.”

You Should Slap The Devil & Sleep With His Wife

They wrote about a song about my friend Johnny and what happened when the devil got bored and decided he might con him into taking a bet he couldn’t win but they never told you about what happened when Old Scratch decided to match wits with me.

Never told you about how someone suggested I should slap the stupid out of Lucifer and sleep with his wife.

Nah, they don’t share that kind of tale with you because it is not the kind of thing you want your children to imitate.

Nor would they present me as the standard role model of good character and fine moral standing because I don’t fit their very particular standards.

Of course if you want someone who knows how to get things done, a guy who can move the needle, dance in the fire and walk through a storm well then I am him.

But most people don’t want to open Pandora’s Box and discover that it is empty because all that crap they fear getting loose already walks among them.

You’re probably curious how I know this to be true and the answer is simple. I opened the damn box.

Yeah, I popped that sucker open and took a hard look and confirmed what I already suspected.

Fragments Of Fiction

If you read all that came before this and are still here I’ll say congratulations and offer to shake your hand but I won’t tell you what is fact and what is fiction.

This piece doesn’t follow the conventional design nor is it supposed to be interpreted as modern art. There is no symbolism here, at least not intentional.

What I can confirm is sometimes I need this to serve as a mind dump. It is why I opened up the Medium blog and why sometimes I just empty out the proverbial closet onto the page.

It is part of a concerted effort to find out what I really think and believe.

I tell my children to work on understanding who they are, what they believe and why they believe it.

I want them to try to understand why they act as they do because I think it will help but it won’t change certain parts of life.

Doesn’t matter if you understand why you love or why you ache because the heart doesn’t respond like the brain.

Won’t matter if you get all of the science between heart and head because we’re not made to be automatons.

But it might help them get through some of the hard times with less stress…maybe.

And it might help them laugh, love and live a little bit harder and longer. That ought to be worth something.