I Am At War

I feel a bit like Snoopy shaking his fist at the sky. “Curse you Red Baron! I’ll get you next time!!” The Shack is officially at war on multiple fronts. Within a few short days I have seen my Treo die, my TIVO explode, an attack on my car and a number of other tiny irritants.

I am dying slowly. I am bleeding from a thousand cuts. No single one is large enough to kill me, but I haven’t the resources to stop the bloodshed either. I feel like I have been ambushed. It is me against overwhelming numbers. Everywhere I turn I see smoke. Everywhere I look the sky is filled with ash and the smell of sulfur.

I don’t give up. I won’t give up. I don’t know how. I’ll keep sending my men to crash into the breach again and again and pray that the dawn comes sooner than later. Robert Frost keeps coming to mind:

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I have chosen to pay Charon for passage into Hades. I am going to tear down the gates of Hell and unleash my own inner demons upon those that stand before me. I am done with this nonsense. I am tired of this war of attrition so I am going to up the ante. You may call this hyperbole. You may deem it hysteria.

As for me, I call it something else.

Don’t tell me about how overcoming great challenges builds character. Don’t speak to me in platitudes or stories about perspective. I haven’t the time or the inclination to listen. The mood is upon me and all I can do is run with the moon and howl. Screams of anger, screams of rage and the sobs that are stuffed down where none can hear are my companions.

And if it should all work and if I should still be standing when the daylight comes you’ll see a different man. But I can’t quite say who or what he shall be. Through the mist I seem glimpses but the day is still so far away I don’t dare lose focus.

When I close my eyes I can still hear the bombs falling. I can hear the screaming of the wounded and smell something so putrid it makes my stomach roil.

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