Things Best Left Unsaid

There must be at least 50 ways and reasons to kill your room-mate.

This is not to say that you should, however, actually kill your room-mate. Or, for that matter, send one of your closest and dearest friends a hate-filled letter stating all the reasons you think that he is the root of all that is evil and wrong in the western hemisphere.

There are many lessons I have learned in life. The greatest of course is that early lesson learned from my mother - "Think before you speak". I only wish that I would have had the moral cognizance to look forward and amend that to be "Think before you speak; pause before you write". As it stands, it is only now that I have learned to do that. Unfortunately, that has come too late, I fear, and I think I have erred greatly on the side of misjudgement.

I feel as if I should offer more of an explanation, but each explanation that I come to only comes off to me as an excuse. I offer no excuses, but I still feel as if some type of explanantion should be made. So in that respect I offer the following.

Please remember, I offer this not as an excuse, but as an explanation. I know that I must accept the ramifications of my actions, I am at very least responsible. I know that apologies for words once uttered do not take them back. I know that no matter how regretful one may be, a lingering wound is just that - a wound that lingers and only heals in time. I know that it is not in my power to heal a wound that I have caused, that the decision is is up to the wounded. These things are all facts that I accept responsibility for.

Life is ugly, and so is this post.

This is raw, and more than anything else, this post rips the heart from my chest and tacks it firmly on my sleeve for all to witness. If you are not comfortable with this sort of thing, then I bid you good-day.

I am ADHD to the point of being crippled by it.

I hate even admitting that.

I have spent years rolling my eyes whenever those four little letters were mentioned. I have long felt that as a nation we are over medicated and spend far too much of our time dodging personal responsibility and blaming everyone but ourselves for the problems in our lives that we are - at root - responsible for.

Nonetheless, I have ADHD to a terrible degree. On three separate Psychiatrically administered tests I scored higher than a 40 on a scale of 1-25 - where 1 indicated no symptoms of Adult Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and where 25 was severe.

Three tests. All administered by others, none of whom were the same person.

I first began seeking psychiatric and psychological help last year when my inability to cope with stress and anger mounted to such a tremendous level I could no longer function as a responsible adult. In the process of this I have learned a lot of really ugly things about my self, about my past, about who I am and where I come from. I have also learned many positive things as well.

Rather than launching into a deletrious diatribe on my many failings I choose instead to focus on the one - or rather the complex interaction of two failings that fuck my life up more than any other.

The rage inside and the ADD do not go well together.

The rage in me builds on an hourly basis and goes to such incredibly horrific depths that I dare not give witness to all that floats in my head. This is not to say, mind you, that I am homicidal - far from it. I am just very angry ALL THE TIME. The ADD has its biggest impact on me in the form of memory loss. I forget things.

Sometimes, I forget entire episodes of my life; entire days even. I once "woke up" in my car after having driven it at least 26 miles - and to this day I have no accounting of that time.

Scary stuff.

So needless to say, as a relatively smart fellow I sought out medication therapy some time ago. It has been wonderful, and to that end it was prescribed in a cycle - a cycle that would eventually come to a close. A cycle that only very recently saw the drop off of my regularly medicated dosages. The results, when combined with everything else in my life at this moment in time, have been disastrous.

My uncle, a man that has done some truly wonderful things for me in the past, died rather suddenly three days before Mother's Day. His funeral was in fact, on Mother's Day. I gave the eulogy. I had to make the phone call to his oldest son, someone who I see as more of a brother to me, and tell him that his father had died. I provided the shoulder at the funeral for his most recent ex-wife, his other son, his grand-son who was grieving the most and could not be seen by his mother (my uncles daughter) through her own tears, the new girl-friend, etc. It was kind of tough.

The night before the funeral, my baby brother (19 years old) went into respiratory failure followed immediately by cardiac arrest. He was rushed to the hospital, he was revived in transit, he was stabilized. My baby brother, the young man that I have quite literally raised and cared-for since he was a small child, taken care of and loved as if he were my own son (his father is a shit, but more on that another time), is slowly dying as he is in the end stages of renal failure. His kidneys are gone, and twice now when I have gone to visit him in the hospital, I cannot help but notice that they have placed him on the terminal ward.

I was recently engaged. Our wedding date is July 16th.

We hope to close on the house we are buying within the week.

I begain a new job in February that has me leading a multi-million dollar financial firm, three other buisinesses, researching new-acquisitions, and building two new companies. I am the president.

What I am trying to establish here is I have been under alot of stress. Again, this is meant to serve as an explanation, but not an excuse.

Now with all of this going on, a good friend of mine offered me some advice. His intent, I believe, was to inform me that some communications to our mutual friends was coming across as shitty and that lashing-out towards ones friends when under periods of duress was not healthy for relationships.

I read his letter to me, and as I understand it, my subsequent response to him was taken as me not being courteous and not taking what he said to heart. I did though, even though I did not protray that effectively to him.

Shortly thereafter I learned that my good friend had posted some fairly insulting commentary on the whole affair on his blog. I went and read it, and I admit I was hurt. Not only did I feel that he had incorrectly related the whole exchange - I felt that he had confused the timeline to such an extent as to make me seem even more the ass. I further read his additional commentary and felt as if I had basically become the subject of many cruel jibes and whatnot - all motivated by a cleverly misinterpretation of the facts.

At this point, I tried to call my friend and left a voice mail saying that I would like to work things out and that I wanted everything to get better.

And then, the following Saturday morning - some days after hearing no response from my friend - I read his blog and more commentary had been posted. This time, his subjects were my other friends that had in his eyes dropped the ball when they did not follow through on a planned intervention. The details are still hazy to me, but I think that about sums it up.

I was beyond enraged. I sent my friend a very hateful, very hurtful, very insidious e-mail that basically was crafted to such an extent that it would wound him as much as I felt wounded.

That was inexcusable.

For that I apologize.

Before I go on, I want to stress some facts that have impacted this whole exchange.

1) I never honestly meant to send the e-mail. My honest intention was to write it as angry as I could to get that off my chest, and then go back and tone it down so that we could resolve this whole thing like adults. I pulled an uber-douche bag maneuver and when I went to save it to drafts, I reflexively (word?) hit send. I immediately realized my error, but due to my massive pride and fear of embrassment, rather than admit I was wrong, I chose instead to take a "moral high road" and try to stand by what I had said. I figured "fuck it", it was meant to be or I wouldn't have accidentally sent it in the first place.

2) At the time I typed the e-mail, I had been off all of the medications I have been taking for my crazy ass head-shit for about 72 hours, and had been taking smaller dosages for about the last two weeks (since my uncle died). ***EDIT - This is because one of the medications in question damages the kidneys and I hope to eventually donate a kidney to my kid brother - END EDIT***

3) My good friend has Sprint. That is where I left the voice mail. I suspect he either never got it, or got it days late.

4) My friend had been out of town during my crisis.

The end result? MAJOR blow up!

Other results -

I have since returned to my full limit of medication and have returned, or at least I am beginning to return, to my normal non-rage-filled self.

I have lost a dear friend, someone that I cannot even begin to describe how terribly close to I felt and whose absence in my life is going to leave a major void.

I am in danger of losing other dear friends because they feel torn about this whole affair and they feel as if I am making them choose sides. I don't know quite how I am going to deal with that, but I wish that this post can act as a beginning step.

I also managed to hurt other people, people that I do not even know because my wretched shit-o-gram was in such bad taste.

Those people, I also owe a sincere apology. While their status as sycophant may still be up for debate (seriously, read the definition), they are by no means a herd of "inconsequential...braying jack-asses (and for the record, if jack-asses don't herd, what do we call them...a clutch?)...whose opinions don't matter". While true, their opinions may be of little consequence to me, they are of MAJOR importance to my friend that I truly love...and at the end of the day that is all that really matters. These "faceless entities" in cyber-space are his support group, and quite honestly I have no real information on his relationship with them and I am a miserable wretch for judging them.

I know that my actions were wrong.

I am still hurt by some of the things my friend did and "said" prior to the salvo of shit-o-grams I launched his way, but that by NO MEANS excuses my behavior. That is for he and I to work out like reasonable adults, should he choose it. Should he choose instead to tell me to fuck right off, then I will also respect that.

It is his right, and I have no sense of entitlement such as that I think he owes me a single thing.

As for anyone else still following along with this I hope that in someway this can be an abject lesson.

Comments are welcome. I am sure I will edit this post to clarify things, but I must close now as my professional schedule is rapidly intruding on my day.

Prospero/Fantomas - I am sorry I hurt you.

Until my alligator mouth stops being overwhelmed by my humming bird ass, I remain...

The Son of Simp

PS - Yes, I really talk/write like this, trust me, none of you have ever seen me use flowery language.