This Really Got to Me

 I'm injured. I've had a three-hour operation. I hurt. I'm not in a good mood. It's going to be two months before I'm allowed to lift anything fifteen pounds or heavier. I can't walk more than a few feet outside my house. 

I posted something anti-racist about structural racism on Instagram. As sometimes happens, someone took it upon themselves to tell me how to do my job. They told me that they "used to understand" what I said (a suspicious remark in itself in the context), and why didn't I get back  to writing amazing books and doing amazing lectures (where have they been? There's a new one every couple of weeks these days, counting the translations). And they rounded it off by calling me "Timothy." 

I blocked them. I wanted to tell them "Don't ever call me by my first name unless you know me, in which case, tell me who you really are." As is often the case, the most aggressive people hide behind a pseudonym. 

I had just had to block an obsessive someone on Twitter whose incessant communications had unfortunately caused me to relax my boundary a little. In intense pain on Sunday, I remembered the Oscar Wildean reason why I had decided to stop talking with them a few months ago. Their name was an ungrammatical, fake-Latin one based on an idea of mine. Intimate with my work, yet weird and critical. I don't know who writes this stuff, but it says "I have borderline personality disorder." Says it. I'm not diagnosing someone. I'm reporting the effect of someone's rhetoric. 

Calling me by my first name is a form of abuse. You're reaching into my pocket and fiddling around. That's actually happened to me, you know. You'll find out more if you keep reading my stuff. I have absolutely zero time for it. If you want to me to block you, go right ahead and call me by my first name. 

Rhetorically this is the equivalent of psychopathic personality disorder. You are unaware of the suffering of others or worse. No matter how much you hurt them, you can't seem to get through. I have met several psychopaths, including my father, and this is the common trait. 

One was called Patrick. He lived with my schizophrenic brother in a house run by a very neglectful Catholic charity. Soon after I met him, he murdered his mother. Then he went to Broadmoor, the notorious psychiatric prison, where he soon stabbed Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer of the 1970s. Brady murdered girls sadistically. Patrick stabbed Brady in the eye with a plastic fork in order to show how hard he was. 

I'll repeat that. I  have met and spoken with on several occasions someone who stabbed one of the most notorious serial rapist-murderers in the UK, ever. In the eye. 

First thing Patrick did: he came right up to me. Right up. Within one inch of my face. He stared right into my eyes with his little tiny pupils. "Hi! I'm Patrick!" Real friendly like. Call me by my first name, I double dog dare you. 

I had met psychopaths before. My dad introduced me to a Kray Twins assassin when I was 13, he was sitting on the floor in dad's living room, He fixed me with his tiny pupils and my head immediately went "psycho killer." His amusing sadistic clown nickname ("Lofty") and his lack of a "real" name (see the similarity with the encounter on Instagram) was a symptom. I never felt his house was mine, but then again, he was also a psychopath. I thought I had a blind spot about them but really I was just in denial about how bad my dad was. 

Soon after, Lofty was in jail for doing a hit job on someone for the Twins. My dad used to love telling me the story over and over. "I sliced his face up like a pizza" Lofty would say to dad, in a thick cockney accent. Lofty murdered the police dog belonging to one of the officers who arrested him. So violently that the police officer broke down in front of him. 

I'm glad my memoir isn't about humans. If I were to write one, and believe me I will, you probably won't believe it. Probably the only way for  me to write a convincing one is to leave out the humans. Definitely the only way that doesn't trigger me beyond belief. It was hard enough writing about the humans by leaving them out, if you know what I mean. 

Don't ever call me by my first name if you don't know me. Whether or not you are a psychopath this is how your words are coming across. Be aware of that. The internet is very bad because people forget that manners are not just nice, they're essential. 

Right now, as you can tell, I am in the most I don't give a fuck mood I've been in, perhaps ever. So if you want to antagonize me, now would be a great time to do it. Go right ahead. See what happens.