Lately I’ve been infatuated with the idea of breaking shit. Or rather: The idea has been infatuated with me. Lemme clarify: I haven’t wanted to break any of my shit; mostly my wife’s. The life of the idea is akin to a photograph flash as I’m always reminded that she doesn’t really have any shit I could break that would just devastate her. Mostly, I think, she’d just feel broken knowing that she’s married to a crazy person.
And that’s no fun. She works with crazy people for a living. So it’d be like taking pieces of her paycheck and putting them in the trash, as we’d naturally want to replace whatever it was I destroyed.
What probably ruins it more, though, is that she’d have to tell her family and friends that I smashed something in a fit of rage and then they’d look at me funny. Or at least I’d be paranoid thinking they were looking at me funny, talking about me behind my back. Also, I can hear my daughter parroting “Daddy broke ours” whenever it occurred to her to say so, or when she came across such an object out there in her little person’s life.
I’d probably feel pretty crummy about breaking the thing, too, but in that pan sizzle of a moment when I’ve body-jumped into the temporarily insane me -- man, do I want to break something. I’m uncertain about the makeup of such a desire, but usually it feels like: two parts release, one part display of power, and half a part of some vague symbolism into which I haven’t yet tapped.