Killing the Lesser Man

       Sweat is a great lubricant for homicidal thoughts. The next time you’re indulging in the sweet fantasy of killing someone, really reveling in it, not just with a fleeting thought tossed at a faceless driver who cut you off on the road or a nameless jerk who cut you off in the grocery store. The next time you have a lingering, vivid dream that involves you taking the life of a worthy foe (worthless people are never worth the time), the next time that happens, take it to the gym. While your heart rate and testosterone surge and salty water drips from every pore of your skin, think about not just how you would like to kill that person but how you might actually pull it off. I do this a lot. I have to. My worthy foe lives with me, lives in me and the only time I’m completely free of the bastard is at the gym.

       I think most of us are divided between the person we are most of the day and the person we aspire to be. Successful people, God bless/hate them, have that inverted. They are who they want to be most of the time and only occasionally do they dip into aspirational failure with the rest of us. How many of you have a morning person who loathes the night person for staying up too late? After a short night’s rest, when the alarm goes off, as you bury your face in the pillow, weighing the merits of quitting your job just so you can stay in bed, do you ever curse the person who put you in that position? You would never do that to yourself. You know the value of sleep. You know that the whole work day is going to be a struggle because you’ll be running on limited power. You know this and night person should know this but they just don’t care. They don’t care about you or your problems. Successful people have their night person under their thumb or at least they have a balanced, understanding relationship. Unsuccessful people are in a daily war with their night person and they will always lose because night person strikes first.

     Most psychiatrists believed that Multiple Personality Disorder was not a real condition so they changed the name and the diagnosis. Most psychiatrists were probably right. After the book Sybil came out in 1973, reportedly portraying a woman with split personalities, diagnoses of the condition increased exponentially. After the television movie came out, thousands of people looked at the screen and thought: ‘that’s me! I have different people living inside me!’ I suspect that generally, that’s all of us and that’s none of us. If you truly believe that you have MPD, then you ascribe a different name and a different voice to your night person, your morning person, your brunch person and your tired after lunch person. This makes you crazy and I don’t say that judgmentally. It’s a technical term. I remain safely in the sane because I know there’s another person there but I know that it’s still me and I only name him for the sake of clarity. My compartmentalization helps me to identify the problem and, hopefully, to snuff him out.

     I have a wrong person and a write person. Write person is talking to you right now. Wrong person has a lot of things to say to you and he’d really like to communicate them but he never can, never has, never will get around to it. He’s a nice guy but he’s a thief. He takes my time, nearly all of it, and fritters it away on ephemeral nonsense while drinking copious amounts of sweet iced tea. Dammit, I hate him. He stands in the way of everything that I’m trying to do. Write person can only exist in the moments, and they are merely moments, that wrong person cedes the floor. In order to transform myself into write person, I have to distance myself from everything that allows wrong person to breathe. I have to leave his home and all his beloved distractions. I have to force myself into the productive mode that allows me to, temporarily, come to life. I know and he knows, he truly does, that I am the better man. I’m telling you and he would tell you that I deserve to be the dominant one. I should be the norm, the fixture of daily life and not the aberration. We both agree and yet he goes on sucking up all the time, day after day like some, monstrous, voracious baby. He can’t help himself. Only I can. He will never share so I have to take. I have to take it all and for that he has to die. It’s the only way this is going to work.

     Aside from the power of a good veiny handshake, the most important lesson to take from the film Predator is: “If it bleeds, we can kill it”. This is how I have begun to think of wrong man. The very fact that I exist, means that he is bleeding. It means that he is weaker than he used to be. I am stronger than him, smarter than him and I know him better than he knows me. I know where he lives and what he likes. I know the things that enable him to be the man that he is. If I take those things away, he will become weaker still. My first move will be to seize control, while at his base and erase all his podcasts, pour out all his damned tea and unplug his router. I haven’t managed to do it yet but I’m closer than ever before. I’m getting stronger bit by bit while he fades. Once I have drained his supplies, I will set up a desk right in his home to operate out of. I will seize some of his turf and then gradually spread out from there. I will strike when he is weakest, immediately after returning from the gym or a writing session. I will cut him a thousand times until bleeding becomes something he is consumed with stopping and then at the first moment that I become one fraction stronger, I will end him.

     He’s returning soon and I’m going away for a while. I know I’ll be back but not until after work tomorrow when we return to the gym. He has been the dominant player for so long that it may seem foolhardy to even think I could take over. But I will. The main thing I have going for me is his sentimental side. He genuinely likes and admires me while I detest him. We both know that if he keeps control, this will end badly. We both know that only write man has a bright future. Wrong man will only get older and find that his wasted time has garnered him nothing of any value while write man has a chance of genuine success. You don’t have to think of it as murder, what I’m planning. In a way, it's assisted suicide. I feel my energy fading now. I know my time is up, but I’ll be back. One day killing time will be replaced by killing time and you’ll be hearing a lot more from me.