Driver's License, Liquor License & License to Kill

 

What are you doing?! Just get in there, now! You know, the brakes are there for a reason. Watch out! You are the most selfish, most self-centered person I have ever had the misfortune to meet! You’re holding onto the wheel all wrong! You need to back up more you’ll get a fine. Get the fuck out of here! I hate you you fucking bitch! You try living with a tumor that’s going to kill you. Oh, that’s right it’s my tumor it’s my fucking tumor! Get out! You are nothing but shit, you never take responsibility for anything, you never have, you just live in your Never-Never Land thinking everyone will live happily ever after! Why do you always need to destroy everything! You’ve ruined everything! Shut up, you’re disgusting! You never think of anyone but yourself! It's fucking over between us! Well it’s your fault I’m yelling every bad thing I have learned I have learned from you you goddamn bitch! It’s all because of you! Well, fuck you back! Oh that’s right, blame me, it isn’t like I’m dying here, oh, wait!

 

Well I was driving but now apparently I’m driving while a bitch. Just give me a fucking break with the brakes already! What makes you think you are the superior driver, Mr. Crank-It-Up, Mr. Shake It Till You Break It!? Oh yeah? Well right back at you you fucking pig. My driving is fine and I’m holding onto the wheel just fine, thank you! What, you really want me to leave? Well fine, asshole, let’s see how you manage alone. The car is fine right here. And I hate you more! Oh that’s right your tumor, not mine, nothing to do with me, only you and your precious Facebook community and every other person on the planet, but me? No, nothing to do with me you arrogant narcissistic ass. Oh and you are taking ample responsibility right now on how you yourself are behaving? Like ooh I may die so who cares what I say or how I behave right? Well I hate you more, I regret the day we met, you are nothing but shit, too. Yep, that’s me, the destructor, I’m the bitch who is ruining your cancer experience, well I have ruined everything else that was worthy in any way up until now so why not ruin this, too? My fault?! My fault!? Let’s ask your ex-wife over and ask her if I’m the one who taught you to yell you self-serving, knuckleheaded self-congratulating prick. I yell to be heard in this fucking excuse for a relationship you never listen to anybody but yourself, I might as well be talking to a brick wall!! Well go to hell. Never bother me again. Yep, let’s play the blame game because that has been your favorite game since day one! You’re Dustin Hoffman at the beginning of Kramer vs. Kramer! No I say when it’s fucking over! I hate you, never talk to me again, don’t come near me, I’ll hate you for the rest of my life! Oh the cancer card again? Right. I’ll alert the media.

 

The mundane horrors of living with a person diagnosed with cancer.

 

Correction: the mundane horrors of living with a person with well-groomed inclination to crush in the game of spousal oneupmanship and to win all pissing contests whether she admitted to it or not.

 

Correction: the mundane horrors of just our relationship.

 

Another day, another broken dish, another knick-knack thrown across the room in the beautiful spring light so that the sun is momentarily reflected in a sparkling flash on the surface right before the china is smashed into tiny little smithereens. Restraint? What's that?

It needn't be explicitly noted after the display just now, but I'll go ahead anyway. This little pastime game of ours; as mentioned before, I have practiced very hard during the a little shy of eight years we have been together, and have become the master of the comeback, the verbal tyre-slash, and complex insult. I realize the example given here doesn’t exactly ooze with extraordinarily well-put slander or gimmickry, or even merit any kind of award in verbal genius. Even I have my off days. But the most important thing is, I always win. 

Even now.

Sometimes it’s my fault. Sometimes it’s his. Being angry and behaving a little nutso, some might say, is totally natural and expected right now. Acting all deranged and being beside oneself, ditto.

It really is.

But as Markus put it back there, granted, in one of his slightly-less-eloquent-than-usual recitals, you try living with it. I have moments when I want to pulverize every bone in his body, the argument depicted here serves as prime example of such a moment. I find it fantastic that anyone should be able to take the other person's immense anger and bile, and not engage, not be personally affected by it, and not confuse the other person's extreme emotion as one's own and adobt it in a heartbeat. In a situation like ours, or any situation for that matter where intense interpersonal relations are involved, Markus and myself, we are both guilty as charged here.

 

Why does the life partner have to take all the crap?

Lately, I feel like a garbage can.

Everyone else gets lengthy philosophical narratives on the luxury and preciousness of life and how privileged we are to be experiencing life to its fullest, how being a journalist is really the best profession there is because it allows one to constantly widen one’s horizons and to contact and talk to people smarter than oneself, how the light is so exquisite right now and how lovely everything is.

I get You’re holding onto the wheel wrong, bitch.

 

Then again, maybe I do have it all backwards. Maybe it’s the other way around completely. Maybe I’m the one who started it. Maybe I really am the scourge of the Earth. The Anti-Christ. Maybe I do deserve everything he said.

But just maybe, he deserves it, too.

 

For the record, I have had zero tickets or accidents in traffic in my lifetime. I used to be an excellent driver, but since I had to give up my own car in 2005, I have become overly cautious, even frightened, behind the wheel, and therefore have little patience in the constant yoyoing that goes from Oh you should just get out there and drive more there’s nothing to it to the infuriating to the point of overboiling yakking and hair-splitting that is Markus’ backseat driving.

Our fights have always been full of fire and brimstone, and I don’t think anyone would believe some stuff that comes out of our mouths during them. To think that two relatively smart people could actually reduce to such levels is embarrassing enough. I read somewhere once that during a stressful moment, the brain’s ability to solve problems is reduced to 8%. 8%! Eight percent is really like having no brains at all, isn’t it? A no-brainer.

I also read somewhere that one can honestly say one loves another truly no earlier than having experienced a forceful and pressing need to kill them.

I never wanted to murder anybody before, so I guess that must mean I really, really, love Markus.

 

What was depicted here is distilled from a series of three different fights during Monday, which were really the first, second, and third acts of the one and the same argument. Act one right after breakfast. Second, in the car on our way to have lunch at a nearby sushi place and do some grocery shopping. Third, back home, unloading the car. And of course a few choice obscenities to really spice it up, something extra, from all our years together.

I don’t think I have ever been at the end of my rope in the very specific way I am right now. Erratic, crazed, depressed, maniacal, desolate, euphoric, drunk, arrogant, apologetic, hopeful, worshipful, superfluous, radiant, murderous, hysterical, courageous, laughable, odious, grandiose, loving, thunderous, sanctimonious, distant, close, sincere, pompous, hormonal, harmonious, tired, wretched, jubilant, morose, brooding, bereaved, happy, exhausted, exhilarated, excommunicado, extemporaneous, desperate, aching, raging, hungover, inflated, deflated, preemptive strike, counteroffensive, Machiavellian, pumpernickel, correctional, bloodthirsty, marred, sanguine, Stoicist, luminous, joyous, regretful; just to name a few not very humble terms and conditions to our already larger-than-life drama lessons in communication.

In couplehood fights, usually no one is entirely right or wrong. Still, for some insane reason, in our couplehood, we succeed every time in making every tiny little thing the biggest issue there ever was, to be rehashed and confused with all possible past indiscretions and misdemeanors and calculated and measured and extorted to the highest and pointed emotional distress. What we love doing is pretending to get into it about this or that, when what we are really on about is arguing over semantics. Like what’s that about? Have you ever heard of anything so stupid? If I weren't one of the participants in the interpolations illustrated here, I'd probably say it's all nonsense anyway, there's no way two people could ever act so silly.

I mean the press have a name for people like us; in the Eighties, they came up with a derivative to use whenever Madonna and her first significant other made the papers with constant loud arguments heard throughout their neighborhood in Malibu, California, and the police being summoned time and time again for complaints about the unhappy couple disturbing the peace, and Sean’s erratic and violent behavior towards the paparazzi. The term that became coined by the events and actions of this relationship and its unraveling was perhaps not the most innovative ever, but there was a straightforwardness and a strong aroma of truth about it. You may have heard it; it was the Poison Penns.

And the shoe fits with excruciating precision.

So, we decided it was finally time to bite the bullet, to face the music, to pay the piper. No point in putting it off any longer.

Thursday, we married.

 

After all, it was Thursday of Mysteries, and what is love if not the last and greatest remainding mystery of them all? And I guess we are just big fans of the silly.

 

In keeping with the today’s theme, a few lines, obviously unauthorized, by the Goddess of 80’s pop herself:

 

So if you should ever doubt

Wonder what love is all about

Just think back and remember dear

Those words whispered in your ear, I said

No more sadness,

I kiss it goodbye!

The sun is bursting right out of the sky

I searched the whole world for someone like you

Don’t you know that it is

True love

 

 

 

Dedicated to my husband Markus, the coolest guy in the universe

 

Lyrics from True Blue, written by Madonna and Stephen Bray, from the album True Blue, 1986

This story contains a paraphrased segment from the show Friends, s 6 ep 3, the one where Monica and Chandler almost come to blows over what to do with the spare room, with Ross playing the peacemaker to serve his own purposes.