Last night at just after midnight (technically this morning I guess) someone came up to my front door, rang my doorbell 4 or 5 times rapidly, and ran away. By the time I pulled on some track pants and got downstairs there was no sign of him/her/them.
I had just dropped off to sleep after a very long and physically exhausting day. Really looking forward to a peaceful sleep in Sunday morning. Now my adrenaline is pumping and every home invasion horror and vigilante beatdown movie scene is running through my head.
In the light of day this is nothing more than an innocent and silly prank by some kids goofing around on a Saturday night. Laying in bed and staring at the ceiling, at one in the morning… this is justification for great and terrible vengeance. Since my brain gets locked in a feedback loop on whatever it’s last focus was on, I laid there for two hours going through increasingly violent and outlandish scenarios in my mind as I tried desperately to regain my lost slumber.
I am waiting by the door when he rings the bell, jump out and scare him good.
I am waiting by the door when he rings the bell, jump out and catch him, smack him around.
I hear them approach the door, I run down the stairs, throw open the door, catch him and beat the crap out of him.
… and his friends.
The doorbell rings, I come down the stairs as they kick in the door. I surprise them, beat the crap out of them and throw them out.
The doorbell rings, I come down the stairs as they kick in the door. I catch them, beat the crap out of them, take their wallets, tell them I can call their parents or the cops, which one do they want.
They kick in the door, I jump down the stairs onto the first one. I turn and tackle the second, knocking him out and tying them both up for the police.
They kick in the door. I jump over the half-wall between the second landing and the front door. I land behind the first invader, dropping my elbow on his clavicle, breaking my fall and his collarbone. Crouching to absorb the impact of the landing, I turn and leap with full force driving the heel of my palm into the nose of the second invader, then my knee into his solar plexus. I grab the bat out of his hand, twisting his wrist back hard enough to hear tendons snap as I swing it backwards through the jaw of the first thug. A second time I spin back around, following the swing through as I bring the bat down on the top of it’s previous owner’s head. I thrust the bat like a spear to the chest of the third attacker, still in the door frame. He stumbles backwards off the steps, I am following through the air, bat raised in both hands above my head like a woodsman’s axe. Bat meets forehead at the same time as skull meets concrete. Bursts like a rotten jack-o-lantern.
These little fantasy scenes don’t bring me rest; instead each one gives my brain a little micro-burst of adrenaline that keeps me awake and angry. This is exactly why I need to read a good and engrossing book before sleeping. I need to take my mind off of whatever I was thinking about before coming to bed, or I will lay there, unable to sleep, going over and over every detail of the game I was playing, show I was watching, work I was doing, or whatever else was going on. This is also why I am and always have been a very poor choice of person to bother late at night for anything less than a dire emergency.
(As an annoying side note, there is a pack of asshole teenagers that hang out in our neighbourhood. All summer they spend their nights getting drunk in the playground park across the street from our house, where we get to enjoy listening to their mindless blather and stoned howling. And, should they feel particularly energetic, we get to wake up to a street littered with broken planters, scratched and dented cars, trashed gardens, and other evidence of their adventures. Of course, a couple of them have their little souped-up Civics that they love to race up and down our residential streets. Basically, a bunch of ignorant bullshit that I really would love to enact violence upon. And before anyone gives me the “they’re just kids being kids” crap: stupid is stupid, you don’t need to be any age to know that. Even as a teenager, I hated pricks that acted like this.)
