"I AM Omega"

There are certain things that I have a tolerance for.

I can tolerate people with differing opinions. It takes some explanation on their end, certainly, but I have had enough arguments end up badly in my brief time on earth to know that bridges need to be hosed down until it's certain that they'll burn.

Today I experienced rage again. I would say anger, but that wouldn't do it much justice. This is one of those blind rage moments, where the steering wheel on your car starts looking like a chew toy and other drivers start looking like enemy combatants. Christ, even now my hands are shaking just thinking about what caused this. Despite not really being able to see straight for a matter of hours, I think I handled myself a hell of a lot better than I could have. I had one of those "hands slipping off of the cliff" moments where every fiber of my being wanted to scream bloody murder, but all that got out was a squeak. I don't want to know what would have happened if I'd screamed, and if I don't stop shaking in the next few hours, I might regret restraining myself.

And that's as much as you'll get this particular inciting incident. Something caused this. I would elaborate, but I have also learned that arguments are never won when the other side isn't present to respond. I'm not really one to mince my words in what I perceive as the privacy of my own blog, but this is one of those moments I'm going to put in the "How I Got Here" part of my best-selling memoir a few decades (and bowls of LCD-ios, Cheerios' answer to Lucky Charms' "Lucky Smack") from now. It will be in full detail, blow-by-blow, so just stay on life support long enough to read it. If there's an apocalypse between now and then, tell the asteroid/alien mothership/erupting supervolcano/robot army to kindly go fuck itself and stick around for the ending. It's juicy. Oh my god is it juicy.

It kind of seems hypocritical to hold anything back, given the subject of this particular tirade, but alas, this bridge stays soaked.

I will, however, go deep into my feelings on this matter. It's kind of therapeutic in a weird way.

Recently, and after playing Mass Effect 2 (where I steal the punchline to this set up from), I have decided on the one rule I lay out to people whose success in life directly correlates with my own. It sounds dry, overdone, and really pretty mundane given how many people have said it over the years and in what regard they have delivered it. It's vulgar, of course, but to take from the greatest angry guy in history, Lewis Black, there isn't really a word in the English language that conveys the rage in someone's voice quite like "fuck". Try as you might to find one (in my elementary school years of trying to find one, the closest I came was "frick", and that's prone to a few embarassing slip ups along the way), you just won't be able to. Thank god I stopped trying, too.

For those of you simply chomping at the bit to find out what it is, strap yourselves in.

It's "Don't Fuck with Morgan".

Doesn't that sound weird? I mean, especially coming from a fat white guy with bad acne, but just from my personality in general alone it sounds awkward.

Thing is, this is the most refined form of my "Mission Statement". I really could go into comprehensive detail, but it'd take too long. People don't have very long attention spans when you give them directions. That could just be based on my own attention span, but as I've found that there's nothing truly spectacular about me that would set me apart from a group (apart from the occasional "being an asshole" or someone who puts others in certain, unfavorable "positions"). There's no reason to believe that my attention span is the outlier on a chart of high school students.

This all stemmed from my trip to Washington DC in November. When I was there, I saw 6000 kids who all wanted to be journalists someday. That's 6000 kids who could be the only thing between me and a job as a journalist. Now, my ultimate career goal in life is to be not only a writer of some sort, but to be a world reknowned writer of some sort. I don't want my lore to end on a tombstone. I want people to read what I've written centuries from now. I want to unlock doors in peoples' minds and allow them to explore the world with the viewpoints from the extremes that I tend to offer.

When I looked at the crowds of kids in DC, I decided something. None of them are going to get in my way. None of them. If I have to scrape the skin and muscles off of their bones because they choose to impede me in some way, I'll carve my name in their fucking ribcage, but they should make no mistake: I will stop at nothing to be the best. Someday I will look down and see 6000 kids beneath me.

That is, of course, if a few of the 6000 don't get all Communist and help me to help them. If they scratch my back, I will most certainly scratch theirs. I'll even use one of those massage things from the Sharper Image.

There's middle ground, of course, but really that's just the competition. Their purpose is to show me the time to beat, so to speak.

It sounds overly confident, and really it is. The chances that I'll surpass the kids who've already got book deals at my age is slim to none, but god dammit I'm going to keep trying at it.

I will say that my new standard in life does apply to the current situation I'm in. I feel that, in a way, I am being held back and I'm getting to the point that, in a way, I'll overcome it alone. However, I keep soldiering on. I might have used a half of a resevoir to keep the flames at bay, but this bridge is smoldering.

Tomorrow, I go forward with an olive branch in my hand, the rage that threw my hands into spasms is safely tucked away in a straight jacket (although, I didn't throw away the key. Just in case). I fully expect that the next time I sit down and write one of these, this same branch will be chewed up and gnarled beyond recognition.

That's just Welsh pessimism for you, though.

I'm Mad as Hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.