Letter to Tony:

An Other Public Letter:

Growing up we learned how to handle bullies: to remember that, deep down inside, they were in fact inferior. They did not simple “suffer from feelings of inferiority”; they WERE inferior, if only because of how they chose to externalize those feelings.

Ever since I met you, you have gone out of your way, it seems, to externalize your own feelings of inferiority. You have called me egotistical, narcissistic, unspiritual (“not OF the Spirit”), and, above all: a bully.

I did not come to you. YOU came to ME, telling me about how I was supposed to live my life.

In turn I taught you how to live yours, but only to the degree that it might affect me. My integrity was in what you called “selfishness” in me: that I was only interested to the degree that it might affect me.

Yet in fact I was speaking on behalf of the General Collective.

I was simply loth to overstep the critical boundary that segregated what I KNEW from what I might IMAGINE. Though my imagination is in fact quite strong and very potent.

You remind me of the kids on the playground who would beat kids over their own heads with the victims’ arms, and all the while they would chant: “Why are you hitting yourself?”
This was what happened when you repeatedly abused me by calling me “a dick”. It was YOU in fact at that very moment that were doing that. And I could sense your aggression coming earlier, so do not think that you could hide it. It is pathetic. I will not be blamed by taking action against it the moment that I saw it. I could not really believe it when you started talking to your departed Mother about how I was “bullying” you. I had known you to be CRUEL, but I did not think you would taunt me by pretending towards my own victimhood in some childish mockery.

After all: it was OUR lives that you had endangered when you chose to drive recklessly.

Do not imagine that you are unaccountable to your passengers. In fact: they are the ONLY authority that you should listen to whilst in the car. If that is too daunting to reconcile with all of the other complications that being a competent driver require, then may be you should stop driving. Have the humility to renounce that privilege, as I did, and I will speak for every one in saying I feel safer.

[We do not “owe” you for the “luxury” of your chaffeurship. If what we owe to you is the capacity to do the task poorly, then you owe US for having offered so poor a service in exchange for our time and safety. (Get over yourself.)]

I never set out to make you feel one way or an other. I do not abuse cleverness in such a fashion. I simply state what I see. I cannot be held accountable for how it “comes out”. That it is empirically sound and factual is sufficient.

I do not abuse cleverness as you do. I do not demand equality by dragging people down to my dysfunctional level. I need not cleverness to such a degree. My work ethic suffices. There is a deep, bodily wisdom in things which grow slowly. It allows words to maintain their kinship with deeds.

It is a virtue of the Earth.

You have since then been in one crash that was total to that same vehicle. You spend hours, each month it would seem, (and the seeming is of course more important than the being, for what does it say that those were hours of MY time that I had not intended to spend in that fashion?) working on getting your car repaired. You do none of your own repairs. And many times you have threatened to crash it in a rage, as though that made a point.

So even were I a “dick”, it would be negligible in context. To say that it was YOU that was THE dick, in fact, is generous to you. I suggest you take it.

DMYTRI.

DM.A.A.