Return of the Berserkerin

Not so very long ago, I wrote a series of posts in realtime, as I did some serious work with anger.

Lately you may have noticed a prolonged silence.

I've been trying to keep the lid on a volcano. The Berserkerin is roaring and whirling her battleaxe so swiftly that it looks like a rotary saw blade. She's been at it for more than a week, and I don't want her to get out... not where she wants to go, anyway.

What she wants to do is time travel, and reduce to quivering slivers several different people, each of whom is responsible for the death of a pet through being, themselves, too stupid to live...

And all of whom have written about it.

They have described their animals' deaths in lavish, sensationalistic detail, and clearly - oh, very clearly indeed - feel much, much sorrier for themselves than for the poor animals.

I haven't been looking for this stuff. It's shown up in my daily newspapers [I read several], or been in items I read online...

What's more, I read some of these accounts years ago. One consequence of surviving abuse, learning to recognize it, and having an excellent memory is that these things tend to cumulate. And with each successive pointless-avoidable-painful-horrific-death-of-an-innocent-from-its-owner's-stupidity, Berserkerin has become angrier - and harder to suppress.

I am deliberately being obscure. If I provided sufficient detail here, then people could run searches and find the articles of which I speak; and then I'd be aiming readers of this blog at the authors, and that's a game I'm not going to play.

But dear God, I want to climb down every one of these idiots' throats wearing steel spiked shoes and using a flamethrower.

And it won't do any good.

There is nothing I could say to even one of them that would have any effect whatsoever.

Nothing I can say will change the fact that innocent beasts died horrible, protracted, painful deaths because they happened to belong to people I regard as negligent morons, and nothing I can say is going to make those purported negligent morons either more intelligent or less negligent. Nothing I can do is going to prohibit any of them from ever owning another animal, either. Nothing I can do will make any of them into responsible, caring, adult human beings.

I didn't cause it, I cannot control it, and I cannot cure it. I own none of these things. They are not mine to own.

Sadly, all I can own are my responses. Which are: to mourn, to rage, and to care, impotently, for the innocent dead.

And eventually to pray, but Berserkerin will be praying first. She tends to pray "with her eyes on fire"... and definitely prefers the imprecatory Psalms.

I won't pretend these deaths don't matter. Once you start doing that, the b@$+@rd$ have won.

And oh, dear God, if you think this is bad... you should see what Berserkerin is like when I read or hear a news account of some fool baking their child to death in the family car.