GIVE A YELL. GIVE A LARGE, SUBSTANTIAL YELL

I grew-up under a dictatorship of yelling.

While it took me years to untangle this mystery, my mother yelling so loudly at my drunken father come home at three in the morning just about any night of the week without even a warning telephone call that he was going to tie one on that I really cannot remember how many times I was awakened to loud shouting, left unable to sleep because of the shouting and thus going to school, even as a small child, exhausted from anxiety, shouting and two gods in the house going at it over beer and attempts to escape while trapped like a wild animal, I finally did untangle the mystery.

Sometimes, when the terror and alienation that arrives like an unwanted guest when I am having a manic episode, I also yell.  But I also know how shouting at people, even over the telephone while in the middle of one of those no-direction-left panics, is "disturbing" and "difficult".  I committed this "error" two years ago when, in March, 2014, literally at wit's end and consumed by a manic panic, I called two former drinking buddies, begging for at least a little friendship.  One totally dismissed me as "wrong" or "out of bounds" or whatever other excuses he utilizes to justify simply offing another for "infractions" such as just pile-driving a woman who had propositioned me for two years running, only to bail the instant I took the bait, the heartache so hard it triggered my already reeling mood swings into a full-blown disaster, worst in 21 years, and other reasons for "condemnation" I will probably never really understand short of conversation and the typical hashing-out from which I will be forever deprived.

Loud shouting: Last resort when one is trapped in a topsy-turvy room, feeling so alone and abandoned and mood-struck, left to act-out long-standing domestic emotional abuse like a soldier in combat getting fire from both sides.  Some people, afraid of psychotherapy, simply do not understand what acting-out is.  Here's a short explanation:  When one has been traumatized, and when a present experience looms in the vicinity of the original trauma, one repeats the trauma.  Especially in terms of emotional abuse, a child laying innocently in his bed while listening to emotional outbursts that honestly shake-loose any sense of security from mom and dad, acting-out both sides of an ontologicaly destructive trauma is quite common.  In terms of me, acting-out, I used to play both sides of the big drama at home.  Sometimes, I would act-out my father's role in the game, getting drunk, withdrawing in shame and fear and even going so far as contemplating suicide, something I did repeatedly until my Bipolar Disorder was reined-in.  Other times, I start shouting, exactly as I had in 2014 when I felt so alienated by two people who basically had been ignoring me, not answering my telephone messages, and one even so vacant as to not bother to respond to those times I posted links to music on his own Facebook timeline.

Yes, I was frightened.  I wanted help.  I started shouting.  Apparently a capital offense.

Who needs any abnormal behavior, right?

It finally took a 911 telephone call to get me a little rescue.  But that's not the point.  People sometimes yell and shout.  Yelling and shouting are normal human experiences.  Why do we yell and shout?  In my mother's case, she felt trapped by a man who would not even let her shop for school clothes for her children, who wouldn't allow her to have the only automobile.  He had her so bound-down and trapped that, when the injustice became too much, she burst out the only way she knew: Shouting.

In 2011, I accompanied my mother and stepfather to New Mexico, happy to tag along on what I knew was going to be my mother's last visit to the mountains of Northern New Mexico, mountains she missed, mountains she loved.  Sitting-up one late night with my cousin, I asked her what my mom's domestic life was like when she was young.  My cousin, 11 years older than I, said the obvious: "There sure was a lot of yelling in that house...."

My mother had picked-up my grandfather's Bipolar, and his acting-out.  This is a sort of cycle of abusive behavior that is almost impossible to break.  For the first time in my life, I knew where my mother had learned that self-defensive tactic.  Her father was a fierce man.  He helped Pershing hunt-down Pancho Villa.  He is legendary in the family for the night he hurtled out of the trenches at the Somme during World War I, enraged a friend had been hit by a German bullet, shouted his way across No Man's Land, jumped in the German trenches, found the killer, cut the killer's neck with a Bowie knife, ripped-off the killer's Iron Cross, and then hurtled back across No Man's Land, shouting the entire way.  Now that is fierceness.  But mostly my grandfather was a quiet man.

Being a descendant of William the Conqueror's reeve, his right-hand man, his chief of military police, I've got that Norman "berserker" blood running in my veins.  I wouldn't be surprised if the manic-depression has been in the family tree for millennia.   One famous relative was Great Britain's first Military Magistrate in Ireland, one devil of a son of a bitch.  Another, Charles Gordon, a.k.a. "Chinese Gordon", famous for leading the British invasion of China during the Opium Wars in the 1840s, fiercely defended Khartoum from the marauding troops of the Mahdi, and died there.  Another less-distant relative commanded U.S. Army troops at Los Alamos during the construction of the first atomic bomb.  He called Patton a "punk".

Good blood or bad blood, at least it's blue blood, right?  Much bluer than that of the two pips who decided to condemn me over "social consequences" when I yelled at them through a freaking telephone in 2014.  Talk about two Little Lord Fauntleroys.  Do they both wear satin pajamas?

I once had a friend, Chris Z., so agitated on a Monday morning after a weekend-long cocaine binge, that he shouted like a maniac right there in his family's warehouse.  I don't remember what he was yelling about, but whatever it was, he was in bad sorts that morning.  I walked over to him as he swung his arms around like Mussolini, yelling his skinny bird's butt off, and when he paused for a breath, and asked him this:

"You done?"

Right about that time, I'd gone to an afternoon guitar jam at his East Dallas house, only to be waylaid by a group of friends who all decided to wack-out on coke, so much of a cluster-fuck that his girlfriend, seeing my frustration and disgust, gave me 20 bucks for a cab so I could escape.  I finally told Chris Z. that I really did not want to be around him if he was launching himself to the Pleiades with white powder.  Not only did I not want to be carried-off by the cops, a guilty by association companion, but he simply wasn't the kindhearted Chris Z. he is when he's not on a coke binge.  He was so angered by me reading him the riot act that he decided not to call me or visit me in the hospital when I had leukemia.  Then, at 12:30 a.m. early in January, 2008, he was on the telephone, sheepishly telling me he'd been in a recovery hospital.  He was quite discomfited by his admission.  I told him I was happy he'd taken that bull by the horns--only he went back to the crack or powder, an addict regardless of the invasion of reality into his world.  He once argued that I was on drugs too.  "You take an anti-depressant! See?  It's the fucking same thing!" 

While shouting.

Is there really no difference between recreational drug use and drug use designed to stem "the crazy"?  Shouldn't I have known this?

Bottom line.  I feel like writing a "user's manual" to explain to those numbskulls what kind of gun I live under every single day.

Damn right, I yell.  I'm a yeller.  I can go from 0 to 11 on the yelling scale almost instantaneously.  Sometimes that's the only way I can get the garbage out of my system and clear my mind when the moods spill over into dysfunction.  Yeah, I always knew I was only a cartoon.  How about you?