Distinctio

Distinctio (dis-tinc’-ti-o): Eliminating ambiguity surrounding a word by explicitly specifying each of its distinct meanings.

It made me mad, and I didn’t mean crazy or that it was somehow cool—I was angry. I had been slighted—made to feel smaller than I was. I am six-foot-two. She told me I looked six feet tall. I don’t know why she wanted to demean me, but it made me so mad I pushed her out my living-room window. I live on the first floor so she was wasn’t injured, but she had me arrested. I spent 30 days in jail and have to meet with a psychologist every Friday. I’m also doing 200 hours of community service scraping chewing gum off movie theatre floors. I put the gum in a backpack and carry it home. I’m making it into a chewing gum ball. After 200 hours it will be the size a Fiat and I will exhibit it on my front lawn, standing on top of it singing inspiring Bob Dylan songs, like “Masters of War.”

But anyway, as I’ve talked with the psychologist, I’ve remembered events from my life that may have made me so quick to anger.

My mother called me her little “Bugs.” She dressed me in a bunny suit and taught me how to hop around the living room. I learned how to say “What’s up doc?” before I could say anying else. She fed me raw carrots, and sometimes, lettuce. She made my father talk like Elmer Fudd when he talked to me, and call me Bugs too. At my tenth birthday party, my mother told me it was all a “tradition” and I could take off the bunny suit and be a real man.

Up to that point, I had worn my bunny suit to school. My mother had told the principal that it was “ethnic” clothing and that our origins demanded boys wear the bunny suit until their tenth birthday when they become a man. They shed their suit in a ritual lasting five-ten minutes. Afterwards they put on underpants, trousers, a shirt, and shoes and socks and find a job. When I finally shed my bunny suit, she asked the principal if he had any openings and I was given a part-time job in the school library at the check-out desk.

All that time I was imprisoned in the bunny suit it would’ve been helpful to know why. I never asked, but my mother should’ve volunteered the information. When I was hopping around the living room and everybody would clap their hands and laugh, I was filled with rage at hopping for no other reason than their perverse entertainment. I felt like a freak—a furry, hopping, cotton-tailed, carrot-eating rabbit-boy bunny freak.

This deeply buried memory of growing up as a bunny boy, triggers my anger, it is so twisted and vague that that it can encompass all of my experiences. For example, my girlfriend’s misrepresentation of my height enraged me because it reminded me of the veil of inaccuracy draped over my being that made me vulnerable and translated guileless inaccuracies into taunts and threats. I’ve since apologized to her. She has hired a bodyguard who, she says will beat the shit out of me if I come anywhere near her. So, the apology didn’t work out and it wasn’t therapeutic either.

I’m starting my 15th year at the school library this Fall. I am full-time now and my duties have expanded to cleaning the glass on the copy machine, and sometimes, shelving paperback books.

My psychologist has proposed marriage to me. I think it may be illegal, but I am going to give it a try. She agrees, if we have a baby boy, we should not dress him in a bunny suit.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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