Yes, I realize that I missed a day.  Yes, I intend to post daily.  No, I don’t feel bad. 

So matters need not be personal. However I am nothing, if not vengeful, if I am scorned.  Considering how easily I can cut people from my life, I am apt to go to great lengths to extract satisfaction after a perceived wrong.  Yes, revenge may be inherently immoral, but it is quite a panacea for the mind after a slight against the self.

I pursue revenge quite often.  The injury sustained that led to such vengeance can vary in subject matter and magnitude.  When someone pulled a hit and run on me many years ago mere months after I had done the same to someone else, I felt no need to go after the other person or to ruin their life.  However, when an employee at a restaurant got my drink order wrong, I did everything I could to get the employee and restaurant in trouble with their corporate entity.  I find that for me, possibly the psychopath in general as well, the action need not result in an equal but opposite reaction.  The reaction may reach the level of a bloody vendetta, not necessarily literally, and may be orders of magnitude more forceful.Why do I want to pursue such a vendetta to a forceful conclusion?   The reasons are simple.  By following through with revenge to completion, I am winning a game of my own making.  By making the other’s destruction complete, I am proving that I am more worthy and more powerful.  I am ensuring that I will never be wronged by that entity again and am ensuring that they know their place relative to me.  Maybe this is a heightened level of narcissism or maybe this is simply playing the game well and with fervor.  And, the realm of vengeance need not be limited to the psychopath.  Plenty of non-psychopaths also feel the need for vengeance, like some primal emotion that needs feeding.  I know that, for me, I just proceed more smartly and more completely with my vengeance than the non-psychopath can ever imagine.  It is not only personal, it is a perfect manifestation of the game I live to play every day.

I also need not feel anything toward the victim of my revenge.  I have attempted to ruin, in some fashion, many former allies in my life.  Whether I have succeeded, I often do not know as the energy to follow up on their ‘well-being’ after I am done is irrelevant to me.  I sometimes wonder if my victims even realized that I was the one to inflict such pain after their wrong-doing.  I remember  around age ten being so full of vengeance toward a friend that I accused him of everything imaginable to anyone that would listen.  In some ways he would become a pariah and for a while he was on everyone’s radar as a potential trouble maker and thief.  I do not even remember what caused me to be so full of rage, but ultimately it didn’t matter and we would actually reconcile and remain acquaintances to this day.

If you are going to do a job, do it well.  I think the same holds for the pursuance of revenge.  As I wrote earlier, an action does not requite an equal reaction, it could be much more insidious and grand.  I do recognize that my bloodlust after being wronged may ruin people, but I am not ready to change that behavior.  How can I prove my worth and superiority if I am not playing the game in a retaliatory fashion?  It isn’t the players of the game or the actions of the game that matter; what matters is that I am the victor, even if I am metaphorically covered in blood when it is over.