That wretched Keith!

My mother tells a story of a time in my life when I was perhaps three, and we lived in a little house in a very new development, while my dad worked at a factory.  We didn't have much, but I was the proud owner of orange thongs, and the proud friend of an energetic young kelpie-cross we had.  Some little distance away lived my friend / nemesis Keith and his mother.  Keith and I fought more than we played, but the final straw was when, one morning, we woke to find my little orange thongs had been chewed to pieces in the night.  'That wretched Keith has chewed up my thongs!" I declared.

Of course, it was really the dog.

Today I found that someone had bumped the wing mirror of the car we've borrowed because our got smashed by an idiot truck driver. No permanent damage, just evidence that someone had cut it a bit fine. At the time I was noticing it, an idiot teenage boy was crossing the road - insolently verging on playing chicken.  That wretched boy! I thought. I was very angry with whoever wanted to 'trespass against me' and get away with it. If it was that idiot boy, what a thrashing he should receive! Oh my!

Of course, I was an insolent, careless youth myself.  And I even clipped someone's wing-mirror and never got in touch with them.  There is a lot of wrongdoing that goes unpunished.  There is a lot that is not even punished with actual harm.  I've done my share of it, and more.  If I want my wrongdoing let go, I need to let it go against me, over and over and over. Just be liable, and live on.

(There is a psychological term for the way we fear to let ourselves be vulnerable, how we over-rate the distress of injuries and accidents.  It is called 'immune neglect'.  We (middle class uni educated folk) greatly overestimate how much bad things will hurt us because we don't appreciate how good our brains are at getting through them. I think the territorial rage is at least partly this unrealistic fear of largely imagined frailty.

Late addition: I do think 'trespasses' is a very interesting word - I feel there is a lot of territoriality in the degree of affront and rage generated, and its probably because 'home' is my last retreat - I've nowhere else to go from here, so if attacked, I get a double-dose of 'Fight'.  I'm sure it works the same way with home-turfs - like your expertise, family, favourite things)