Obvious Ignorance

 As soon as Squishy left for her first span of time with the gnome this summer, the old man had a massive blowup towards me.  I never even said a full sentence to him, and tried to be calm, and he wound up screaming so that the room shook, saying things with a clearly malicious intent.  Without going into much more detail about it, the situation was bad enough that while I was in tears outside, afraid to go into my own home, Oliver was pacing in front of me watching the door to the house guarding me.

Later that night, after I had informed my mom what happened, he came into my room and said he was sorry.  While shrugging, he just said "We were exchanging words and it got heated".

I had nothing to say on the matter.  I couldn't tell him it was alright, or anything like that, because it wasn't.  His actions are constantly in line with that behavior, and only escalating.  Not only that, but what he had said just showed that he wasn't even aware of what had happened.  No words were even exchanged.  He cut me off a few words into any sentence, and started yelling from the very beginning.  It also didn't "get heated" as he put it, rather than he had an absolutely irrational response to something that wasn't even entirely directed at him.

He wasn't sorry.  He couldn't even take ownership of what he did wrong, and he sure as hell as a result wasn't going to change any of his behavior to try and not have it happen again.  He did what someone else told him to do, and couldn't even figure out how to do that, like a toddler being told to apologize after being in time out.

An empty apology like that, and not even knowing what he had done just wound up making it worse.  Showed me that it would happen again, and again, and he'd never realize that it's his own behavior.  He actively fights against doing anything that might make him a better person, claiming that it's just who he is.

Well, he proves himself again and again to be the problem.  What problem?  An example of all of them.

I'm glad he'll be gone for almost a week, but that's another post for another time.