MsBurb’s “Difficulty” Dealing with Tex…

  I’ve thought.
And I’ve thought.
And I’ve thought some more.
And all these months, when I first began to tackle the Tex Watson mystique, his life and his role in TLB, I have been disabled, of sorts, in writing on him, like no other Manson Family killer I have written on before…
And it’s been driving me loony, I tell ya! 
You know, when Pat Krenwinkel begins to tell the actions on those two nights of murder, she will predictably hesitate before she’s about to describe the more gruesome, more emotional acts that were committed by her at the Tate and LaBianca homes. Well, that’s been the kind of mental “hesitation” I’ve been going through, when I try to put finger to keyboard on the subject of Charles Denton Watson…
But why? I keep asking myself, is this happening with Tex, when my fingers easily sped through the keys when yapping on Sadie and Katie, Bobby and Bruce? Nothing was making any sense.
I brushed off this literary “blip” of sorts and kept slogging at the old keyboard, sure that with the next word, that “hesitation” would just dissolve and I’d be back to my easy-going verbosity once more. But no such luck.
This isn’t writer’s block so much as it’s killer’s block, it seems, that, to even look at this aging man seems to instil a kind of “Don’t go there!” mentality in me, severe enough, that when I write, each word is as heavy and laboured as army-issued boots slogging through Flanders mud in WWI!
So, in my funk, I confessed my quandary to a fellow blogger, and while we were chatting on a possible answer to this silly mystery, he asked, “What did Tex do that was different from the rest of the killers?” And I said, “Well, he killed more people.” And he said, “Yeah, but that kind of brutality you seem to live for in your writing, what else did he do different?”
And I said, “Tex cut the screen at Tate.”
One sentence, and I wrote even it with hesitation, to my blogger friend.
Tex cut the screen at Tate.
And so he did.
And it was this act, as a little girl of six, that somehow brought home to me, all those years ago, the real possibility that Tex, or some Hippie like him, could cut my screen just the very same way…
Above Charlie, above crazy Sadie, above zombie Katie, Tex was the one who cut that screen, sideways even, making more noise I’m sure, than if he had cut it length-wise, the noise factor of no importance to a Mansonite who was, for all intents and purposes, The Devil, there to do the Devil’s business, no matter what the delivery.
And so he did. He cut that screen and it might as well have been my screen that he cut, as those years ago.
So, if you’re wondering why MsBurb’s posts on Tex have been laboured, and dare I say less than animated, now you know. It was because of a man who cut a screen, in a window, that could have been any one of ours, all those years ago.
Forgive MsBurb of her faults as we both labour through the upcoming posts on Tex, okee dokee?