270407/0243—I have anger issues. Actually, I have lots of issues—hell, who doesn’t?—but anger is the one that potentially might topple me. So, in a last-ditch effort at self-preservation, I’ve made a pact with myself to work on the problem. It seems to be working. But the thing with issues is that they can bare their fangs when you least expect, as I’ve found numerous times. Like, every time I’ve ever punched a wall or a chair or myself, I can honestly say I didn’t expect to do so. The destructive behaviour isn’t premeditated. It just . . . happens. Impatience slowly boils to frustration, and suddenly the urge to violently act out overwhelms me like water surging over a levee. As the comedian says, “What’s up with that?”
When I first started thinking in depth about my anger issues, I figured I was angry because of unresolved emotional problems, because of some thing (or things) I had experienced that I needed to remember or understand. Now, though, I’m beginning to realize that whether I experienced crappy stuff or not, my fits of anger have to do with how I respond to the world. It can be a crappy place, the world, and if you’ve learned to nurture anger, you’re going to let it dictate how you interpret the world.
040804/0247—Epic moments. Those moments that last so long, those moments so expansive they quiver towards eternity. Anger for me is like being trapped in one of those moments, a pocket of air bound by a thin skin of soap or spittle. As long as that skin don’t break . . .
Other woman said, “What about a condom?” I said, “You’ll be my condom, bitch. Get on my cock.” VD stands for . . . Valentine’s Day.
Fifteen percent of all laughter is forced.
~
My body is the setting, my emotions the characters. The primary conflict wages between Love and Ambivalence. Like a chess match. Ambivalence usually makes the second move, yet doesn’t play aggressively, so things tend to get tedious. Love knows well how to attack, but Ambivalence seemingly without effort evades any real confrontation, content simply to prolong the match.
Love’s true opposite is not Hate, but Ambivalence. Love and Hate are connected at the hip by virtue of their relentlessness. If Love (or Hate) is feeling everything toward some target, Ambivalence is feeling nothing toward it. Glancing briefly, discarding immediately, without consideration. Or perhaps to avoid a threat of rejection. I don't know what frightens me more—these extreme emotions, or the absence of emotion.
Maroon four-door sedan edging away from gas pumps toward
My mood is the first casualty. A scowl feels so right. Something of considerable weight. Something to wield as one might wield a visibly holstered gun. The bitch is littering, words flashing reddish hot through deepest cells of my limbic system. A similar flashing reddish hot stirs through my limbs. I consider running and grabbing the litter, catching up with the car—which hasn’t yet reached Finch—and knocking on the window.
“Yes?” she’ll say, putting down the window.
“You dropped this,” I say, shoving litter into car, staring the chick in the eye. “Don’t do it again, otherwise I’ll hunt you down and split your face open.”
Anger plays itself out. Anger must occasionally do so in order to avoid buildup. Or rather, buildup plays out in moments of psychic fracture, bad vibes like black fumes wafting from porous surface area of my body, dark menacing energy encasing me in a thin reactive Hell. Ideally, such a scene plays out inside my head rather than my actually performing any such thing. It’s not, one might say, pretty, that scene.
These moments when I want to kick something or punch something or bite my tongue until I draw blood. I still experience these flashing reddish hot moments. When impatience and indignation intersect. When I’m waiting for the bus and it doesn’t come for, like, half an hour. With every second the bus doesn’t come, impatience slowly builds, filling me with menace, weighing me down yet lifting me off the ground, raising me towards an apex of singular rage. And then four buses arrive at once and I think, how fucking stupid is that?
Indignation seeps into the fold and ignites a conflagration of Anger.
For a minute or twenty minutes or an hour—that epic moment—giant bricks of RAGE shooting through my head, cracking my skull, dispersing the urge to remain angry. Bilious green-yellow ectoplasm pulsing through deepest channels of my limbic system, arranging signals which enervate my arms with mindless need to lash out. Grab something, squeeze until it releases its liquid. Throttle, close hand around victim’s throat, suffocating.
270407/0313—I’m sorry, where are my manners? My name is Jody McCutcheon. I’m a nobody. At least, to the world at large I am, as are approximately ninety-nine point nine percent of us. To my friends, family, and co-workers, I’m Jody, or Jode, or Jeush, or Jody the Roadie, or Captain, or Dr McCutcheon’s son, or that stoner dude. I’m a thirty-five year old white, over-educated underachiever with an upper-middle class upbringing. My father’s a doctor, my mother a retired nurse. Among my uncles and aunts are a doctor, a physicist, an engineer, a teacher, and a jeweller. Obviously I have good genes. I live in a country—
And that makes me angry.
But whereas most people take anger out on external things, like walls and material goods and other people, I take my anger out on myself. The stupidity and self-destructiveness of such behaviour makes me angrier. And thus fuels a vicious cycle of masochistic violence. I’ve cut myself (accidentally and otherwise). I’ve given myself black eyes. I’ve sprained both wrists. I’ve broken my hand. I’ve ended up in casts at least three times in the last four years. I’ve embarrassed myself beyond words. And if I’m not careful, one day I might “accidentally” kill myself. If I can (without warning) punch a metal pole hard enough to displace my fourth metacarpal bone, who’s to say I can’t (without warning) grab a sharpened stick within reach and plunge it into my neck? I guess it all comes down to how mad at myself I might get.
So I began to fear myself, my seemingly uncontrollable anger, to the point where I sought outside help. A second opinion, if you will. I went to see a specialist in anger management. And after several sessions (at $200 an hour), I think I’ve learned a few things about myself and anger management. (At that price, I’d better have learned something.) But that’s not to say I’m out of the woods. Like I said, these issues can bare their fangs when you least expect. The occasional bout of anger is unavoidable. That is, everyone gets angry once in a while. But anger needn’t lead to destruction.
My earliest misconception was the presumption that everyone punches walls. I learned this behaviour at an early age mainly because it wasn’t discouraged. I’d get angry, I’d punch a hole in the wall, and my dad wouldn’t condemn the behaviour, since he himself was familiar with punching walls. He’d just say, “Well, that was stupid of you. Better fix it.” So I learned that punching walls was stupid, but not necessarily wrong. And of course I also learned how to fix holes in walls.
Apparently, punching walls isn’t normal, but rather a sign of uncontrolled anger. So the walls of the house I grew up in, pockmarked with patched-up holes, told an ominous story in a language I wouldn’t understand for many years. Now, though, I’m learning to understand it. Hopefully it’s not too late.
