[1162] Mad Man

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the idea of me being “angry all the time.” It’s one of the most true and consistent things about me. I’m ready, pretty much at any moment, to make something of a show out of how much pent-up feelings I have about something. I’m not precisely looking for an excuse to blow, but I am secretly daring the universe to test me. Based on my size and history, I have every reason to believe I could be some dramatic display of consequences that fly in the face of my otherwise training, practice, and outward display 99.9% of the time.

I forget where I read it, but this is apparently a well-documented and categorized personality already. That took some of the oomph out of my enthusiasm for my potential years ago. If you’re reading the right books, you’ll reduce yourself to someone’s particular field’s cliche with every chapter eventually. At the same time, being capable of an explosive episode is different from a standing anger.

The circumstances that provoke the anger are going to be often obscure or counter-intuitive. I don’t get intimidated or scared and adrenaline-rushed by other dudes macho-manning or doing the weird almost-kiss chest bump thing. I didn’t get angry when my SNAP card info was skimmed and food money was stolen. I don’t get angry at the weather, even though I deeply hate snow. I don’t get angry at animals for doing animal things until it’s a reflection of the ambivalence of their owners.

Here we start to breach into the base of the anger. I want to believe people have more control than they care to acknowledge. There are many standing mysteries regarding life, agency, “free will,” and spooky probabilistic means of describing existence. As a person, as a conscious agent, I think there is as clear and obvious difference between making a choice and doing something like this writing, and throwing my hands up to suffer and proclaim the inevitability of my victimhood.

There’s dozens of ways to describe this. When my cat jumps on the table and thinks he’s going to eat my food, I can bop him on the nose or ass. I can do it every single time until he arrives at the place he is today, looking onward from 3 to 5 feet away, not even trying. It might take months or years, but the reality for him has no less been molded by me and clearly set in for him. The less-conscious agent I’ve taken the responsibility over to both be kept alive and turned into less of an annoying cunt.

I don’t find this controversial, hard to understand, immoral, or anything less than necessary in order to function in my home where I would like to eat in peace. I’m not punching, bruising, or breaking the cat. I’m speaking a universal language that gets me where I want us to go. It’s right here I will say exactly one line about the fucking idiots who would never harm an animal as though we’re in Narnia and a deal could be cut with his instincts, or that it’s somehow noble to live at the mercy of the ambivalent destruction of nature.

I don’t blame the cat. I blame people who would construct a fantasy around what a cat is and let that pollute how you might better engage and orient one. It works the other way too. My, extremely shy and scared female cat? I’ve turned her into an annoying lap cat. I don’t yell at her for crawling into my lap. I’ve spent years constantly training her to normalize and not flinch at pets. Now, she doesn’t even move sometimes as I go to step over her. My will be done, sometimes overdone. I was lucky enough to grow up with collies and know very well how much you can get a dog to do if you care and try and mold.

I find myself most often in conversations that betray what I know to be true, not just about myself and the nature of control, but about pets, health, government, or really any single interpersonal interaction. This is probably the heart of my anger.

A few days ago, as it’s now time to vote in Indiana, as I sent out a couple texts encouraging people in my life to do so, I had a friend respond that she wasn’t going to. She offered the cliches; they’re all corrupt, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean anything to her, she’s not informed enough, yada yada. A day later, I sent her another text saying, “I’m not trying to persuade you, but I’m curious, what would it take you to vote?” She responded, “Money.” So I asked, “How much?”

This then kicked off an anger-inducing exchange where, all of a sudden, she’s behaving as though her vote matters to her, and when I earnestly say I would buy it from her, she’s got paragraphs of excuses and explanations I have less than 0 interest in fielding. I don’t need her to explain. I don’t need her to contextualize. I do not care if she doesn’t care, provided I can carry on with my agenda.

But, that’s exactly what she said. She’s talking out of both sides of her mouth. She’s carrying on as though her life as it’s currently being conducted is “just hers” bestowed upon her as an inevitable perfect manifestation that suits her preferences. The kicker? She’s an addiction counselor. It’s her job to help people wake up to their patterns that keep them under the threat of dying or destroying everything they care about.

I understand, at some level, the societal need for performance, ritual, polite pleasantries, and the facade of basic civility. There is something practically and inextricably “corrupt” about the ways in which we communicate and navigate shared spaces. I’ve already explained my latest understanding of lying, and I don’t think the majority of how we engage with each other in those veins are the dangerous corrosive kinds of lies.

Yet, there’s what appears to be a spillover effect where we treat ourselves as superficially, and that’s where the disingenuous danger appears.

Of course your decisions, awareness, and actions matter. That you have a choice to perform one thing over another matters. It’s, to me, literally the only thing that can truly matter if you’re going to distinguish yourself as a moral person and not some arbitrary collection of atoms. I feel like, to deny this, you’d have to be perfectly okay being force-fed any type of food, merely kept alive. Surely, you have food preferences, right? You'd like it to enter your body through your mouth and not a tube cut into your stomach?

When I think about a cultural narrative that either sees us colonizing space or ending up wiped out via nuclear holocaust, it’s the distance between responsible personal agency, and forlorn ambivalent conclusions.

At many levels, we are stuck. We don’t know what we don’t know. We can’t perfectly predict the weather, but we can evacuate. To deny yourself the use of your legs, vehicles, or eyes and ears taking in the news is inhuman. I don’t think you get fascism unless a major plurality of people are not just subverting and excusing and denying their humanity, but an even larger portion of people are letting them get away with it.

It’s an everyday kind of exercise. Every day you have to find your power, choices, and orient yourself against, or in concert, with the way the wind is blowing. It’s work. It’s hard. It’s most often unfair. It’s the operative difference between being human, or just an animal. Are you a perpetually justified at-the-mercy-of-instinct being? I’m not, and we’re made of the same stuff. It makes me incredibly angry when you sacrifice yourself, and in turn me, to your base animal. I actually want to live, and live in a particular kind of way. I can’t achieve my goals pretending, like you, that I don’t have them.

We normalize complacent, complicit, hopelessness constantly. “It is what it is.” That’s my go-to catch-all summary. You, in all your majesty and wisdom, know what it is more than anyone else, and you think it’s time to give up, ride it out, and die. Thanks, dick bag. “They’re all corrupt!” That’s not just simply not true, it’s not true-enough to matter for the issue at hand. Identify and vote for someone who is not corrupt, or barring that, less corrupt. Are you corrupt? If so, how much corruption are you willing to stand from your representative so you can keep functioning as you please?

I can kick the shit out of most people. I can snap into verbally and emotionally abusive language in a split-second. I’m the meanest person I know, and I go through zero emotional withdrawal when I shift into those demonstrations of my character. I’m as petty, small, volatile, ignorant, hateful, spiteful, judgemental, and ridiculous as anyone you’ve ever met. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a choice. That doesn’t mean I get to deny the compounding nature of my better habits. That doesn’t mean I get to let my vitriol excuse my responsibility to myself or others.

I don’t know how much of it is a consequence of the internet, or of the general wealth and decadence of modernity, or of the targeted plots of nefarious power-hungry actors, but we seem to have forgotten how to feel meaningful shame. We should be ashamed of our laziness and pride. We should be ashamed of empowering those who fuel our anger and resentments. We should be ashamed of emboldening our indignant self-righteous pretensions because we’re afraid of the patience and humility it takes to be a proper person.

Every single one of us contributes to this pot, and I feel like I’m never not floating in shit. We keep choosing to look away and lie. We keep choosing to lay down and give up. We keep reducing what would be a preferred direction or sense of stability into a tit-for-tat ironically hyperbolic performance. The only thing more powerful than my anger is the exhaustion.