12 angry men

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i've had a few conversations recently that involved anger and it's effects, control or ramifications. I suppose that one could argue that effects and ramifications are the same thing. funnily i'm listening to this screamingly beautiful music and it's hard to think about this.

anyway. i was a child encompassed by anger and terror. where there wasn't anger there was fear and where there should have been love there was hate. so i spent a lot of time in my life expecting to get kicked when i was happy. i spent even more time expecting that i would be the kind of adult who was violent.

I especially thought that there would be problems with children. In fact until something that happened in my mid twenties I had decided not to have children. It's probably why I came late to the party and probably why I'm a little heartbroken at the idea of not having kids. Sometimes the things you think you want the least will break your heart the most.

Anyway eventually I had a couple of really fucking angry moments that did not go the way that I expected them to. The first was with a two year old who hit me in the face about half an inch below my eye with a surprisingly sharp plastic hoe [the farm implement... geeze you guys! *snerk*] and it hurt like HELL. No you guys a lot. I grabbed it out of his hand and shouted his name in this really angry voice and he flinched and looked afraid.

and the anger just melted away.

like it just wasn't there anymore. i was just so heartbroken that i had made this beautiful boy afraid of me that i didn't have an ounce of anger left in me.

it was actually pretty cathartic. I realised in that moment and in the many months and years thereafter that I had been a violent child but that I was not a violent adult. I eventually realised that both my physical and emotional violence (the emotional violence had rapidly become something that i pointed to myself... with severe long lasting consequences) [wow i'm a bit physically ill from typing that] were natural outcomes of being raised in a savage environment. [public school]

so i had become violent to deal with violence but when left alone i reverted to my own nature.

which is to hurt for every little thing
the butterfly i murdered with my bumper
the dying animals
litter
the homeless people everywhere
my friends pain
beautiful music
war
unkind words
the chopped tree

to be unable to bear it.

and yet i'm still violent. i participate in sports which require me to work my body to a ridiculous degree and i'm not happy unless i'm a little bit injured. i tease my clients for being type a jocks but i am one myself. [speaking of, one of them took a climbing lesson because of me! she got three quarters of the way up a 5.8!]

so for me it turns out that anger isn't a natural state... although i come closer to it around my second year of ridiculous pain. anyway i had a similar incident with an adult roommate a few years later and i realised that it was gone. that the scary black anger had melted out of me when i wasn't looking.

it's good, no child should hate that much.

so.

all things considered my childhood was pretty tame compared to the ones on the talk shows. it sucked. it sucked a lot, but it wasn't oprah material for sure.

and then i look at the angry people around me. and i hear stories about what angry people have done to people i love. and i hear about the shitty things that happen to people for no reason. worse i hear about the shitty things people do to other people for even less reason.

and two things occur to me.

that i am helpless to understand this incredible morass of rage in which i live

and that i am afraid to imagine what must have happened to those people to make them that angry.

i don't know which idea is scarier really. that they are reacting to things which happened in their lives and left them feeling helpless and out of control and thus they inflict rage bombs on other people [done that btw, the leftover guilt sucks] or that they are just that angry.

because if people are just naturally that angry? if no one taught them to rage and hate? well then there will always be war and rape and greed won't there? and that too breaks my heart.

holy shit this post hit nowhere near where i thought it would. but i like it.