I haven’t been truly, red-faced, screaming, shouting angry for over a year and I can count all the times I’ve been angry on one hand. One, three fingered alien hand to be precise.
So when coach today pats my back and barks “get angry, Reg!” before I step into the ring, I can’t get angry. I get confused, a thousand conflicting thoughts bouncing about blindingly in my skull.* My throws are pitiful wounded birds and the resulting commentary from coach I take dutifully with pleading, drowsy eyes.
Its not like I don’t try to get angry. I think about that time my date for prom dumped me via his sister, the rat bastard with my ex best friend, the time my father dated a 25-year old stripper…
Nope. Still nothing. I must have an overload of that neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid, cause, as my psych teacher says “GABA drags ya…” It took me an entire day to work myself into annoyance at that prom date. I resent the rat bastard but I don’t hate him (even though he had the impudence to ask me why I hate him, that’s a story for another time…) And dad’s ex-girlfriend was sweet person when I got know her. It’s just that she made some ill-advised life-choices that led her to a part-time secretary job and a stripper pole.
It was after another ugly duckling throw that my coach came to a probable conclusion:
Coach: “Get angry! What if you didn’t get into the college you wanted to?!”
Me: “I didn’t”
Coach: “Think about people on welfare that don’t deserve it!”
Me: “That just makes me disappointed.”
Coach: “What about starvation?”
Me: “That’s depressing.”
Coach: “You ever seen a bear in the wild?”
Me: “Nope. Saw a mountain lion once though..”
Coach: “It was fierce…?”
Me: “I had a rifle. It wasn’t that intimidating”
Coach: “You’ll never be angry if you don’t quit rationalizing everything!”
The man that overuses exclamation points is right. I rationalize everything. There is no anger; Anger is divided into hundreds of subcategories, each of which has its own multi-syllabic name and appropriate reaction. Resentment, disappointment, and annoyance are just ways that I can rationalize human emotion. Human emotion that is inherently irrational.
Eventually all this denied expression bursts out, making episodes that are worthy of a day-time soap opera. The three times I’ve been angry were spectacular. Yet I still cannot throw worth a damn.
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*Summer, I wrote that alliteration expressly for you! Happy last day of March.
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