I just found my mouth guard in about the last place I would have thought to look for it: in the refrigerator. Specifically it was sitting in a salad that I ate last night, or early this AM, when I got up for what has become a nightly ritual of sleepless wandering around the apartment, eating potato chips and whatever else I can find, then going back to bed filled with carbs and whatever else I ate. Healthy lifestyle? No. So today I had to take a panic pill, which is a stupid pattern to fall into, drinking for a few days, taking a pill and not drinking, rinse lather repeat. This time I intend to stay dry for at least the week, and to do ever more writing and creating. Having slept ’til 2pm the previous two days I was awake today at the more respectable 10:30, at which time I learned that the stuffed animals each have their own Shuffle. There’s a Wookie Shuffle, a Clyde Shuffle, a Bruce Shuffle, etc. Each little routine is unique to each creature. It was a fun discovery.
Yes, I really do live this life.
I could very well have just thrown out that mouth guard with the rest of the salad, as there was not much left of it. It reminds me that some months ago I lost my glasses somewhere in my own damn apartment. I must have thrown them out somehow but I do not know where they went. They were not good glasses anyway but still, you like to keep things like that around.
I was listening to myself talking about the arc of anger, or the notion that anger is a metaphor. I was thinking of my own little outbursts and how I can’t even stand to hear them when I hear the recordings of them I accidentally made. But am I really mad at the field recorder, or the fact that I can’t find my earmuffs? Of course not. I mean nobody gets that mad at an object or a situation. It’s displacement for something else, some other lurking evil that did me wrong elsewhere in life.
I also think anger arises when someone knows they are wrong about something but for reasons of pride or stubbornness simply cannot allow it to settle into fact. Anger has a way of escalating when you know you are wrong.
Anger gets in the way of things. It erases things.
My mother was an angry loner, even when there were other people around. I feel like I am becoming that, or at least exhibiting those traits. Mother would wake up angry some days. I would be awake before her and, sitting downstairs, I heard her stomping around upstairs, jumping out of bed and sounding like she was running from one side of the room to the other and back. It sounded like she was going into the war. Thinking of it now I guess it’s possible I did something to wake her up, and this was what teed her off, but I just don’t that makes any sense. I felt moments of fear as she came down the stairs, appearing with her brow tightly furrowed and her face tightly locked in a demonstrative frown. That was how she greeted the day. She did not like when I got up before she did, nor did she like when I stayed up later than her. I never understood why but I never asked.
