Tag: anger

Expect Delays

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On November 3, 1993, New York’s legendary senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced a bill to tax Winchester hollow-tipped “Black Talon” bullets, “specifically designed to rip flesh,” wrote the senator in an Op-Ed to the New York Times on December 12, 1993, at 10,000%.  So sacrosanct is the poorly written Second Amendment that no rational debate can proceed beyond the “shall not be infringed” clause (conveniently omitting the “well-regulated militia” part. Nineteen days after the bill was introduced, Winchester voluntarily announced it would cease the sale of these “cop killer” rounds to the public. What a shame. Winchester’s action rendered the narrowly written bill moot. Perhaps a more broadly written bill, introduced in an era when public discourse and compromise still existed, might have progressed and saved countless lives. What a shame.

Is there a mindset, a phrase, that city planners use with their public works departments where delaying maintenance on a road is considered the safer option? Hear me out. Automobiles are profoundly safer than they were in the 1960s. Seatbelts, airbags, better braking and steering systems, and computers armed with the ability to either stop the car autonomously or, at the very least, alert the driver of an imminent collision. Coupled with that is the rise of the SUV and the baffling dominance of pick-up trucks, most of which haul groceries and passengers instead of tools and dirt. Most are polished to a greater shine than my sedan. And I know most have never seen the off-roads except in testosterone-dripping advertisements with chunky guitar riffs and gruff narrators. I had a Camry at one point, about 20 years ago, and had to trade it in because I could not see around the walls of aluminum and plastic in front of me.

I inquire about the city planners because, once again, like Senator Moynihan’s end run around the Second Amendment to save lives, the size, power, safety, and speed on our roads create a recipe for disaster when paired with the divisive, Dunning-Kruger homeowners who’ve claimed their territory on Mt. Stupid. Driving to work daily, I can picture insurance leaders scratching their heads, wondering why they continue to underwrite auto policies. In addition to the countless lives lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, another casualty of that time, still affecting us today, is the demise of the speed limit on our roads. 65 mph means 80 (at the very least), 45 means 70, and 25 means 40. If you drive at the speed limit, you risk being run over or, at the very least, becoming the target of the NASCAR driver behind you, engaging in road rage characterized by flailing hand gestures, flashing headlights, and monosyllabic profane grunts. Furthermore, bad behavior no longer has any consequences. While my blood pressure rises and I feel the urge to respond in kind, they are already home, feet up, watching SportsCenter for this weekend’s zoom-zoom race pole positions.

So, if society has ever safer, ever more powerful, ever bigger road behemoths, can we not take a page from the late senator’s book and reduce highways and byways to either dirt paths or the cobblestones of Pompeii? Lives would be saved because traffic would have to slow down. Counter programming through delayed maintenance: Inverse Safety Measures.

And so, while the gun chorus chants, “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” a suitable response to the petulant and self-appointed “special” drivers can be expressed as, “Cars don’t kill people, people do.” While cars are safer, guns are increasingly ubiquitous in Red/Blue angry America. And that truly is a recipe for death.

Short Cuts and Insults (or caveat emptor and cave familiam)

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God, the Universe, Chaos Theory, or any deity you think is running things has a peculiar penchant for piling on. When one thing goes bad, seemingly, every other hanger-on in your life decides now is the time to make the wheel squeak. And the problems fall like rain.
 
I’ve written before about how no good deed goes unpunished. The ultraviolet bookend to that infrared light is that bad deeds also go unpunished. The guy who cuts you off in traffic and weaves in and out of traffic will have his feet up at home while you’re adhering to the rules of the road. He will also be responsible for an exponentially disproportionate number of accidents in which he will not participate.
 
When told the money promised to me was being taken away, I was given notice by an attorney to sign, notarize, and return a document giving away my promised portion. Not that it was a choice, but I “agreed” because it was the “right” thing to do, even if the execution/request was unbelievably insulting and hurtful, and contact with me was a mere afterthought. Still, I acquiesced. That is when God, the Universe, Chaos Theory, or your deity of choice decided to pour acid on the open wound.
 
Our house is 22 years old. In house years, that is young. However, when my wife and I noticed rotting OSB plywood under a window in the garage, we contacted our handyman friend to repair it. What we discovered can only be described as catastrophic. He chased where the leak originated and determined it began above the window. The decorative header above the window was installed incorrectly by the original builder. Nailed directly into the siding on top of the clapboards and without the standard spline of thick sticky tape placed around the window, the nails invited water into the OSB plywood and destroyed the wall from the inside. With that fixed (which involved removing the entire window and reframing the wall), he poked around other similarly constructed windows on the front of the house. Every window had the same rot and destruction. We are rebuilding the front of our home from the outside in. And when they cut out the old studs, they cut into the drywall inside the house, requiring that, too, to be patched and repainted. What started as a simple job now costs us tens of thousands.
 
Piling on is contagious. This week has been hot by Rhode Island standards (high 80s). We called the HVAC contractor when the downstairs air conditioning system malfunctioned. While 22 years is not old for a house, it is for HVAC systems. Replacing it will cost another $12,000.

I haven’t mentioned that the next year also includes us paying for a baby shower, a bridal shower, and a wedding—our fourth wedding in four years. Piling on is contagious.
 
I would not have received the amount I gave away for many years. Paying for the house problems now will cause us to tap into our retirement. The fact that I will not see that amount in the future compounds the insult without consideration by anyone involved. Indeed, the amount we will soon be out of pocket today, withdrawn from our retirement account, is equal to the amount I would have received in the future. It would have been an offset mitigating today’s hemorrhaging. Not having that amount in the future doubles the financial impact. God, the Universe, Chaos Theory, or your deity laugh while man plans. What a sense of humor. No good deed goes unpunished.
 
The only information I have regarding home building is from watching This Old House. With that limited knowledge, I know you use pressure-treated 2x4s on the sill plate (the wood placed on the concrete foundation. My house does not. Tommy Silva on TOH instilled in me that you always use the wide, sticky tape as a spline around windows and doors to seal disparate connections to prevent water infiltration. My house does not have this around any window or door. This begs several questions. Why would the home builder not use these standard building elements? How did the town building inspector not identify these omissions? Did money change hands somewhere to look the other way? We found a patch in three locations, indicating the previous homeowners knew of the problem. Why did they not disclose it when selling the house?
 
Ah, but there must be some recourse we can take to compensate us for this monumental cost! Alas, no! Our homeowner’s insurance policy only covers mold and mildew, not ridiculously poor construction. The statute of limitations against the builder expired ten years after construction. The town has immunity (nice!). Even the inspector we hired before purchasing benefits from a three-year statute of limitations (not that he would have seen anything behind the clapboards and shingles). We could go after the previous owners; however, considering the cost of attorneys and court fees, we would never be made whole or satisfied. There is no punishment for bad behavior. 
 
We have our health, save for the foot surgery I had at the end of May to place screws inside bones that did not heal from a break last October. The frustration, anger, and resignation we feel cannot be erased because we have our health. It is cumulative. We are frustrated, angry, and resigned, AND we have our health.
 
Nice guys finish last, and jerks succeed. And karma? The jerks invented karma as an empty promise to those upon whose necks they place their boot.

Writing is cathartic for me. I know the situation does not change when I vent on paper, but somehow, I feel better—a little better. If you can take anything from this story, all the better. Caveat emptor and cave familiam.

Control

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Can this be how it works? I’m 57 years old and see more life in the rearview mirror than the open road ahead. With that perspective, I find it’s become essential to reflect on what I’ve done with my time on this planet. Blissfully ignorant of the repercussions of news events growing up in bucolic suburbia, adulthood, parenthood, citizenship demanded my attention as I aged. I’ve experienced events no one wants. People summarize it as “life” when you see death. I’m not special. Just frustrated.

After the massacre at the movie theater in Aurora, CO, I began to write. Not with the expectation of affecting change, but rather to give my anger, my emotions, an outlet, an offramp for the toxic blood poisoning my body. I saw gun violence stealing a generation. While some social issues had moved the Overton Window, political intransigence (keep cashing the NRA’s checks!) and eventual American ennui accepted gun violence as baked into the American fabric in the name of “freedom.”

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, CT, I began to speak. Surely, a tragedy of this scale would shock Americans (and politicians) out of their stupor. Nope! I talked to groups in Texas as the lone spokesperson for the Brady Campaign in Texas. The only one. That alone tells you all you need to know about the calculus of “I NEED my gun, dead kids and teachers be damned.” Thoughts, prayers, and sad face emojis flooded social media until America’s fruit fly attention span moved on to the latest “tragedy” affecting Kim Kardashian.

My anger peaked with the death of my wife. Fuck cancer makes a great tweet, a guttural reaction without consequence. Utterly suicidal and dying with my wife, I could not yell at the tumor. I took it out on God for a while (also useless) and even turned to God for a bit (utterly meaningless). There was no one to blame, no revenge to be had. No offramp for my anger.

And then Americans, in the obvious next step for a society that had abdicated all personal responsibility and suffered no consequences, elected a narcissistic moron president—a billionaire (if you believe him) speaking for the uneducated rubes. Merit and logic were dead. With each lie, with each crime, I expected consequences. None came. Robert Mueller fumbled the ball with no defenders anywhere near him. Facts were relegated to the trash bin. Tweets became governmental edicts. And I waited. Furious.

When I get angry (when I get down), it is because things should be easier. “Keep the simple things simple; the hard things are hard enough.” But nothing was easy. Changing a light bulb resulted in the glass bulb snapping off the metal base, a trip or two to Lowes, and a call to the electrician. Nothing was easy. Ultimately, I realized it was an absolute lack of control. There was nothing I could do about any of it. My wife was dead, guns were more important than life, freedom from fact and responsibility replaced actual democracy, and rabid evangelicals believed in Trump as the messiah. Stop the world; I want to get off.

And now we have Ukraine. Again, one man brings the world to the point of a world war—one man. Ukrainians are fighting to survive- as a nation and a people. “Denazifying” Ukraine? Really?

I’m reminded of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech as I watch an army destroy entire cities. Stepping back for a second, it seems bizarre that NATO and the UN watch the massacres with tepid financial penalties because Ukraine doesn’t belong to their club. It’s like a high school clique turning its back on a less cool student getting beaten up because they don’t wear the “right” jeans. I understand the political ramifications of engagement. But on a human level, it seems callous and impotent.

So here I am—no one special, poisoned with anger and unable to control or change anything. Hell, I can’t even watch baseball now! The billionaires are too busy fighting with the millionaires. I get the feeling that if aliens did visit earth, they’d look down and say, “Nah, they’re petulant adolescents with nascent technology and a penchant for killing each other. Keep driving.”

So, my clock continues to tick down, and I’m not ignorant enough for its promised bliss. I’ve read Viktor Frankl and Thomas Paine but still cannot find reason or acceptance. How do I accept all of this? How do I “let it go?” No, seriously, I’m asking.

Today

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Picture1We are divided. We are angry. Regardless of what side of the political chasm you stand on, we each scream at ears that cannot hear. Each side can site their own origin for our condition, but increasingly, our cold civil war is getting hot.

And now we have lunatic sending bombs to critics of the president while the president continues to pour gasoline on the growing firestorm.

Words are my religion. They are far more important to me than physical persuasion. Books are portals. Carl Sagan wrote as part of his incredible Cosmos series,

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

And yet, in our hurry-up world of 280 character pontifications, arguments and debates are reduced to ad hominem attacks and ad reductio gotchas. We are a heavily armed society with hair-trigger sensitivities and no sense of personal responsibility. That’s a terrible combination.

Cicero wrote, “He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason” and I understand the sentiment. As of right now, three bombs have been sent to New York City. My son lives in New York City. This individual has subjected everyone handling these packages (whether politically likeminded or not) and everyone around them to harm from within a potential blast radius. I look at Google Maps to identify where the newest bomb has been located and then see where my son should be at that moment. I am a civilized man, but also a father. I do not own a gun, and I treasure words. However, as a father, should I encounter the individual sending these bombs, I would not hesitate to punch them in the face.

Perhaps that makes me part of the problem, maybe I’m merely a parent, regardless, we all must do better. And it starts at the top. And it begins with the individual. The president leads, and we are responsible for ourselves. I’ll do my part. Mr. President? #Vote

Dear God

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Creation of Adam“Take your anger and put it into an imaginary being. That way you can yell at the entity and throw it out when you don’t want to feel the pain of the anger anymore or if you don’t have the time to deal with the anger.”

These are the words of the grief counselor, to whom we (the kids and I) have been going since mid-December. I told her that I am angry about the fact that cancer first took my father, then my wife, and now will take my dog. First she said, “Why do you have to do anything with the anger? Aren’t you allowed to be angry? Aren’t you justified?” My response was that there is no outlet for the anger, no target. I cannot remain so angry for so long that I shut down emotionally and socially. I have enough problems being social as it is!

So I, as my homework for this week, am to create an entity, an imaginary being, to whom I can ascribe the evil characteristics necessary to house my anger. I could create a virtual punching bag and anthropomorphize it to the point where it has horns and a tail upon which I can stomp and to whom I can scream. However, that form does not appeal to me and seems shallow and unfulfilling.

As an atheist, I have a better solution. God. How could a benevolent God inflict my wife with a terminal disease that would kill her? How could a caring God do that to my children? To me? How could a loving God condemn a dog to three separate forms of cancer within it’s short life? How could a generous God condemn my father to an incalculable amount of pain in the months before his death? And on a grander scale, how could an altruistic God kill thousands of children each year through malnutrition, starvation, disease, or war? Because I can conceive of no rational reason for such a dereliction of duty, I choose to believe there is no supreme being above. It is easier for me to believe that nature simply evolves in chaos than to believe a God could be so inept or uncaring.

So, if there is a God, I do not believe he/she is omnipotent and all powerful. That said, and as part of my grief counseling homework for this week, here is my creation of an imaginary being to whom I can bequeath my anger. God. And now my letter to God:

Dear God,

How could you? How could you either give my wife cancer or allow her to contract it? How could you do that to my children? How could you make her suffer through the barbaric treatments you have allowed medicine to create in an attempt to counter your unholy and defective DNA? How could you take her when she was still so young and we had a future planned together that now is reduced to ash? How could you? Why?

How could you put my father through so much pain that it killed him? How could you allow that much pain to transfer to my mother who now survives him but cannot live without him? How could you put my brother and sister through the act of watching him suffer with no ability to alleviate his pain? How could you? Why?

How could you give my simple, silly dog, whose sole purpose in life is to love us and make us happy, three different forms of cancer in his short life? How could you take his eyesight and force him to endure countless surgeries to save his back legs from your poor design? Why do you make him suffer so much and force us to euthanize our pets without allowing us to end the suffering of our human loved ones who endure so much pain? How could you? Why?

How could you allow the children of the world to endure unwarranted pain and suffering simply because of the circumstances under which they were born? How could you allow men to create war against one another for, ultimately, silly political, geographic, or religious reasons?  Why do we have to suffer so much on this earth? How could you allow all of these things to occur while remaining unseen and unresponsive? How could you? Why?

Are we simply to fall back on “faith?” A faith that you are really there and listening and that we will be rewarded in paradise for all of our suffering. Well, I don’t buy into it and find that if you do exist, you are either malevolent, uncaring, or incompetent. If you are malevolent, you are not worthy of our deference. If you are uncaring you are also not worthy of our blended knee. If you are incompetent you are to be pitied and not revered. Occam’s Razor demands that the most likely solution is that you simply do not exist. But for the purposes of grief mitigation, I will allow that you exist, but only for the purposes of my derision, my anger, and my pain.

Most sincerely,

Zerrissenheit

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Shattered FutureGive sorrow words; the grief that does not speak                                                         Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.                                                                              Shakespeare, Macbeth, IV, iii, 209

A very dear friend of mine gave me Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book Gift from the Sea following my wife’s September 2nd death. It was a wonderful little book and contained a German word that accurately describes my emotional state: “zerrissenheit.” It is described as “torn-to-pieces-hood.”

The thing I am learning about grief is that it does not follow a linear path. One does not travel from one emotion to the next, leaving the first entirely contained in the rearview mirror. Rather, from minute to minute, I can wander from disbelief to acceptance to anger to sadness back to disbelief. This emotional whiplash takes a physical as well as an emotional toll. While I am back at work, my mind is not. This mental “zerrissenheit” manifests itself in a lack of confidence, second-guessing, a lack of focus, and sudden confusion. I was so much more confident when Lisa was here. I check my pockets a dozen times before leaving the house to make sure I have everything I need: keys, wallet, phone, etc.. In a word, I am lost.

And it isn’t that I don’t smile or laugh. I do. But so often I find myself reaching for my phone to text or call Lisa to tell her the joke only to realize that the call will never be completed again. I am having a hard time with the concepts of “never” and “forever.” I know that someday I will be glad for the time we had, but right now I am angry over the time that has been stolen (not to mention the time wasted fighting cancer when we should have been living our lives together). “Never” and “forever” are as daunting to me as the size of the universe is to a child.

It has been two weeks now, and the house is silent. I don’t know what the future holds anymore. We are taught to plan, to prepare as we enter adulthood. I did. This is not what I planned for; this is not the future I wanted. I am alone. My best friend was stolen from me. And while she would tell me to snap out of it and start living my life, this grief-triggered “zerrissenheit” is involuntary. I miss her so much.

Supernova

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Keplers_supernovaPhysics has a concept called the law of conservation of energy, which states that the total amount of energy in a closed system is neither gained nor lost over time, but rather is only transformed from one state to another.

Perhaps this concept is the best way for us to understand and process the news of Robin Williams’ suicide. Consider the sadness, anger, shock and unease we feel to be the explosive energies released from inside the tormented Williams himself, the magnitude of our impact directly proportional to our relationship to the man- immediate family members impacted most severely, friends and extended family members next, neighbors and colleagues next, extending outward to fans and then to those to whom he was known by name only.

Consider, too, how this has impacted you. Are you more sad than angry; more angry than shocked? These are the wavelengths of emotion radiating from the supernova that are Mr. Williams’ inner demons. Bottle all of the sadness we, collectively, feel and that is what he felt. That is mental illness. Compress all of the anger we feel toward him for doing this. That is how angry he was at himself for his perceived failings. That is mental illness. Mental illness is a disease that eats away at the individual as surely as an aphid on a rose bud, but from the inside. The pain is invisible and unforgiving. It is self-perpetuating, feeding on its “success.” When people are at their worst they want help the least and will either hide their pain the best (or not at all).

Remember, the law of conservation of energy states no amount of energy is gained or lost. If he is gone, that anger and sadness is still here and we feel it, not nearly as much as those closest to him, but we feel it. But, if no energy is lost, than so too, must the joy he shared be here. And so, today, go make a goofy face in front of the most important person in the world until they smile, the person in the mirror.

Soft Targets

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The events in Boston today are still raw, the embers are still burning, the wounds are still being dressed and the limbs are still being amputated.

When did living in America become a balancing act between freedom and paranoia? When did we decide that churches, schools, movie theaters, grocery store parking lots and marathons should no longer be considered integral parts of our daily life but “soft targets?”

Politicians on both sides of the aisle will call for prayers now. The gun lobby will ignore compassion and state that if only a “good guy with a gun had been there” blah blah blah, and nothing will change. We will wring our hands and shake our heads, call for justice and ignore the facts, demand vengeance and persecute the innocent in misplaced bloodlust, run to Wal-Mart to purchase our assault weapons and hunker down in our bunker waiting for the end of times.

And then our fickle little minds will forget and move on to the next crisis where we will wind up our public outrage for a new group of victims.

What happened to compassion and empathy? Are they so anathema to the personal success and safety in America that we are doomed to suffer for our arrogance? When did celebrity and instant gratification replace intelligence and hard work?

I am heartsick to learn that the final mile of the Boston Marathon was dedicated to the families of Newtown affected by the evil events at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. Sickened to learn that there may have been another device under the very VIP viewing section in which they were seated.

I refuse to live in a society where we gauge our potential activities by some weighted average based on their “soft target” quotient.  I should not have to sit in a movie theater with an eye on the best route of egress, or view the pole obstructing my view as “cover”, or worry if I need to use the restroom whether my children will be attacked while I’m gone. I should not have to worry at a sporting event that I am in a large group and therefore a great target for mass casualties. I should not have to worry that when some student who did not prepare for an exam in college calls in a bomb threat and when my children congregate with a large group of students waiting for the “all clear” that they represent a soft target.

America used to be the land of the free, now we are the land of the paranoid, where 300 million guns exist to “protect” us from our own government and fertilizer is no longer used exclusively to feed the world, but to detonate and kill, where politicians disgorge vitriol and fabrications in order to make the evening news and Congress enjoys a 13% approval rating. We blame the President, Congress, the education system, parents, the environment, the weather, any other country and everyone else with certainty, but we never look in the mirror. The golden rule has been bastardized to be “Do unto others before they do unto you.” We harden ourselves and avoid soft targets. Can’t we do better? Don’t we want better? Shouldn’t we demand better? We continue to burn holes in the calendar. Am I whistling alone in the hurricane?