Why So Angry?

I guess it must show. Or I project it somehow even in a mask, a hat and dark prescription sunglasses. Is it my body English? Does the anger just invisibly register with people?

I can’t say. All I know is that most of the time, I’m unaware of it. I’ve learned to live peacefully and to aspire to altruism in the manner of Christ’s teachings. If I said in my last post that I don’t get disappointed or discouraged if I get no views or likes on my posts, it’s not because I don’t appreciate every visitor, every like, every comment. A few weeks ago a commenter left a lengthy response explaining their opposition to vaccines. I disagreed but respected their right to choose, to believe what they will, and act on their beliefs. I still appreciated the reader’s visit and the effort taken for conversation.

There’s something funny though.

I will never have a hundred followers like a sponsored blogger with a paid-for domain.

I won’t ever be able to stick a full page beauty shot of myself on my leading page. There’s no beauty to see, and I’m an asshole who doesn’t really like himself very much anyway.

Late yesterday I walked to the store. I bought a few things, then stopped on the way back for smokes. Finished with being indoors, I took my masks off (I double mask) on the way home. Groceries on my back, walking with a cane, I lit one and took my time on the way home.

It was hot, one site giving the temperature as 90°f (32.2°c) and another listing it as 92. I was irritated; Fucking same city, people! But two degrees difference? Fuck you, stupid weather apps.

The air was humid but pollution caused the AQI to climb to 55. Too bad for a man in my shape to be outside, much less lugging a bag of groceries. But you can’t tell me anything. I’d gone anyway. The only real reason I checked the weather first was to see if it was going to rain. It didn’t. The storm was far to the south.

Why was I so mad? It built up as I walked across the parking lot. I tried to decide if it was hazy or not. It felt like it should be. But my damned eyes.

In the store it was the same shit. Always, people looking at me as if I scare or disgust them. I’ve been accused of being paranoid, but it’s not like that. Nobody stares, it’s not dramatic. Just when they glance at me in passing. Even allowing for how vulnerable people feel if you’re wearing shades and they aren’t can’t account for it. I got the same looks before I saw the doctor.

And people weren’t wearing masks. Maryland has loosened its restrictions for Covid and idiots are inside every place you go, unmasked and uncaring.

Fuck. Why put others, who might not be vaccinated, at risk? I fear it’s too soon for no masks inside; if one person dies because of it, that’s fucking stupid. And more than one will surely die. We’re not out of this yet. We won’t be until the month when no cases are diagnosed, no one is hospitalized and nobody dies. We’ve gone through hell. All of us. Why fling caution to the wind now? We’re talking life and death. People tempting Death piss me off.

But who am I? These people want their pizzas, Italian ice and groceries and will never go back to wearing masks now.

They still give you dirty looks though if they need to close in on you to grab a jar of Nutella. And you’re in their way and they can’t wait. Morons.

Yet the foot stickers on the floor for distancing are still at the checkout lanes. No, it doesn’t make sense. Shit that makes no sense pisses me off.

I posted a comment on Google where you can rate places and I rated the shopping center one star for all the panhandlers. It got so bad that I heard one guy say into his phone that he was banned for a year by the shopping center but yet he continued his asking for money. He’d ask for a dollar. Nobody gives him one dollar. In a day he could have a hundred bucks in his pocket. He’s always clean, hair cut neatly and he still gets money from people who are intimidated by everyone asking for money.

Once upon a time, I’d have punched the fucker. Once, I pulled up to a convenience store. I parked near the bank of pay phones and a guy was standing to my right front slouched against the wall. He looked at me and spat on the ground.

Now you can beat me half to death, throw bricks at me, I don’t care. Looking at me and spitting will enrage me like nothing else. It’s a gesture of more than contempt and disrespect. It cannot truly be put into words. I got out of the car. The entrance was to my left, away from him. But I didn’t go there. I walked up to him and with every once of force I could impart, punched him in the groin. He immediately fell forward, doubling up, fell completely to the ground with both hands between his legs, and explosively threw up.

As if nothing had happened, I walked into the store and poured coffee and bought smokes. When I left he was still down, sobbing in gasps like he couldn’t breathe. The stink of vomit was everywhere. I’ll bet he never did that crap again. I didn’t give him the respect of a punch in the jaw. I gave him what he gave me: treatment like he was just a scummy sleaze.

I regret it. I did five minutes later, as adrenaline and anger bled off and left me feeling depleted.

And I won’t punch the scammer-begger, but I still want to. Why so angry?

It’s been there the whole time, dormant, contained. I had no idea.

It seems as if that level of anger should be long gone. Discovering how serious it is has left me shaken.

There’s nobody to talk to. I can’t afford a therapist on Medicare. What am I doing?

I go back. I know where it comes from.

Being terrorized, raped, beaten as a kid. From siblings who were always better than me. From my disgusting behavior toward them.

Her name was Heather. And I was in a bad spot, deeply depressed, fully PTSD symptomatic, lonely. And still a screwup with women.

I’d long since sworn myself to celibacy but on Facebook her picture was amazing. She knew my nephew and his wife. I don’t remember how it happened but I missed a signal somewhere and thought when we talked she might be able to get interested and I said something that she told to my nephew and his old lady. They in turn told me to back off. I could have died of embarrassment. I wanted to crawl under a rock.

Fast forward. It’s two years later. My older brother came to town, and we always got together with other family, whoever could make it.

This time the dinner would be too far away for me to travel. Pissed off, I wrote into the group text that I couldn’t go. Not even an hour later, my sister who had stopped going to the get-togethers years earlier replied that she’d be there. Worse, my nephew’s wife, who never went and who I suspected didn’t care much for me, texted that she was going.

I replied that I was offended; not until after I said I would miss the get-together did my sister and my nephew’s wife decide they could make it. I also added that it had been a couple of years since the Heather thing and I was still being judged on it.

I haven’t seen or spoken to any of them since except my older brother. And I don’t care. I never want to speak to them again. I love my older brother too much to hold a grudge. But I know what the others did, it was right there in the group text and they made no effort to hide what they were doing; they probably just thought that I had said I couldn’t go and had gone off. Didn’t think I’d see it.

But I was still getting notifications. They didn’t care. It never even occurred to them I might see the texts and be hurt.

Or angry.

And the anger is still there. They may as well have spat; coming from family, it hurt and offended and embarrassed me. How could they hate me so much, about as much as I hated myself?

Nah, nobody’s ever hated me as much as I hate myself.

The same brain that thinks I deserved better, thinks I deserved everything I got.

I just don’t know why I got so angry. I mean, I know where it comes from. I’ve lost everything I had and never had anything I was supposed to be given as soon as I took my first breath.

And that’s not all. Things piss me off. You know how I feel about the Republican party and their ongoing campaign to rid the United States of all Constitutional rights. That has me on edge anyway, but there are other things that gnaw at me until I’m sure I’d punch someone the fuck out. Which I can’t do because it’s evil, but also because it’d be contradictory.

Cruelty and abuse piss me off. Not just in humans. That guy whose horse won the Kentucky Derby. Doped the animal to cheat. I wonder how much he secretly bet on his own horse, the scumbag.

You know how many horses break their legs and have to be euthanized because of fucking horse racing? Check it out sometime.

Greyhound racing. Everyone who does that shit ought to be sent right to fucking jail because it’s no better than dog fighting. Those animals get retired and put down. They’re injured. Abused and “conditioned”. Fucking barbarians! You ever tried to “rescue” a greyhound? Ain’t nice to have to watch.

TV pisses me off. The goddamn commercials insult everyone’s intelligence. How can I even think of one to use as an example, when there have been, and are, so many of them? Actually the question mark is out of place; I wasn’t asking. It’s a sad, enraging, bullshit thing. It should be illegal to lie about products and services but it’s really not. Once the law services on Madison Avenue get into the fray, we’re screwed. The next commercials will not only be worse but will pointedly be far more insulting. Marketing studies, you know? And questionnaires, surveys, hell. We gave them our secrets. They use them to bilk us out of money we can’t afford to spend on their processed foods, their useless shit…

It makes me so mad, that level of “fuck ’em” attitude retailers and manufacturers have toward us. “They’re stupid,” goes the conversation in board meetings, “sales of widgets went up during the pandemic. Online purchases rose 45 percent!”

‘Nother thing that pisses me off…the Army, according to an Associated Press investigation, has been hemorrhaging assault weapons. Some wound up discovered in gang member’s homes. Some were used in crimes!

It’s inside work, to be sure, but it shouldn’t happen. Ever. Armories on Army bases are supposed to be secure, yet a couple of MPs without even having unrestricted access to them, got partway in and forced entry the rest of the way. Some were AK-74s, beasts with three-shot bursts of automatic fire that got sold for as little as two hundred dollars U.S..

How can this unthinkable, inexcusable shit happen?

Sexual harassment is so pervasive that even a colonel was recently caught up in a legal case because she apparently facilitated the cover-ups. A woman. A colonel.

Disgusting.

Keep in mind, this is news. Anyone in the world can read or hear about it. Doesn’t anyone in Washington care? Are there no honorable officials left?

Reality shows have disintegrated the part of our brains that use logic and reasoning. We eat this bullshit up until every cable entertainment and educational channel floods you with it and if one fails there a hundred more ready to go into production at a moment’s notice.

Subscriptions for streaming are a point of agony and rage to me. You pay for cable and internet. Then you pay for a subscription, but is what you want to see on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or CBS online, Discovery Plus? They crept up on us. Hulu was once free. If you subscribe it’s autopay. Every month. Lose track or forget, you overdraw your account. Fuck that.

I can’t afford Netflix or Amazon. Therefore I have no desire to see anything they have.

Climate change pisses me off. Nothing is being done in this country about it because people are lazy and entitled. They’ll play activist and drive their gas mowers, cars and they still refuse solar power. And they listened to Fox News and Donald Trump for too long: wind power kills thousands of birds, you can’t watch TV if there’s no wind, and so on.

Republicans who believe this shit should be ashamed. Well they will be if they ever listen to the truth. Donald Trump became Don Quixote in one sentence, a remarkable moment in U.S. political history.

I’m saying everyone is wrong sometime about something. But to intentionally take up some asinine stance on something because of people caught lying on a regular basis, no, I’m not going to give them a pass. Even I, eventually, despite conditioning and being highly suggestible at times, always fight for the truth. And if I can fight myself for whatever the truth is, so can others.

And another fucking thing: who the hell started this “It is what it is” bullshit, and why do otherwise intelligent people have to use the term 90 times a day?

I’m fucking sick of it. Do you even pay attention to the words? It’s an insult.

Sometimes you may admire someone. Express it and find they don’t return your esteem. You probe further as to exactly how receptive they are, you’ll eventually get a no that sounds like “I can’t” followed by “it is what it is”. See how you like it then.

And stop saying “tout” for hell’s sake. Its a stupid fucking word. Do you hear the stupid bleeding from it when an anchor person or reporter uses it in a sentence? “The White House touted the rollout of a new…”

Waitafuckinminute!

You really think people do that? That someone says, “I want you all to go out and tout this to the public”?

Stop it.

And what the hell was all that shit with VP Harris, not “visiting” the border but going to Guatemala and telling poor people who obviously have no access to news, “Dont come here (the U.S. Border)”?

What the hell?

Yeah, I’m pissed, you’re right. Because first, the gesture and the message were strangely out of place, and second, an insult to the Guatemalan government and guatemalans. They got singled out for a great big “fuck you” in front of the world.

It happens to be true that the Border Crisis never ended. It’s also true that it will never end because most central-and-south American countries are poor. The smuggling, gangs and drug lords are obvious but only a part of it. Each province, division, town or city has its unique position on the danger scale. The misery scale. The environmental health scale. Safe drinking water? For some people no. Boil lake or stream water if you live near enough. Too poor for bottled water? Too bad.

How about homicides? Wanna talk about Honduras?

People don’t come north to have a better life. From Mexico, Columbia and Venezuela they come in the hope of survival.

But I don’t get it. From Trump’s campaign slogan about rapists and his white elephant wall to Harris’s bizarrely timed and placed warning, it doesn’t make sense. We have the duty to protect human lives. Condemning them isn’t quite humanitarian.

You know what really boils my oysters? The United States is not one of the safest countries in the world. In 2019 the U.S. was ranked more dangerous than Uganda. And Uganda is a place that should appear on tourist lists like, never. You will be kidnapped, arrested, shot, bombed or tied to the machinegun stand in the bed of a pickup truck and dragged down the airport runway.

Since Trump campaigned the first time, I’ve seen articles on several occasions where other countries warned their citizens not to come here.

Until you dig into the subject you’ll never know that Canada, Vietnam, Ghana, Poland, Germany, Mozambique and Bangladesh are safer.

And you’d never know which countries have better opportunities for education and employment. It ain’t us. That pisses me off but not because I think those countries are inferior. But we followed World War Two as a superpower. We were supposed to have learned from Japanese internment camps and the Holocaust. All the guys who died and were buried overseas or at sea, all the empty chairs at the dinner table that never got used again…we’d learned from it. We went into an economic boom and people bought houses and refrigerators and cars.

Damn it, we’re better than this!

This is the end of my Fuck! post.

If I were Catholic, I’d be saying Hail Marys for the next 24 hours.

Surely God has pity on men like me; we may get mad. We may hold grudges. But we try to learn control. Today you could probably spit at my feet and it would be forgiven.

For all my vices and my mental health, you know what I think?

I think I should like myself just a little…and not be so angry over things I don’t know how to change.

Even if those things are fucking stupid.