Why Angry

A few weeks after the Death Valley trip I found myself popping off on strangers - losing my temper with people who didn't know how to properly form a line for the train, who blocked my path, who blew the yellow light with people in the crosswalk. I chased one to the next light. I growled at another to get the fuck out of the way if he's not boarding. I shouldered another out of my way. Too many people get on the elevator, I curse, "Fuck. I'm getting out of here," and push out of the car. These people are on my schedule, I'll see them again; I'm poisoning the waters. I need to get control, I tell myself. But it comes on too fast to see, then it's done.

So, apparently, I'm angry. There must be some freight of pain hiding in there unseen in normal life, no aesthetic surface.

I've been mad all my life, my mother said I was born angry - I wouldn't breathe until the doctor slapped me. Howling in rage is a form of breathing. But it was an abstract, enduring, generalized, pervasive refusal. I didn't really have a temper. Now it's a petty, mean, explosive thing. I mean, sure, those perps are annoying in their little ways, but I used to be above all that. Not some cranky old cane-shaker.

One day a few years back walking away from my place I thought, "I'm tired of being mad all the time. But there's nothing I can do about it." Then, a few weeks further on,I cautiously noted that the ancient black cloud had begun to lift, as if speaking the wish had effected some inner alchemy; the old dudgeon seemed to have dissipated. That was the historical, world-kicking wrath. Now I'm forced to recognize this shabby tempermentality.

Actually, that was born, hatched from its leathery egg, while driving cab in the 80's, but it stayed sequestered, off to the side, behind the wheel, until the last few years when it began insidiously creeping into everyday life.

So. Ask me how I am. I am lonely, angry, and afraid to die. How are you?

Why Lonely and Afraid

Looking west across dry ground over Furnace Creek to the ridge I asked myself why I don't live under a sky like this all the time - compared to the grayscape wherein I live and work. There is a slippery place when I try to recall the next step of the mind: to the suicide I've always kept in mind for when I get too old to carry a pack on a hike. Maybe it went, if you're not living right, why live? To leave behind the city doesn't seem like so much, but here, under this vast empty sky, breathing the dust, feeling the heat, eyes full of shades of dun and dull green, the most skeletal world, there comes over me a mighty fear of death. The world without me, that's okay; but me without this world, that's unacceptable. I'll never have the guts. That's a revelation. I wondered but here, it seems sure. And when I picture the irreversible act, finger on the trigger, looking into the little round black eye, in that moment with the fear comes an unbearable loneliness. That isolation is always there, sleeping in the Cthullu dark, waiting to open its eye on you.

So when I rode out of there I carried an interesting insight. I'm lonely and afraid to die. It's lucky that I have a sense of humor, for if there's an antidote, that's it.