Swing Away, Merrill

TASK #18: SWING AWAY, MERRILL

Non-violence is fine as long as it works. Malcolm X

Boy, I love the movie “Signs”. I know that it ain’t Sham-a-lam-a-ding-dong’s best effort. “The Village” was creepier, “The Happening” was weirder, and “Unbreakable” was awesome-er, and I don’t like directors who think that their viewers want to see them act in their own movies (Spike Lee’s vanity role in “Malcolm X” was ass-kissy and silly), but “Signs” is just fantastic, especially the denouement, when Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix, who plays his brother, a failed and flawed former pro baseball player who never learned that there is a technique to hitting a ball with a bat and you don’t just flail away at every pitch like you’re trying to bash in the head of the man who fucked your wife in a closet during a company party; Gibson and Phoenix are staring at this giant alien and Gibson whispers, sotto voce, “swing away, Merrill”, and Merrill does just that–he grabs a Louisville Slugger and hits the alien in the temple with all the might and will that he can summon up…

I get angry a lot, and I never know what to do about it.

I thought about how good that must have felt to hit something so hard and with such deadly intent, and without a trace of guilt or worry that you could go to jail, or even be castigated–shit, people were going to treat you like a hero!

In real life, not Sham-a-lam-a-ding-dong’s cinematic worlds, we rarely have the opportunity to work off our frustrations–we are bound by laws and convention and their just aren’t any aliens around at all–let alone aliens too stupid not to get the hell out of the way when a man is coming towards them with a Louisville Slugger.

But seeing the movie gave me an idea.

I get angry a lot, and I never know what to do about it.

It’s spontaneous most of the time. I mean I get angry and I start hitting the dashboard, the walls, the pillow, the floor, etc. Never a person. But something. Or I kick. I kicked a tv when the Buckeyes lost that game last year to the Sooners. I kicked a refrigerator when I found out that I wasn’t getting a raise.

Sometimes I’ve hurt my knuckles or my toes. And once I put a hole in some drywall. In the basement, otherwise my wife would have eaten my lunch.

I know that what I’m doing isn’t healthy. That I needed to find a better, more constructive way to vent my anger. So I went to Goodwill with 20 bucks. It’s amazing the breakable things that you can buy at a Goodwill. I bought dishes, glasses, picture frames, pottery crap like a ash tay that was basically a turtle with an inverted shell–I think. I got some classical music albums and a couple of plastic toy dumpsters.

I got my old high school baseball bat out of the closet, where I keep it as a defensive weapon in case someone breaks into the house, which is stupid, because I would never get to it in time if I really needed it, but I grabbed it and took it along with the sack of stuff from Goodwill out to the back yard, behind the garage, and I set it all on the ground and I took the bat to it, smashing it like I was a man possessed, which I was.