Though my home state is as red as a tomato, I am not. I got my liberal streak from my mother, who voted for Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford, which pissed off my dad to no end, because as he said (loudly) to her at the time, “you canceled my vote!”. I never liked that skunk Ford, and I had two good reasons:
- he pardoned Nixon, and
- he was from Michigan
For two years now I’ve been angry because of Trump, and I’ve noticed that I’m not the only one with a stick up my ass–it feels like the whole country is angry. Dems are angry, Republicans are angry–hell my father in law, who adopts labs and volunteers at the homeless shelter, who cried when one of his goldfish died–he kicked the tv during the Kavanaugh hearings! He missed the tv, of course, and fell to the floor.
And all this political anger has seeped into our daily lives.
God knows I’ve become a bit unhinged. Just this past week I flipped off a guy at the YMCA (playing b-ball), I cursed at an old friend at a pot luck party because of his peculiar position on three bean salad, which was that he thought it sucked, which I disagreed with; I chased my dog around the house with the intention of shoving my foot up its ass (because he shit in the garage–and I stepped in it), but of course I couldn’t catch it; I pounded on a conference room table because I lost the over/under Superbowl jackpot, and I fought with my wife because she said that she wanted to get another dog.
Road rage is my specialty. One day a guy cut me off at an intersection, and I went eye-bugging crazy. I followed him for a few streets, then jumped out of my car and knocked on his window. He got out and punched me in the face. I end up flat on the street. He drove away.
My wife confronted my the other night and said, basically, that I’ve been acting like an ass.
She was right.
I had to stop it. I had to find some control. I didn’t want to make a mistake that would haunt me the rest of my life. So I got out my notebook.
TASK:
Write down every angry impulse you have this week. Everyone, even if it’s small–like the anger that seeps up the back of your spine when you through the drive-thru and you order a Big Mac Meal and you drive away and look in the bag and you realize the bonehead at the window gave you a fish sandwich. And forgot the fries.
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Photo courtesy of the author.
Hi. I’m sorry, I can’t seem to find the rest of the story….? What happens after the task?