misery hates company

Have you ever had the unpleasant experience of swallowing all of your anger for somewhere around two weeks to two years, and finally, one day at work, you realize, "Boy, am I miserable!"?

At the time, you'll be tempted to blame it on work, which seems the most likely suspect.

But then, you go home, and sit down, and expose yourself to relative quiet and sounds that don't mean, "Someone might die if you don't do something about this all quick like!" and realize it wasn't work that was making you want to throw things and use profanity in the manner of a sailor. I mean, yes, in a general sense, work absolutely sucks, and it's a good target to blame, but then you take a good look around your surrondings and realize it's not all work's fault. In fact, you make the almost-awful true discovery that indeed, work has picked up the scapegoat slack about a hundred times for something/someone at which/whom you're exceptionally pissed off.

Not that it makes it any easier to go to work when you're mood smacks of a sort of Goodfellas goomba, "I wanna smash your face in, Paulie, etc." (And, in my line of work, people come in with faces already smashed, thank you very much.)

In fact, I feel particularly cranky at the fact that I now have to to go to work having spent half the night up in a miserable, seething kind of emotional detritus, the kind that then can't sleep because of all the snoring going on right next to it.

While I can assure worried readers of this blog that anything as sensational or cinematic as Michael Douglas's baseball-bat-in-commuter-traffic performance from Falling Down will happen today, it seems to me modern life leaves little civil recourse for the kind of pathetic angst it inspires.

If revenge is a meal best served cold, what of piping hot anger?

I could spend a good part of my morning drinking beer and throwing the bottles at the tile fireplace, but then that would only inspire more anger, as I'd then have to clean up the mess. (I mean, I could if I had Jeeves, and also, if I didn't have to show up sober to my workplace in an hour).

I'm clearly in the wrong profession. I should be a rock star, for whom regular hooliganish behavior is not only tolerated, it's expected.

However, I think my temperment is far more of the Suicidal Dark Poet, somewhere between the pop cultural phenom of J.K. Rowling ("I did want to kill myself, but then I made more money than God, and now, funnily enough, I don't.") and the guy who does those travel shows about food ("I'm angry and hate things in a snide and sneering way, but I sure do eat a lot of tasty meals for absolutely free!')

Any way, it's not so much as being morose right now as it just feeling large amounts of resentment and the urge to slam cupboard doors and primal scream in the closet until hoarse.

I feel like that robot with his vacuum-piping arms flailing madly about, screaming "Danger! Danger!"

If the human soul comes free with an anger compactor, mine is on overdrive today. I hope work is a perfect steady state of whatever I need to keep my fingers from randomly scratching out my eyes in sheer frustration.