shut up, frank

I used to be one profoundly angry guy, eternally pissed-off, hair-trigger to explosion, and like that, a trait that, increasingly through the years, has, well, outraged me, even if …

Because let me very quickly qualify, I am not violent, nor have I ever really been, toward others, and not otherwise abusive either, certainly never toward loved ones. Reactionary, yes; I’ve snapped off a regrettable comment or countless thousands in my time. Any real “violence,” though, has ever only been toward myself.

I’m truly something of a pacifist, for such a historically volatile guy – that is, right up until that trigger-point of personal indignation, and then rage indeed overwhelms the moment, some flashpoint outburst, fuming, stomping, slamming, most often just wildly ranting toward whomever is present. Then, inevitably, a prolonged bit of self-punishment, literal, or even more often, a protracted period of mental self-immolation. I beat myself up on the inside.

I see us possibly derailing here if I instead label any of this as self-abuse.

Anyway, anger, fomenting, fermenting, down even in my very cells, I’m convinced.

There is a recent personal trigger for my launching into all this angry talk, of course, but I’m gonna delay getting to that, in hopes my stalling makes you a little angry yourself. Y’know, getting you in a more simpatico mindset for reading a ramble about, well, anger.

You’re welcome.

pre-fuming

I grew up witnessing similar anger issues with my dad, the same subsumed fury, which could, when he felt cornered, take a hairpin turn, into withering sarcasm. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, alas; it mostly fell right on my fucking head, splitting, perhaps, and then moldering at my feet. The fruit, I mean. I think.

For too many years, my old man never seemed to find an outlet for his own anger, and I’m gonna, with no medical substantiation, credit his bottled-up rage-iness to pushing him toward that major heart attack in the early 1990s. Thankfully, he lived for a good 20 more years, forcing himself, on doctor’s orders, into mellowing a bit (he did love a project, my dad). But what a wretched way to have to get there, no?

He became one helluva gardener, by the way. Oh mercy, those fresh heirloom tomatoes!

I still haven’t had my own heart attack, so maybe …

Anyway, apples, tree, head, rot, onward.

I’m not nudging up to the idea of environmental conditioning here, the nurture argument, nor even that of genetic psychology, how genes influence personality – that my dad had some “anger gene,” a hint of that once much-balyhooed, now largely debunked Maori warrior gene, that I myself then inherited.

There’s a much more esoteric line of thought, dubbed epigenetic inheritance, the notion that behavior and environment can affect how genes work. And on the periphery of this line of thinking, how family trauma itself – not just a gene that predisposes us to anger, but the actual trauma – is somehow able to be passed down, generation to generation, bundled, if I’m getting this at all right, in proteins along our DNA, which influence how our genes perform. Restructure that protein-bundling, and boom, release the trauma, goes the thinking. Or, y’know, something like that.

Seriously, you can look it up. And then maybe you can better explain it to me.

Until recently, I would have dismissed said epigenetics business out of hand, mere New Age claptrap, crystal-rubbing rubbish, something Gwyneth Paltrow would suggest was somehow infused into some profoundly overpriced “beauty product” that you could then shove straight up your hoohah. Except.

Except we’ll get to that.

My mother, let me now say, was inordinately kind, and badly broken. A badly broken human angel. Oh, how I miss her.

My fascinating father, meanwhile, was facing down that well of anger he had every right to have drowned in, given the endless struggles of his youth – the hard-drinking, grifter dad; nine older siblings, poverty and too-frequent hunger; both immigrant parents worked to death in sweatshops by the time my dad was 7; a thieving brother then supposed to care for him; a U.S.A.-proud military enlistment, and then shipped off to two quagmire Asian wars he increasingly did not believe in; a pretty wife who crumbled into fragments in front of him.

Split the difference between those seemingly opposing people-poles, and somehow, you get me, Mr. Compassionate Angry Guilt. Yet barring family difficulties (my dad and I were oil and water through much of my young life, though in reality, we both were oil, believing the other water) and the increasing long-shadows of my depression, plus the pain of seeing my mother’s own bipolar variant grind her down, the wild manias; the shock therapy; the lithium Rx.; the down days burrowed lost in bed; down; down; down, what the hell did I personally have to be this angry about? Except maybe all of that, of course.

Family trauma? “Angry” proteins? Grrr. Just grrr.

Whatever the case, the fury fired up in me, embedding like some flaming briar, and stayed, whyever, however it actually started – and all too often, in the many years since, was ready to go boom. Boom, mofo. Boom, chicka, boom.

My rage used to blow up so blasted quickly, an overheating (lead) balloon exploding into smoldering shrapnel all over whatever my current personal aggrievement. The thing about such explosions, though, is they tend to impact everyone in the vicinity, whether those present had any part to play in it or otherwise.

Collateral damage, as they say.

Victims of such aren’t always assuaged by a declaration that, well, I didn’t mean you, after all! You were just, y’know, there.

As in apologies, unaccepted. Because fuck you, Frank. Fuck you.

it ain’t so easy to whip your own back

My way of dealing with my anger has not always been all that healthy either.

Once my, ahem, sugary-sweet disposition becomes too snarly even for me to ignore, I will attempt to relocate my stormy self away from anyone I care about. Off I’ll go, for instance, to hoof my lardass ass 5-6 miles in broiling Southern afternoon sun, the punishment often far exceeding whatever my perceived crime, especially with my heat tolerance now going in the opposite direction of my years.

When I was much younger, and had knees that still accepted the abuse I piled on them, and a waistline, at all, I would get similarly worked up over whatever indignity du jour, and then literally try to run it off. Out the door, screw the preliminary stretching, just run, goddammit, run, to literally sweat the small stuff. To hopefully sweat some of it out.

I’ve always chosen to see it – no doubt too romantically, so as to cut myself a little slack with myself – in terms of one of my favorite Warren Zevon lines:

“I’m gonna hurl myself against the wall, cuz I’d rather feel bad than not feel anything at all.”

Though in my case, it’s clearly more that I’d rather just feel bad, period. That is, versus feeling guilty that I can be such an ass. Which I do, and which I am, respectively.

This particular form of self-flagellation reached its apex in my mid-20s, when whatever blow-up of the moment sent me out one summer Saturday afternoon, into an actual storm; I used to love running in the rain, just love it, the better the therapy somehow. Except that a couple of miles into this particular trek, and the storm suddenly went all kaboom, the sky flipping on its electrics, the rain becoming sideways sheets, furious lightning jagging from chaotic skies, and a periodic soundtrack of bone-rattling afterbooms that scared me shitless. My sense of mortality, for once, got the message, and I promptly about-faced, certain I was dodging my own demise on that frantic journey back home.

a bit of ah say, boy! ah say!

My flashpoint anger itself certainly dates to far earlier. As a young teen, I was that little Henery Hawk from the classic Foghorn Leghorn cartoons. By age 13, I had just gone from being a plump, short kid in ugly wire-frame glasses to someone who, while not appreciably much taller, had by then found running, plus a set of barbells, and at around the same time he had also discovered contact lenses. I prided myself on my bench-pressing, so my pecs were more pronounced than my other muscles.

Picture that little cartoon chicken hawk. Go on, picture him.

So who, with an increasingly big chip on his relatively modest shoulders, because, whatever and whyever, then takes to wearing too-tight T-shirts? Because, y’know, go ahead, fuck with me! Because I will, most ceremoniously, then lose my shit at you.

One Christmas-holidays afternoon, my mucho besty Joe and I, both somewhere in the vicinity of age 14-15, were crossing, on foot, a divided four-lane between his own neighborhood and what had then been our town’s mall. A couple of teenage yahoos shouted some garden-variety obscenities at us from their teenage-yahoo car, which almost immediately gave Joe a bit of, shall we say, concern, about our own immediate future, because, well … me, actually.

Damatic FU hand gestures from yours truly at retreating car, grabbing at groin, pointing, etc, and in case anyone might’ve missed the messaging, shouting, on the order of, “Fuck you, you redneck fucks!”

By the time we’d crossed the other two lanes into Joe’s neighborhood, the car had spun around and was jolting to a halt alongside us. These guys were a few years older than we were, and Joe was by then in a state, as it legitimately appeared we would, quite directly, be getting the living shit beaten out of us.

The next bit has become part of my personal lore.

I turned then to Joe, and hollered, yes, really, “Hold my sweater, Rayle!” Because I was indeed wearing a sweater, and that’s Joe’s last name.

Off comes said sweater, shoved dramatically into Joe’s hands, and little Frankie Chicken Hawk, pronounced pecs pressing against too-tight T-shirt, advances to driver’s side window of Yahoo Car, reaching right in and, quite literally, pulling the driver out by his own (surely much looser) shirt.

Anger, bitches. Misplaced righteousness. Whatever. I never even thought not to do this – because a Rabey, at least this Rabey, does not suffer personal indignation at all gracefully, if you haven’t yet sorted that out.

People used to tell me they could see it in my eyes, my losing it. The driver kid’s own eyes got wide, and he promptly apologized – only jokin’ with you guys, y’know? I don’t recall even a peep out of his passenger. They then just drove off, with Joe instantly in the opposite state from mere moments before, utter giddy disbelief, rambling joy, oh, my God, that, what the, hey, holy shit, wow! Which, as the next few moments passed, and the Frank fight-or-fight response started waning a little, I confess to being in myself.

Two nerdy goofballs got one over on life. This anger thing, just … wow!

A bit of romanticizing might, Ah say, boy! Ah say!, just might have followed – and now, after more than four decades, Joe still pulls up that little nugget as, I confess, do I:

“Hold my sweater, Rayle!”

Because it’s damn funny. Even if my anger, especially in the ensuing years, became anything but.

ya had to bring that effing guy into this?

By the time of the 2017 election that gave us Donald “Democracy Is My Bitch, and You Can Just Come Right Up to Her and …” Trump, and the knowledge that much of this country would rather abuse its own most vulnerable than lift a single goddamn finger to help them, I was a furious mess of indignant compassion, or compassionate indignation. Hell, I dunno, just a mess.

I was also newly let go from the worst job of my life, working for an overtly racist greedhead family that had disgusted me at every turn; I nearly vomited several mornings on my long drive into work, in nauseated personal defeat. That wretched seven-year-gig was followed by a short period of unemployment, and then a new job with, initially, a boss who had profound difficulty conducting himself respectfully with underlings.

So I was not in a particularly settled place already, and then along comes an Ethically Impaired Spider, who sat down beside us, that is, astride, us. As in the U.S. of A. us. That us.

The Trump election was my ultimate trigger, the final straw between me and acting like an endlessly fuming idiot. If you breathed too loudly in my direction back then, I was guaranteed to go into some unstoppable rant at the world, face red-blotched like rapid-onset rosacea, fists involuntarily clenched at my sides, stomp, fume, stomp, rant, stomp.

I got kicked off of Twitter (now that insufferable X) for my doing that very same sort of raging, by then in 280 characters. My particularly bleak-dark humor of that time period was perhaps a bit too suited to the platform, and I could turn my fury into, by my lights, verbally truncated sniping of the most amusing stripe. Except, not really. Certainly its subjects themselves did not find it at all funny, and several times said so to the Twitter Police.

I got downright foul toward the end there, a blind-fury fog of aggrieved typing, simply unforgiveable in my nastiness. Too much, too readily, too often, and all very not-good for a rage-o-phile like me. As in don’t let the door hit your newly closed account on the way out, Frankman.

This anger thing. Oops.

self-awareness ain’t the same as fixin’

I’m known to overthink stuff, too often after the fact, which is altogether useless in helping to navigate the present. Still, I’ve figured out through the years what probably became immediately obvious to you as you’ve been reading this, that it isn’t perhaps the world that makes me so mad, and that then makes me go a bit mad, it’s actually my own sense that I have no power to affect whatever unwanted situation that’s just presented itself.

I invariably lose my cool whenever I feel like I’m being taken advantage of, for instance. Now, when I can ride that proverbial lightning and not let it electrocute every part of my being, I am often particularly effective in getting the reparations I seek. I have a general tendency to come across as having authority, whether I actually do in a given instance, or absolutely don’t, and even though I’m personally convinced I am every bit the fraud, hashtag Imposter Syndrome, and sooner or later, the rest of you are gonna figure that out for yourselves.

But those other times …

Those aforementioned situations when I feel I’m being played for a sucker, and all bets are off. I’m gonna, as we say down South, show my ass, for damn sure. And I’ve seen it. My ass, I mean. I’m pretty sure you yourself don’t wanna.

Part of my blowing up is obviously whatever that particular thing I feel life hass just gotten over on me – an unexpected finance charge, for instance. Yet what may be an even bigger factor here is that I somehow didn’t see it coming, or else did, and then just kept standing there in traffic anyway, convincing myself that no one would come along and actually hit me.

Then, sure as fucking Christmas, wham, bam, Frank I am. Or was, in any case.

chant-down frankie mon

I did finally get some help with the anger thing a few years ago, since it was starting to do a significant number on me, hammering away at every single goddamn thing, affecting even my sleep. On a trusted friend’s advice, I sought out some truly alternative therapy, in the form of ancient Polynesian chanting – yes, seriously – that has at its core a belief in the aforementioned epigenetics; relieve that “hereditary” issue (in my case, anger, in my own mind dating  to my dad’s father), and voilà, better future.

Just one session made an astonishing difference to me, no joke; I left feeling like someone had taken my head clean off my (still-modest) shoulders, scraping my brains out with a wire brush and shoving the whole pulpy mess back in there, then reattaching my bloody noggin, Frank-enstein, go forth and be nicer!

Brad, the therapist, said: You will still get angry; it just won’t stay with you, always, anymore. It’ll flare, as anger should, and then it will abate. Your ongoing internal fury will be quelled. You’ll be a bit happier monster.

All true. Amazingly. Just don’t ask me how. Crazy-ass damn Polynesians.

i’m really not so awful anymore, right?

I asked Lisa only recently: You’re no longer living with such an angry person, right? I mean, not anymore, I hope … ?

No, she said. I’m not. You’re not.

(To which I was tempted to say, in a voice like Heath Ledger’s pitch-perfect Joker: Oh, you’re not just saying that, are you? Because that would make me … angry!

Ha, ha.

To which she would almost certainly have responded, and I quote, however hypothetically: Shut up, Frank.

Which is actually a recurring inside joke with us, part of our own oddball-couple dynamic, to me wildly endearing, shhh, don’t tell her. I love that she often tells me just that, however playfully, because I so often need to hear it for real.)

Though, just as therapist Brad foretold, I do still get angry, sometimes ridiculously angry. which actually pisses me off with myself, and then I have regret, which likewise, y’know, rankles me a bit.

Which brings us right up to now. Finally, right? So, you maybe a little angry yourself yet?

though perhaps I still am a bit …

Lisa and I have gone through several recent major upheavals, which have tended to pass through her own well of positivity a whole lot better than through my whatever the hell lack of happy magic is puddled ocean-sized inside me.

In very short order, I got bumped to part-time at my job due to a financial downturn among smaller hospital systems across our state. Then, almost immediately, I had back surgery, from which I rebounded at first very poorly. Next, when I couldn’t drive for a while, I found myself forfeiting my (fully paid-for) car to our son after he (very foolishly) totaled his own.

Once I was finally driver-ready again, Lisa and I went out looking for a new Frank Ride, Subarus exclusively, as I’ve wanted one for years. And you should know this about me: I do not spend large sums of money at all well, and didn’t even when I was fully employed. I twist myself into emotional knots over it. (This trait, in fact, kinda pisses me off too, now that I mention it.)

And we find a car I like, right there at the start, though I still hem and haw about how I need to wait, to do this research, to look at some damn new-used Subaru or other, blah, blah.

Lisa cuts right to the chase: Let’s just get it. No agonizing for days over this. You’ve never had a new car in your life. Let’s get it, now.

And we ultimately do, because, Lisa. Which isn’t to say that I don’t. Agonize, I mean. Because I do. I’m hard-wired for it, kinda like with the anger.

We are, despite my changed occupational circumstances, actually able to buy the car outright, because my dad had quietly socked away a fair amount of money, much to the shock of me and my sisters, leaving us each an equal amount upon his passing six years ago.

Lisa and I still had a portion of ours in our savings.

I moved some money around so we could pay for the car right then, because I’ll be damned if I’m gonna cough up interest for years on anything else beyond our house if I can avoid it. Then we determined it’d be a lot quicker to set up the whole transaction as a finance contract – we could be out of there in 20 minutes, and if we paid it off immediately, there would be no interest on it, at all. No harm, no foul.

Sure, I said, reiterating to Subaru Guy: but no interest, right?

Right, says SG. His finance manager shortly after confirms this.

So I’ll just call and pay it off as soon we get home, I say to Lisa.

Um, no, actually, SG interjects. You’ll have to wait for the bill to arrive in the mail, in a few weeks. You can call the finance company and take care of it then.

OK, but seriously, no interest?

No interest, SG again asserts.

You probably see where this is going. Of course, if you bail on reading right now, you’ll no longer be eligible for the fabulous prize at the end! So press on, goodly soldier! Press on!

prizes! fabulous prizes!

The bill arrives a few weeks later, as promised. I call the finance company on the spot, telling the representative I want to pay off my balance. She says sure, then pulls up the account. Oh, she says then, sorry, you can’t pay that much over the phone. You’ll have to send it to us.

I grumble at this. But … OK, OK. No interest, right?

Nope. None.

She gives me the payoff address, to where I send a check that very next morning – and it takes about three weeks for the thing to clear, which works on my nerves, cuz it’s a check for $30K, and why the F isn’t it clearing when I sent it to the address I was directed to?

I joke to Lisa that they’re holding it so we’ll actually have to pay interest, ha, ha. But of course, there will be no interest.

Late afternoon a few Fridays ago, and I received some new mail from the Subaru finance folks. I opened it, expecting a statement officially confirming our payoff, zero balance, yippee.

It was, instead, a bill. For $122.81. Interest. On our loan. That I had already paid off.

And. Then. I. Completely. Lost. My. Shit.

I am immediately on the phone with the finance company, soon told that no matter what I think might have been said to me at the local dealership, that I owed that amount, period, pay up, bub.

My voice can turn on a dime, from low and well-modulated to full-on roar. Depending on the nature of my anger, I am a whirling verbal dervish of indignation, or else a caustic bullhorn of bitten-off words and cheap stage theatrics. Or both. And both, that’s really bad.

Both is where things ended up on that unfortunate Friday-evening phone call.

I demanded then to speak to a manager, because even a Frank can be a Karen, I guess. By that time, I was no longer actually speaking; I was bellowing. The finance-company rep left me on hold for a while, ostensibly to go search for said manager to not make things any better, either.

The additional time to stew: not helpful.

Finance Manager Lady, having now arrived, tells me: You signed a contract, sir. So I repeat what the dealership’s own finance manager had said: doesn’t matter, no interest. FML says: I’ll have to research it. I say: OK, you go ahead and do that.

FML: I can’t right now. It’s the weekend.

Unsurprisingly, this also does not help.

Then I asked the question the answer to which I knew in advance, and which nonetheless duly destroyed any possibility of reclaiming even a scrap of calm or decency going forward: Will I continue to be charged interest as you look into this?

Yes. Yes, you will.

Ugly, uglier, ugliest. Our entirely unproductive back-and-forth nonetheless drags on for a bit longer, with FML twice threatening to hang up on me as my language itself had gotten loud, no longer just my voice. “You will not curse at me like this!”

Oh, yes. Yes, I will.

As with FML, people have, as often as you might imagine, threatened to hang up on me, sometimes actually doing so. Which indeed they probably should have.

To Lisa’s credit, she tried to avert my tirade even pre-FML, pointing out that I was yelling at someone who had no actual blame in any of this. So I simply snapped at her too, because, hell, I don’t know why. Because.

So Lisa had by then left the room, trying to tune me out. Because, what else?

Understand, I do not like this quality in myself, at all; whatever romance in my own rage-iness has long since given way to disgust, as even my much-diminished well of anger clearly can still flood over me in the right/wrong moment. When it’s also then pointed out to me by someone I’m not only not angry with, but whom I also care deeply about, then, well … it only drowns my good sense even further.

So, before the current fiasco finally fizzles for the night, Lisa, from the other room, and with her characteristic need to try to fix what’s broken, has called the local dealership on her own phone, on the off-chance someone might pick up and be able to help sort through all of this. The genuinely nice young woman who made the mistake of answering is then made by yours truly to address FML, as in you people hash this out; I propped up the two phones to be facing each other on our kitchen counter. The reality, though, is that neither person could be of any help to the other in resolving the issue, and I fundamentally knew that, and yet.

Next thing, the young woman from the local dealership is straight-up bawling, and I’m trying to interject that I’m not mad at her, which merely devolves things even further, launching her into some serious ugly-crying. She tells me, between gasps, that I can come in the next morning to see her own finance manager, who’s gone for the day, so she can’t call him right then, the weekend, etc., and she’s so sorry, she understands my job situation, and the potential financial strain, and she would never have put me in this position, and, gasp, and, and gasp, gasp …

the journey ends in …

We all hang up, finally, because, here again, what the hell else?

And yes, I’m at the dealership that next morning, even before they officially open. I’ve been feeling lousy as hell for some time by then, that this blameless young woman had been made so upset, when all she was guilty of was picking up the phone after-hours and trying to help, and instead getting caught in the crossfire, collateral damage. I take her a pretty greeting card with a sunflower on it, with my hand-written apology inside, which she likely just tore in half, because …

While the local finance manager wasn’t there when I arrived, the general manager was, asking me what was what, and I told him, mentioning how I’d also made his nice business-development person cry on the phone the previous evening, truly by accident.

She isn’t going to come out to see you, he now says, his whole demeanor strangely flat. When we walked in with her this morning, he adds, she was weeping, because of you, you. And no one speaks to my employees like that.

I initially think he’s kidding, because WTF with the affect, dude? So I say, chuckling lightly, no, not really, right? Anyway, my anger wasn’t even directed at her …

He wasn’t kidding.

The GM agrees to pay off the interest, never once acknowledging the dealership’s part in any of this, merely suggesting that the interest itself was accrued incorrectly for my loan.

I forget that I’m being deferential, and that I have been enough of an ass already, and I snap, utterly fucking flabbergasted: There’s not supposed to be any interest!

We’ll cover it, the GM growls back. As in end of transaction. He then pointedly looks away from me, my cue to leave. Which I do.

For the next couple of days, any time I bring this whole thing up, which is often, Lisa picks on me, playfully, about making this or that person cry, a kind of perfect Shut up, Frank. I deserve it, and can only ever return a wincing grin.

Now I’d love to say nothing like this will ever happen again. And yes, it pisses me off a bit that not only do I know I’d then be lying, but at this point, you know that, too.

… defeat

So, gosh, there’s not really any prize here at the end, merely the satisfaction of time well-spent!

I guess you’re finally really angry yourself now, huh?