12. Anger Part 1 Arriving on Fuming Island

“Fuck off you fucking bitch... You fucking pushed in, you fucking cow”

This was uttered by an eight year old at the tills in the camping shop I pretend to work in. It was a notch up on the usual Stockportian charm school absentees.

His tubby bodyguard that masqueraded as his father was already on the phone to the police. They had accused two couples of jumping the queue. It turns out after checking the security camera this was incorrect, but instead of maybe tutting or saying excuse me this kid went supernova. He went from zero to Roy Chubby Brown in naught seconds flat. His obscene verbiage was actually pretty impressive.

One of the women stayed behind to give back as good as she got.  She had no mask nor did the other three in her group. They were the usual group of loud mouthed anti-maskers who when you question them all have the same difficulties breathing. However this woman did not seem to have any problems shouting back at the kid and his father. She said she was going to “smash their faces in”. The group of four congested outside the shop doorway.

Meanwhile inside the father of “rude kid” was on the phone to the police and reassured his son that they were going to have protection “from the full force of the law”, but Rude Kid was in a full meltdown. He was kicking and punching the air. Whomever he was fighting was "'aving it large."

By this time I was down to support my wife who is also lucky enough to work at the shop. I said I was going out to talk to the group and see if I could convince them to go, but she insisted on doing it which was super brave of her. I went over to the father and son and insisted they break their sad little staring game and move out of sight of the group outside.

My wife convinced the group to leave and we eventually got the bloke and Rude kid out two hours later and five minutes before closing the shop. The police never arrived.

It was odd to witness this level of aggression in someone so young. The father was just as bad and here lies the problem. The kid wasn’t born with this level of aggression, it was a learned behavior. He thought he had the right to say whatever he felt like as he had probably seen his father do it over numerous occasions. Worse than that behind this was an inability to deal with anger issues that I know all too well. 

There is a generation now that begin sentences with “I’m fuming” before descending into a diatribe about how their life has been bent out of shape by someone. It is half serious, but it is there and it will get worse. 

My earliest memory of being angry was watching the 1970s cartoon show called Godzilla. It launched in 1978 when I was the same age as this kid. I think this is the age when you start working out that it is all pretty much bollocks and you start to smell the “White lies” told by the adults around you. The excuses your parents give you gets tired. Like when you ask them where they are going and they tell you “to see a man about a dog” and the said dog never makes an appearance because they were just going out. Like I say, bollocks.

Godzilla was a cheap Hanna-Barbera cartoon in the age when they really started to pump them out for television. It was about the exploits of the crew on board a scientific research vessel called The Calico. They had a normal crew on board but they also happened to have a lizard-like dragon thing called Godzooky who was kind of like the Scrappy-Doo to Scooby-Doo i.e super annoying.

I am not sure of the main scientific goal of the Calico, but they usually happened across some smugglers or illegal treasure seekers. The crew would get into a pretty bad scrape investigating a random crime somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic. The Calico Captain, Carl Majors would have no other option than to press a big red button and Godzilla would appear from under the water. He would then breathe fire and shoot the shit out of people with lasers from his eyes. Godzooky would try and help but just get in the way….again!

Carl Majors or a cartoon Peter Sutcliffe?

You can see a bit of it here

My first issue was purely a visual one. Godzooky would one minute be the same size as Godzilla's head then next cell he would seem the same size of his eye, then half the size of his head. This lack of consistency got me riled up. This was just lazy bloody cartooning and if there is one thing I was serious about it was cartoons. This is where anger starts, it pulls you gently in. It says to your consciousness “hey there big lad, fancy getting on this train and let's go and fuck with some people?”

Here is Godzooky half the size of Godzilla

Oh wait, now he fits in his hand

 

So next stop on the anger train was Godzilla himself. My issue was the fact that Godzilla appeared wherever they were in the world despite never appearing to communicate. He would just appear as soon as Carl pressed the red button. They didn’t hang out socially. There was no telephone or text, just this big red button and then hey presto a one hundred foot sea monster with lasers for eyes would appear. Give me a break Hanna-Barbera more like Cocaine-Bourbon. 

 

I begrudgingly suspended my disbelief again only for the final insult to my eight year old intelligence.  Godzilla would then stand in the water next to the ship, towering over it by about a ratio of 1:100 even though a few seconds before he was nowhere to be seen. So where was he? Had he found yet another convenient coral ledge to stand on or was he still in mega deep water and his feet were going ten to the dozen behind the scenes? 

 

Piss off now. I am still going to watch it as bound by an unwritten kid/cartoon convention, but really, piss off now. This feeling was new. This felt like the awakening of a deeper aggression, a feeling that is different to one I'd had before. 

 

These feelings slowly carve out what I can only describe for the moment as “placeholders” in your psyche. I will come back to placeholders another time as I believe they are key to my overall “blatherings”. (that is a self deprecating version of the word “Theory”).  It was something I read in my teens by Martin Amis that has always troubled me 

 

“You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.”

                                  (The Rachel Papers)

 

I am less deterministic these days and believe this can be changed, but the capacity is carved out and it does not just appear. We create the grooves in our psyche by repetitive thought cycles. The grooves are the “capacity” and the fresh thoughts are new cards that slot easily into these grooves. Like I say I will come back to this and expand on it another time. 

 

I was carving myself these grooves earlier than normal as I had older siblings (nine and twelve years older) who had more analytical and possibly some may say cynical abilities than myself. So my early Godzilla cards would be replaced in time by more serious cards. Eventually not much further in the future I would place an anger card down in the place of an abandonment card as my dad left us and I would not see him again for ten years. 

 

And as often happens with kids, the anger never gets released. We learn to internalise it and we learn to blame ourselves. An insipid pathology that stays with us. Even when we hit the big red button over and over again believing it will release something, it just makes everything worse. Pain and trapped energy inside spills over and involves other people. Our inner thoughts are projected onto the big screen and we then need fresh actors to play their part.

 

The road to anger is paved with sign posts but we don’t see them unless we gain some self awareness and insight about our triggers. For me these are usually any perceived attack my ego picks up on. So things I heavily associate with my idea of self, if they are challenged the hackles go up. As humans we construct walls and elaborate structures otherwise known as the psyche, designed to protect us from a perceived harm. If these are threatened the alarms go off. 

 

Anger can be useful as it can act as a reminder that we or someone we love is being treated poorly and action needs to be taken to protect them from mental or physical harm. However usually it is a result of a series of unchecked thoughts that go through one gate after another until it enters the field off the leash, unchecked and unsupervised.

 

As I grew up I never learned to try and deal with the moment before the reaction. I was quick to find fault with the world rather than deal with my      own internal wranglings. The pointed finger does not point back towards the owner of the finger. It is a mental magic trick and slight of hand. Look over there not over here.

 

After several thousand disappointments later I arrive where I am today, working on the mess and unpicking he knots in myself trying to free myself from the pathology of anger and something new….catastrophizing.

 

In its basic form catastrophizing is the belief that what can go wrong will go wrong. Not only that, but it is the knee-jerk belief that the worst outcome is the most likey to occur. I came across the word about six years ago. I went to see a doctor so he could fix my brain. He slapped me on a course of antidepressants faster than you can say “One Fluoxetine over the Cuckoo's nest”. I came off them a year later but none of that really matters. I think if Mother Teresa of Calcutta lived now she would be on them being told “you care too much, what issues are you avoiding dealing with in your own life?”

 

I’m not even sure the doctor was right as my catastrophizing is slightly different. In the absence of a term that suited my particular pathology. I came up with “Cyber-Fighting”. It is more like an anger flashbang. It is an instant that time stands still. Like just before the bull and rider are released into the rodeo. The gate is opened and the ego rides you out of the gate and throws you left and right smashing your thoughts in strange directions.

 

Looking back, I remember instances of my dad going on flights of fancy where you would think by the way he was talking that he was the last cowboy in the wagon-train fighting hordes of Apaches. He used to fly off the handle not with us kids but with possible situations that he played in his head.   Once when I was much younger I  remember walking home from the Off-licence with him. He was carrying a bottle of Rum and a bottle of coke in a plastic bag, he wrapped the top of the bag around his wrist as some teenagers were walking towards us and said to me “if they try anything I'm going to smash them over the head with these bottles.” He was tense until we walked past them and then the bag was unwrapped from his wrist and the bottles clanged back to the bottom of the bag. That tension and release I feel on a daily basis.

I'll give you an example. A car pulls out in front of my car sharply and unexpectedly. He flips me the V sign even though it is his fault. It makes me mad. The traffic lights change to red and I am now stuck awkwardly behind him.  My ego is let out of the gate and it is Rodeo time. 

 

I see myself opening the car door and knocking on his window. He lowers in and starts to shout at me then he starts to get out of the car. I kick the car door and it traps his leg. He shouts out and tries to punch me so I punch him in the head repeatedly. The police come and arrest me for being the aggressor. The jury finds me guilty and even though it's my first offense the judge makes an example of me as his wife had just been involved in a traffic accident that week. He sends me down for five years and I end up in a cell with a guy called  Big Nicky. Big Nicky is built like a brick-shithouse and has a “cut here” tattoo around his neck. He makes me bend over naked and grab my ankles and jump around the cell shouting “higher Nudey Frog, Higher!”. Luckily I’m funny and I win him around so he doesn’t have bum sex with me and I spend the rest of my time learning Portuguese and put myself through Law School so I can defend people like myself, probably in Portugal otherwise I have just learned it for no reason. There is a Hollywood movie and my part is played by Jude Law.

 

Cutback to 

 

Me still in my car, the lights turn green and the guy that cut me up turns off and I go on my way.

 

The whole 5 years in prison lasted ten seconds and in that ten seconds my body was flooded with adrenaline. I have talked to other men and some do the same. I have never asked a woman on the grounds that I don’t want to scare them to death. I feel guys may do it more as we have a shitty ego to defend which is always on high alert. What is interesting about my cyber-fighting is I usually go through some sort of judicial procedure or court appearance where I am judged and sent down, so at least even in my most psychotic of incidents I am ethical and can speak two languages.

Next time

Anger Part Two

"Adventures on Fuming Island"

I had him on the floor about to punch him him in the face. His adult son was trying to hold my arms from behind. Off to the side my wife was looking for her glasses in the grass. This wasn’t the wild west, this was Cheadle. I had no shoes on and was wearing bleeding yoga pants. This fucker was going to get it.