I felt angry at the start of the week. I thought it would have abated by Wednesday. It hadn’t. Being angry means that I get frustrated at things. I feel like I want to punch things, kick them in the head and then generally elbow them to a bloody pulp. And by things, I mean any things – roadworks, low hanging branches that snag in my hair, my hair, incompetent pedestrians. I have a simmering cauldron of rage, boiling away inside me. At the slightest and most trivial stimulous – external or internal, the cauldron boils over, and hot anger is spilt into my blood and my brain. My neck tenses and my first impulse is to hit something or yell or both. If I’m in my car, I may start to yell obscenities at drivers I feel are impeding my progress. Angry, angry, angry.
I was trying to figure out what I was angry with.
Perhaps it was the humidity. The weather forecast was for rain all week, the water hung pregnant in the air, stifling.
Perhaps it was the temperature. I remember a Pop Will Eat Itself song which described the very real phenomenon of psychotic episodes being more prevalent when the temperature reaches a certain point. (92F) “Third degree, the heat mystery spree…” It’s pretty hard to work on your Saab in scorching temperatures.
Perhaps it was my living arrangements. I had moved in to my new house, sharing with the landlady Elisabeth. She was seldom there, and I felt under constant pressure to keep things especially clean, given the house had only been built in the last ten months. I was not exactly comfortable in the communal space for this reason.
My training had been bothering me. I hate being injured or ill. Maybe everybody does, the same way that everybody thinks they are a good driver or a good judge of character. Every time we sprint at boxing, and every time we jump rope, or skip as I call it, my shins become too painful to continue. Running is totally out of the question, and I don’t want to let the climbing team or myself down in our upcoming assault on Mont Blanc. The rest of the team are running quite fast, and for long distances that I can’t currently even dream of. Given the week long debacle of Flipside which is coming up, I only really have three weeks left to train, and one of those weeks is going to be incredibly hungover.
Another aspect of my training that was perturbing me was the routine I had adopted. I had been increasing the number of activities steadily to a level which I could manage. This was between 2.5 and 3.5 hours a day of actual activity. Then there was maybe an hour of travelling to and from places to do the activities, and several hours of planning what and when to eat. The result was that on weekends I would have to binge to catch up on feeling good – on food, booze, and free-form time. The discipline of not drinking on schoolnights was really beginning to piss me off.
Boxing was beginning to frustrate me as my footwork sucks, and the people I train with at the lunchtime sessions are not the most skilled of people. If I was to go to the evening sessions, that would screw up the schedule that I dislike so much.
The whole question of what I was going to do and where I was going to do it after Burning Man was still hanging over me. I had a notion of coming back to Austin and buying a place to live in six months of the year, but that was still at best half baked. And it required decisions that involved the future. Decisions, bad.
What else, while I was bitching? I refilled my Saab AC with leak sealing refrigerant, and it pretty much seized up the compressor. More heat to endure.
On Wednesday, I was driving along with my iPod finally hooked up to my car, and I suddenly felt like listening to Vengeance – a rather angry track by New Model Army that I used to listen to when I was an angst-ridden and angry teenager. I remember being a teenager, and that I was very angry with things at home, and used to go out and get in trouble.
Then I remembered that this has been happening on and off for a while. Monica first pointed it out. At first she thought I was just angry with her. But she persevered and then realised that I was angry with the world. Angry at everything. And this was in a cold climate.