I read that on a bottle of hard lemonade. I think it’s Shakespeare.
I listened to a mental health app that asked a series of questions about if you’re sleeping enough and if you talk to your friends every day. Things like that. It told me to think about the last time I was really angry. Truly angry. I think there was going to be more about that but I stopped listening because I got distracted thinking about being angry. I don’t think it’s a good app.
It wasn’t the last time I was angry but this is what sticks in my mind. I was at a show and when I went to leave out in the parking lot, I saw two women fighting. One of them had been on the show. I didn’t know who the other was.
The woman from the show knocked the other woman down with a couple punches and then started kicking her when she was on the ground. When the other woman was defenseless, the kicker gave her one last really good kick to the back of the head.
I have no idea what was going on there. For all I know, the woman that got kicked in the head tried to rob the kicker. Or something worse. You walk into something like that it’s easy to assume the person getting their ass kicked is the aggrieved party, but you have no fucking idea. Not really.
That last kick really pissed me off. I was good and angry. I was on the verge of showing the kicker what it was like to be fucking stomped on the skull when the fight is over. Looking back on it now, I realize how evil that is. I was pissed that she was beating on someone who was defenseless but I was thinking about doing the exact same thing to her.
Emotions are fucked up sometimes. In that moment, I would have absolutely loved to beat the Christ out of that stranger. It would have felt great. It would have felt justified. I would have felt like there was a purpose to it. Makes me sick to think about it now.
What’s crazy is that the kicker definitely thought she was justified in what she was doing. People usually do. If someone saw me kicking the crap out of her, they probably would have been pissed just like I was. And it’s not like I can go “No, it’s fine, she has it coming because she did the same thing I’m doing right now.” It would have been a big cycle of angry kicking.
I think I have a fundamental problem in my brain where I believe that violence can solve things. I wonder what I do about that.
The Shine 