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I was traveling last week and I arrived at one of my airline gates early. So I pulled up a chair, and man, I noticed there were a lot of people who were very mad that day. One guy got to his gate two minutes too late, and was pissed that they closed the gate and the flight was pulling out for Newark without him. I thought he might end up going to jail after the way he yelled at the airline people.
Then an older couple showed up and they quickly realized they had walked to the end of the airport… to the wrong gate. The guy hustled off in a huff to see where they were supposed to be, and his poor wife looked mortified. When he came back, I couldn’t quite hear what he was saying. He was whisper-yelling, with his teeth grit, and as he raged I couldn’t help but see a giant glob of spit shoot out of his mouth and land on the floor. It reminded me of Cujo, the rabid dog from the Stephen King book and movie with all the spit flying out of his mouth in the 1980s.
I was about 61 percent of the way to puking myself when they got up and left. I took a few deep breaths and tried to block out the fact that some random old dude just splatter-bombed half of the floor with a ginormous loogie.
As soon as they left, and the likelihood of me barfing subsided, I took a moment to be grateful. Back when I was drinking, I spent about 95 percent of my time numbing all of my uncomfortable feelings, including anger. I would just stuff it down, and get blasted on pills or booze. I guess you could say it worked, but it didn’t really. None of those resentments really went anywhere, I just packed them into a bag.
And so that other 5 percent of the time, I would occasionally erupt. I think most people would agree I was always pretty chill, so it wasn’t that I was getting into fistfights. But I got right up to the edge of fistfights a few times, and when my anger boiled over, I would sometimes be literally spitting mad like the old dude at the airport. I definitely damaged some relationships when I would suddenly lose my s**t.
I remember one morning almost 20 years ago, I was extremely hung over and potentially still high and drunk from the night before when I drove into New York City. Going through the Lincoln Tunnel, I half dozed off and rear-ended another car. It was a very minor accident, and the guy in front of me didn’t even get out of the car.
Terrible, right? Well, hold on, the story’s not over.
About 15 minutes later, I rear-ended ANOTHER car on a Manhattan side street. It was a big SUV, and the guy put his car in park and got out and walked around to look at his bumper. It was, luckily, another very minor fender bender, so he just raised his arms in anger and went to get back in his car. I put down my window and sheepishly said I was sorry, and tried to blame a delivery guy that had walked out onto the street and distracted me. That wasn’t true, of course.
I don’t know what happened, but the guy seemed to get extremely angry right as he was about to pull out. So he walked back toward my car and started yelling at me. He was a smallish, older guy, and I nodded my head and said sorry for a good 30 seconds.
But then something exploded out of me. He just kept barking at me and standing outside my window in a pretty threatening way. I got to a point where I switched over from feeling apologetic to feeling like this guy needed an ass-whipping. So I threw open my car door in the middle of the street and went after him.
He seemed to realize, “Uh-oh, this guy isn’t just going to take my s**t,” and he started backing away quickly toward his car. But I was enraged and engaged already so I chased him to his door. When I grabbed the handle, it was locked and the guy looked sufficiently scared so that I could feel like I had somehow won the encounter without throwing a punch. For about 10 seconds there, I was spitting mad like the airport guy.
Let me say, I do not live like that any more. Someone asked me recently what the maddest I had been in the past year, and I couldn’t come up with an answer right away. I feel so blessed to be alive and to be sober, to be able to work through all the anger that used to get stuffed in a box and packed away in my brain, to not have explosions like that any more. I told the guy I couldn’t think of one.
An hour or so later, I remembered one, though. I had an important work meeting once a few months ago, and I tried clicking on the Zoom roughly 2,000 times as the clock ticked down to the meeting. But my computer kept giving me a hard time, and I couldn’t figure out the problem. I was walking from room to room in my house, just simmering and smashing my teeth together in frustration.
Luckily nobody was home because I let out some real animalistic growls and grunts that I wasn’t proud of. Eventually the Zoom worked and I got into the meeting at the last possible moment, and everything was okay.
That wasn’t the first time I have gotten extremely frustrated about technology stuff, so maybe that’s something I need to take a look. What specifically makes my head about computer and gadget stuff?
Oh, and wow, just in the nick of time, I am being told I need to change my company password in the next few days on this laptop, which I screw up every time.
Uh, perhaps a computer-heavy Fourth Step is in my future!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
An oldie but a goodie:
Q: What's the difference between a Grapevine joke and the AA Preamble?
A: A moment of silence is observed BEFORE the Preamble.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, by David M. of Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, August 2006)
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