Anger and Annoyance

Despite all my readings and meditations about the ultimate futility of anger and annoyance, I take to anger and annoyance like ducks to water, bees to flowers, and moths to flame. They are part of my nature, my default mode of consciousness, my dark angels of destruction who help me see the dark side of people's moons. I'm not claiming that I'm anybody extra-special. I'm just a seeker of truth and peace. Of course, truth and peace are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other, if by truth you mean the ultimate truth, not the kind that skims and glides on superficialities. I hate superficialities with a passion. Those who don't understand me are invariably tied to superficialities. The below cannot understand the above, a part cannot comprehend the whole, undeveloped minds are forever mired in ignorance and darkness, and fancy that they are the only realities in life. I'm reading about the origins and evolution of language. My fascination with language is a matter of course for a person who writes poetry and knows several languages. Reading and thinking about language makes me feel good about myself as I think I know something about the subject, not like the stupid and ignorant Asshole who loves to pontificate on subject matters of which he knows nothing. He is nothing but a jaunty, linguistically impotent pontificator, yet he is wont to foamy-mouthed, quivering pontification, and agog with sardonic, stupid triumph. For instance, the poorly educated bastard couldn't distinguish a "can" from a "cane", yet he pathetically said that he used a "can" to whack a barking dog when he was delivering mail as a postman. I was wondering what kind a postman would carry a "can" in his bag and used it as a defense against a territorial-minded dog unless it was a can of dog food that the postman was accustomed to consuming on his delivery round when hunger struck him.

Anyway, I used to pine and sigh longingly for a certain woman who in her youth attended Lycee Marie Curie, the woman with the downy outline of her pommettes in the sun, the amber-tinted darkness of quick eyes, lips shaped into a friendly smile. Nowadays, if my thoughts ever turn to her in passing, I shudder with horror at the stupidity of my youth, and the idealism of my innocence. And if my being registers any feelings of anger and annoyance, they are directed at myself and not at her because I understand she did what she had to do: she only responded to the dictates of her nature-- and to her perceptions of my nature-- and not necessarily to my true nature. As I often repeat, it's not easy to understand me. Many fools have tried and in the end they only see themselves in me. I'm like a shining mirror where men read strange matters, like the case of the Asshole who has opined that I am full of insecurity and fond of chiming in! He was counting on a possibility that his words were like the weighted tips of a flagrum across my soul. He was hoping his iniquitous, nefarious, meretricious, tawdry words would have an effect on me. And the bastard was right. I collogued with my inner self and it told me to wait and to act towards the harlequin in the mean time with a studied, persnickety shibumi while maintaining a winsome disposition.

The tragedy of my youthful misplaced affection has overshadowed and colored all the subsequent love affairs, even to this very day. I am a prisoner of my distant past. The painful memories have haunted me and shaped me into the person I am today. I've often coiled and curled and clung to my own intimate and bittersweet recollection of a love that could have been. And I often reach a painful understanding during which I understand why a piece of a broken glass sparkled so on the pavement, why the sunlight reflected on the ice cubes of a tall glass of ice tea on a picnic table at the road stop in mid afternoon, and why I loved so much the shimmering sea.

Sometime ago, a kind elderly man pulled me aside and whispered to me that as a writer, I must regard all living experiences of my own and others as gist for my creativity; thus, I shouldn't be so angry and annoyed by ignorance, taunts, and slights especially if they come from filthy dogs like the Asshole. He further advised that I must learn to manage my tapasya (Sanskirt for heat/essential energy. The gentleman was an Indian and well versed in yogic tradition) in such a way that I could achieve my evolution as a spiritual being. I asked him how he would know that I have potential to develop into a bona fide spiritual being. He replied that his master had taught him how to read people. He said, "I was observing how you were baited, drawn in, sucked into a vortex called "debate" initiated by the mangled, maimed mongrel of a creature who called himself fittingly Asshole. I listened to your arguments and the nonsense uttered by the Asshole. I watched your facial features and his simian and canine traits. While your face radiated with human beauty and intelligence, his muzzle showed the cunning of a dog. In addition, he had lousy teeth and he was short, pudgy, and ugly. He was obviously not as well-versed in reading, languages, and logic as you were. So I wondered why the fuck you were wasting your tapasya on an animal like that. He has no chance to evolve. His destiny is already set. He's well on his way straight to samsara while you still have a chance to reach nỉrvana." I explained to him that I was suffering from HDADD (High Definition Attentcion Deficit Disorder) and that I usually didn't pay attention to words spoken by dark-skinned men from India, but when I did, my attention was crystal clear and in his case, his words did hold my attention. He laughed uproariously and then stepped forward and embraced me---the pungent curry smell still clings to me to this day---and said the following parting words before jauntingly sashaying away: "Intensify your receptivity. Make yourself highly magnetic to core truths."

Well, core truths are what I am intimating today. Only those who are strong enough can withstand them or are attracted to them. The rest, like the Asshole, are scared of them and would resort to lies and cheap pontifications in order to avoid the head-on collisions with them. As Daniel Kahneman was fond of reminding us, we easily think associatively, metaphorically, and causally, but statistical thinking is the kind that gives us trouble. Statistical thinking exposes the limitations of the human mind: "our overconfidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events." (Thinking, Fast and Slow, pp 13-14)


(to be continued)