Anger at God

 Or anger in general. We all know, if we think about it, that the occasion of our lashing out--lashing out at people or computers or at the flat object somehow that fell off the flat table we just laid it on--the occasion is just that, the occasion for the anger. It's not the motive. It's not what we're angry about. We're angry, like the Hulk, always. It circulates through our body like blood. Physically it is certainly generated in some gland or other as a hormone or whatever-mone that could be easily tested for. And our chemical-based medical industry could synthesize the anti-hormone to cancel it out with reasonable efficacy. I'm sure it has done so. I see the commercials. 

But that's no real solution. We have to find our what we're angry at and stop being angry at it. What is the real frustration? Why do we let it frustrate us. (Yes we LET it. We have the power to do what the preacher pretends to do--name the demon and cast it out.) 

I'd like to think, like Freud, that the thing that is the occasion of our anger is a key to the true cause of our anger. I'd like to think so, but I'm not sure it is. Look at my own. These are the things I curse daily:

Computers that don't do what I want them to do.

Errors in typing.

The things that fall of surfaces when I walk by.

Machines that stop working when I need them.

What do these things have in common? They delay me. I'm focused on one thing and I have to stop to figure out something else, something that should work effortlessly and easily, that I shouldn't have to think about. I'm in a rush. I have so many things to accomplish by a deadline, and they slow me down. 

But the deadline is often self-imposed. While I curse little details that steal my time, I waste so much time, use so much of the time I have for the things I need to do so unproductively. There's enough time. But I use it poorly and then curse when the inefficiency of things takes any of it from me. 

There really are two problems here: the things that get in the way of what I really want do. The fact that I don't do what I really want to do when there's nothing in the way. In fact, when I do find myself doing those things I really want to do--at last--I find myself drawn to any of the other things I really want to. When I'm writing I want to be playing music. When I'm playing music, I want to be gardening. When I'm gardening I want to be building things. And I end up doing none of it particularly well. 

A lot of half-assed work. I have a large but poorly planned-out garden. I build furniture when so much imprecision. I play music even I wouldn't want to listen to. And I write stories and novels and poems that never find their form or meaning. Some great passages, some interesting ideas in all of it, nothing that comes brilliantly together.

But is any of that the ground of the frustration?