A Krakatoa State of Mind

My therapist has been talking some about anger, and it has got me thinking about the topic, as well as my own relationship with anger.

There is a scripture I first heard in the King James Version of the Bible that says:


Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath Ephesians 4:26

Maybe you think the Bible is the word of God, and maybe you think it is a human document written by people about their faith thoughts, but either way, the phrase may contain some sort of truth. The truth is that there is a way to be angry that is positive, healthy, or enhancing to life, and there are sinful, or negative, hurtful way to be angry.

Anger bothers me. I don’t mean to imply that I am anger free, far from it. I am full of anger.

I wrote this Ransom Poem about anger. 1

A Krakatoa State of Mind by tex norman

I am erupting like Krakatoa.
My core is screaming.
There’s a battle raging, Angel,
and I am tired, so very tired.
I feel fine about this, morally,
fine about erupting to make my point.
And yes, I feel I’ve carried more than my share
for this lifetime.
My mama stabbed, scratched, stung,
gouged and tripped me, debunking my fears.
“Whoa! Are you going to catch
it now,”
my mad mama hissed.
I do not care.
I’m asking for permission to
duck, dodge, dart, or flee
this most unholy burden,
and render this volcano
I’ve been sitting on inactive
-- this a mound of black,
jagged, Vulcan glass.
I’ll sit this one out,
alone,
in a hard place
grown cold.

My therapist seems concerned about my suppression of anger.

Of course I know where I learned to suppress anger. As a child if I expressed anger, or displeasure, or disapproval, or a differing opinion, emotion, or leaked a hint of independent thought my parents would hit, slap, spank, belittle, or in some way unpleasantly punished me. Experience taught me that if I held my emotions in I avoided being crushed by parental disapproval. Actually, what I learned is that one way or another anger and emotion had to be crushed, thwarted, pressed down, squeezed, compressed, and that it hurt less if I did my own suppressing.

While there are those who subscribe to the ole, “squeaky wheel get’s the grease” philosophy, and while it does seem to work for some folks, it doesn’t have that same appeal to me.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.
Toni Morrison

In my past, a display of anger seldom ever ended well. Complaints, disagreements, arguments, nasty faces at close quarters, accomplishes little and often makes things worse.

Some might claim that venting your anger will make you feel better. To venting anger makes me feel worse. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be my anger. Being near an angry Venter is like standing too close to a dirty bomb – it contaminates you. “Venting” as a positive act got popular back in the 1960s, but remember a lot of pot and LSD was consumed in the 60s, so some of their thinking was barely thought out at all. yogi gurus and pop-psychology turned “Letting it all hang out” into a hippie, yuppie mantra. Venting promised to free the psyche of its pent up feelings, freeing the pent up was suppose to somehow lead to healing.

But suppressing anger is said to increase your blood pressure, allows depression to dig a trench in your MIND field, and it is bad, bad, really bad.

When I do let my anger show I have usually just hit my finger with a hammer, or broken something I was trying to repair, of had some sort of accident. In a short span of time I may lob and F bomb, and scold as harshly as possible, but the target is usually me. The YOU STUPID IDIOT my parents used to say has turned into I’M SUCH A STUPID F-ING LOSER!”

When they say depression is hatred turned inward they say right.

When people vent their anger my heart beats faster, I get that fight or flight feeling, but flight is preferred, and I am deeply uncomfortable. My therapist tells me there is something to add to fight or flight, and that’s the ole deer in the headlights freezing up. When my therapist said this it had the ring of truth. I could identify with that freeze up scenario. I don’t fight, and rarely can I withdraw, but I do freeze up. I stand there and wish I were somewhere else and wait for the earth to stop quaking.

Maybe it is bad to suppress. I don’t just suppress anger, but I suppress most of my emotions. I close up joy in a tin can. I put exuberance in a hermetically sealed bag. Love is hidden in a steel drum and encased in lead like it was kryptonite.

I’m like a big ole Caldara with a churning pool of magma deep inside, there is the potential for an eruption, but it can look dormant, and calm for the next thousand years. Maybe.

1. A Ransom Poem is created the same way they make kidnap demands in the movies. You read two or three prose works, you circle words and phrases that catch your attention, and then you arrange them on a page so that they make up something new. The new thing is what is called a Ransom Poem.

Anger

Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.
-- Maya Angelou


My Monster by tex norman

What was I doing wrong?
I ask the taboo question.
I now wonder why.
I was a nerd in 1957,
I didn’t know the nuances
of Faulkner’s magic.
Thinking the same question,
finally, I got mad.
I was afraid to probe
my secret heart,
bloody and pulsating.
Anger shook the monster
off my shoulder,
to scuttle under the bed.
The monster growled.

My monster remains
in residence.
Slightly Amended Time
Slightly amended time
is offered,
shared,
scheduled,
collected to reuse, re-cycled.

Now we have the capability
of canning
dedication,
stuffing so many extras,
nurtured, fired up,
busy,
loose.
Don’t forget,
I have been lost
striving to be good.

The Key To Me

“…each of us holds the key to our own freedom…you are the gatekeeper of your own happiness.”

Angel Kyodo Williams

I read a book by Ms Kyodo Williams and I admired the book, but, as with all books, I have this habit of pulling out parts and worrying the meaning out of them. In this case I am wondering what the writer means.

If I hold the key to my own freedom wouldn’t I know that? A key unlocks stuff. There is the word Key as in the test answers. Teachers use a key to sore tests. The key in the case of teachers is a document that contains the correct answers to a test. There might be some way of applying the key definition as it applies to teachers, but mostly, I think the key here is like a piece of metal that, inserted into a lock will lift the appropriate spring levers that release a lock. If the lock and key image is correct, then once the lock is unlocked you are no longer restricted, you are no longer confined.

The second part of the Kyodo Williams quote says that we are the gatekeeper of our own happiness. I hear gatekeeper, but I think “prison guard.” What it seems like she is saying is that the person that keeps you imprisoned, the person that has the power to keep the gate closed or to open the gate, the guardian of your confinement is YOU.

In other words, if I feel imprisoned in misery, I need to recognize that I am the person keeping me confined with misery. I need to realize that I have the power to release myself to freedom and happiness.

If Ms. Kyodo Williams is right, I think she is only partly right. If I am the one keeping me locked in a cell with unhappiness, then yeah, logically, it would seem like that situation should not exist, yet it does exist.

Now why would this situation exist? Why would anyone confine themselves to a melancholy existence, when I have the power to release myself to a life of joy? What I’m thinking is that it is just not that simple. If I am the gatekeeper keeping myself locked up then there must be something causing me to do what it is illogical for me to do. Why would anyone be so restrictive and uncooperative with themselves?

I mean, really, if I have the power to allow myself to be happy, then why don’t I?

Obviously if I am in the position to free myself, and I won’t do it, there has to be some reason. There has got to be some cause. Perhaps it is some chemical imbalance, or post traumatic stress thing, or bipolar problem, or schizophrenia, or something along those lines.

Perhaps Ms Kyodo Williams is saying that we have the power to release ourselves from our self-imposed prison of sadness, we don’t realize it, and so we need to work on recognizing that we are the source of our own problems, and we are the solution to our own problems.

When Things Seem Always to go Wrong!

There are a whole bunch of rules and aphorisms that say what the cartoon says. Murphy’s Law says something like, “if anything can go wrong, it will.” There are just tons of related rules and maximums.

• If you drop a slice of toast is will always fall butter side down.

• If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.

• If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

• Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

• Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.

• If your advance is going well, you are walking into an ambush.

• Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.

These sayings do not reflect my life, but they do feel like they represent your life. It occurred to me that these “glass half empty” type proverbs would not be common, and they would not resonate with so many people if many of us didn’t also identify with these dictums.

It just feels like a big ole dark cloud is following us around and it isn’t true. Well, it isn’t true most of the time. So why I feel this way? Why do so many of us feel this way?

Many troubles come to me, because these troublesome beliefs feel at home inside my head. That is, when a person's mind is full of thoughts of how rotten things are and how bad they are going, so the troubles say, "Hey, here's a place for us with all our friends where we can feel at home!"

Obviously the smart thing to do, the logical solution is to disinvite these negative thoughts. If your brain is full of thoughts about how things are NOT going to be OK, then jump up on a table, pull your hair, and shout: “Get out of my frikin’ head!”

There is another saying that is common among us Charlie Brown types. MISERY LOVES COMPANY. All my “I’m a loser” thoughts invite their pessimistic pals in until there is standing room only inside my head and each and every guest is a miserable ad man selling me on how great and wonderful my own flaws are.

Here is a truism that I need to take to heart: Misery attracts misery; joy attracts optimism. Aphrodite knows that I have tried to follow my own advice. Perhaps I haven’t tried hard enough. My hope is that with diligent practice that I will eventually disinvite the negative thoughts and greet lots of positive thoughts. We’ll see.

Decision-making and Me

Like it or not, life is made up of making decisions. I make decisions all day, every single day. I make decisions every waking moment of my life. We all do. I think, even in my dreams, I am making decisions.

Some people are sure, but it is never like that for me. I sometimes am sure about my decisions, and sometimes I have doubts, but inside, deep within the core of me, I am never absolutely sure. I have made decisions abruptly, and I have agonized over decisions for hours, and days, and in a couple of cases months. Careful deliberation doesn't seem to make my decisions better than the ones I make on a whim.

All decisions are made on insufficient evidence.
- Rita Mae Brown

Robert Frost wrote about decision-making in a poem that he called “Two Roads Diverged.” In stanza one Frost writes,

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could

I guess we could say that this person looking down the road as far as he could is actually gathering data. He was clearly trying to see as much into the future as possible hoping that was going to help him make a decision. MacBeth asked if some old ladies could look into the seeds of time and tell him which would grow and which would not. It is what we all want. Some of us agonize over decision making more than others.

In stanza three Frost writes,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Lots and lots of time, when we make a decision we are stuck with the consequences.

When possible make the decisions now, even if action is in the future. A revised decision usually is better than one reached at the last moment.
- William B. Given

Confidence by tex norman

I hate confident people.
At least that’s what I think I think.
For when confident people speak
they sound sure, and they speak,
not just with confidence,
but with certainty, with an assurance
that we all find compellingly convincing.
There have been times when I have not
only been right, bur I’ve known
I was right and yet the confidently wrong
have managed to be wrong with such assurance
with such certitude, that I have been stunned
into silent stupidity and although I have been
actually right, I have felt very, very wrong.
The confident feel sure, positive, precise, right
and accurate, which is always better
than being actually, factually right.

How could it be better to feel right than to be right? It might be better to be right, but what I yearn for is that feeling of being right. I wish I could just feel OK. I wish I could just feel like I’m doing the right stuff, going the right direction, rejecting or accepting what needs to be rejected or accepted.

Obviously you can never know how things might have gone had you made some other decision. I’ve made choices, seen how the other choice turned out better, and kicked myself for my stupid decision, but I don’t know that even if I’d made that OTHER choice things could have gone very wrong for me.

I was once in a car crash and after I was fussing at myself, “Why couldn’t you have left 5 minutes earlier, or 5 minutes later? Then you’d have missed being run into by that Mustang.” Those recriminations were right, of course, I would have missed being rear-ended by the Mustang, but maybe leaving earlier, or later I would have been T-boned by a garbage truck.

Decision making is just what we do. I'm not sure how to feel better about this.

Raised Hands Hands Down

My hand hurts. It has been a couple of weeks since I fell and my hand still hurts. Actually it seems to be hurting worse. Maybe it is the cold. The part that hurts is one of the metacarpal bones, the one below my pinky finger. It is the end of the metacarpal closest to the wrist. I am so thankful it is my left hand, but I am amazed at how much I actually use the left hand.

I am thinking about my hand, and that leads to thinking about all hands. This leads, of course, to Googling the word hand. I found some interesting stuff:

1. One out of six disabling work injuries involve the fingers, most often due to the finger striking or being struck against a hard surface.

2. One fourth of athletic injuries involve the hand and wrist.

3. Children under the age of six are at the greatest risk for crushing or burning injuries of the hand.

4. fingers are special, because there are no muscles inside the fingers. The muscles which bend the finger joints are located in the palm and up in the mid forearm, and are connected to the finger bones by tendons, which pull on and move the fingers like the strings of a marionette.

5. The wrinkles on the back of the finger knuckles are actually dimples, and mark areas where the skin is attached to the tendon beneath the skin.

6. Finger joints only have wrinkles and creases if the joint moves. If a finger joint stops moving, the creases eventually flatten out.

7. One out of six of congenital anomalies recorded on birth statistics involve the upper extremities.

8. White children are four times more likely than black children to be born with webbed fingers.

9. Black children are ten times more likely than white children to be born with extra fingers.

10. Each hand contains (plus or minus... everyone is different, and everyone counts these things differently...)
o 29 major and minor bones (many people have a few more).
o 29 major joints.
o At least 123 named ligaments.
o 34 muscles which move the fingers and thumb:

17 in the palm of the hand, and

18 in the forearm.
o 48 named nerves: 3 major nerves.

24 named sensory branches.

21 named muscular branches.
o 30 named arteries and nearly as many smaller named branches.

11. The muscles which power the fingers are strong - strong enough for some people to climb vertical surfaces supporting their entire weight at times by a few fingertips. The muscles which accomplish this feat are stronger than you might imagine, for the biomechanics of the hand require that the force generated by the muscles which bend the fingertips must be at least four times the pressure which is produced at the fingertips.

12. The thumb is controlled by
o 9 individual muscles, which are controlled by
o all 3 major hand nerves and moves in such a complex fashion that there are 6 separate descriptive terms just for particular directions of movement of one thumb joint - the basal joint, at the base of the thumb.

13. Contrary to popular opinion, humans - homo sapiens - are not the only primates posessing opposable thumbs. Chimanzees and monkees can oppose the thumb to the index digit. What makes the human hand unique in the animal kingdom is the ability of the small and ring fingers to rotate across the palm to meet the thumb, owing to a unique flexibility of the carpometacarpal joints of these fingers, down in the middle of the palm. This is referred to as "ulnar opposition" and adds unparalleled grip, grasp, and torque capability to the human hand. This feature developed after the time of Lucy, a direct human ancestor, who lived about 3.2 million years ago.
14. Structurally, fingernails are modified hairs.

15. The skin on the palm side of the hand and fingers is unique for these reasons and more:
o No hair (the medical term is glabrous).
o Fingerprints.
o Usually neither color nor the ability to tan.
o Tough and durable, yet sensitive.
o Anchored down to the bones beneath through an intermediate layer of fascia. This arrangement keeps the skin of the palm from sliding around like a rubber glove when we use our hands to grip and twist.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine. Ralph Waldo Emerson

I see the hand as a tool of my art. It is a tool of my mind as well. Without my hands I would have great difficulty in communicating, and it would be almost impossible to express the emotions and thoughts that define me to myself, and to those around me.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. Leonardo da Vinci

Give Up Goals

Wanting to go
is not the same as having
some place to go.
To climb without a goal
is to climb forever.

You don’t have to convince me that goals are important. I know, it is impossible to succeed with a goal you don’t even have. But is there a point where you just stop with the lofty goals, that you give up on ever achieving big important things, and just accept life as it is? Is there a time when you exchanged you goal to be President, or an astronaut, or Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and instead have goals like: I would like a sandwich.

Seriously, I’m almost 60, I have two knee replacements, and a total shoulder replacement, and I weigh way too much. It would be absolutely insane for me to have a goal of being a fireman, or an astronaut. As you age, as things change me physically and permanently, I start shutting doors on past goals.

Perhaps I’m not actually giving up on my goals. It could be I’m just giving up on my wishes.

I’d like to have been a doctor. But not really. I hate math. I didn’t have the confidence to take chemistry. I don’t like being around whiny sick people. Oddly, I don’t have a problem being a whiny sick person. Actually, I guess I’m still right, because I don’t like myself when I’m whiny and sick.

Perhaps the question I’m worrying with is this: Do you get to a place in your life when you can dispense with making goals? I understand that when you feel stuck and have no idea what to do, that is the time to make some goals and to formulate a plan to implement your goals. But another thing I’m wondering is this: Is there ever a time in life when the goals you once had need to discarded (if you are to have a grasp on reality)?

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be. ~Henry David Thoreau

In the Thoreau quote you get the image that goals make you what you want to become.

Adults are always meeting little kids and 9 times out of 10 one of the questions the adult asks the kid is this: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I heard someone say that the reason adults ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up, is because the adults are looking for ideas.

I’ve been there all my life. I’ve never figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’ve never actually created a grown up’s goal for anything.

It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement. ~Mabel Newcomber

That is what I did! I mistook activity for achievement. I did
lots of stuff, I tried lots of things, but because I had no clearly defined
goal, I wasn’t going anywhere, I was just doing stuff.

At 59 and heading toward 60 it may be time to give up on the ole, what I want to be, stuff. Is it ever OK to just give up, and not bother with goals? At some point you realize you missed the boat, your ship has sailed, and the only goals left to make have to do with occupying yourself until there is no more self to occupy.