nunoncastors

Today, something that has been jostling for attention in the depths of my mind finally elbowed its way to the front for examination and began shouting.

I find my head is full of thoughts and half-thoughts like this one, the embers of ideas and insights not quite had. It seems to me that they seethe and writhe like eels in a dwindling pool, a boiling mass of the unremarkable, until I focus upon them and they still. But there, under the scrutiny of my conscious mind, some thoughts still strive to be thought while others shy away to hide their faces in the dark.

Today, the boldest was this,

“You are an angry man. It fills you almost to the brim, undirected and causeless. You’re furious at the duplicitous state of the government; all those self-serving sycophants vying for power make you sick. The rich, who help only themselves, and the indolent, who won’t even do that, make you want to shake them until they wake up to the state of the world. While spongers, racists, homophobes and chavs make your fists itch.

You can’t stand pen pushers, jobsworths, Nimbys, xenophobes or the politically correct. Petty bureaucracy, the rude, the ignorant, the servile and the sensationalist, make rage rise within you like molten rock reaching the peak of a volcano. The media, all the way to its dull-witted core, the self-centred, thoughtless, pointlessness of it all, fills you with such anger that sometimes you feel as though the futility of it is going to make you burst. You know you think to yourself that flooding in Bangladesh is not news, that it happens every fucking year and that the country is one huge river delta, barely above sea level. You want to know why it still surprises people when it happens; you want to know why they’re so stupid as to be surprised. And it makes you angry. Britney Spears having a breakdown, you want to know who gives a fuck. You want to know why the horrors taking place in Zimbabwe, Africa’s AIDS epidemic and the systematic abuse of human rights in dozens and dozens of countries isn’t that as important as some bint’s breakdown. And it makes you angry that no one cares.

You believe that everyone has a right to exist, each to their own, but you wish that rapists and murderers and thieves could be made to suffer. You wanted to take the head of the little gobshite that spat at you at the bus stop and drive it through the plate glass panelling, just to teach him that actions have consequences.

You didn’t, but you wanted to and you were angry enough to do it. You’re angry at everything and everyone and you’ve been getting angrier for the last few months. You need to do something about this before it poisons your life.”

I’m the first to admit that I keep a tight rein on my emotions and that I don’t really know why. The fact that this thought has surfaced unbidden, like the last gherkin in the pickle jar, has unsettled me a little. Its accuracy, even more so.

Now that the thought has been thunk however, I’m coming to realise that this has been bothering me for a while now, I just haven’t acknowledged it. So tomorrow, as seems sensible, I’m off to have a word with a healthcare professional in the hope that something can be done.

Maybe they’ll give me a reefer.