This is a story about anger.
So if you’re not in the mood to get slightly riled up, feel free to ignore it. But before I get into my observations about the massive chips I’ve noticed on peoples’ shoulders these days, I’d like to start this post on a positive note. Because that’s who I am. A positive human who just wants everyone to get along, for goodness sake.
Yesterday I visited a couple of bookstores to see if they might feature my novel in their Local Authors’ section. It was scary and intimidating for this shy ‘lil indie author, so you can imagine my joy when they said YES! Part of that joy came from simply getting out into the world and seeing real people (masked and at a safe distance), but most of it came from the enthusiasm these complete strangers showed for my book. I left with a skip in my step and renewed excitement for the not-so-glamorous marketing side of self-publishing.
It called for celebration.
And since all decent celebrations include ice cream, I decided to grab a carton of Tahitian Vanilla on my way home. I pulled into the parking lot at the grocery store and eased my car into a spot between two giant pickup trucks then opened my door as carefully as possible like I always do. But there was no avoiding it: in order for me to get out of my car, my door would need to rest up against the truck in the next spot. We’ve all had this experience. And while we’re not exactly excited about it, it has to be done if we want to get out of our vehicle.
So, when I opened my door, it tapped against the running board of the truck in the next stall. The bump was so light and inconsequential that I didn’t even bother surveying the truck for damage. Or my own door even. There was no need to.
As I walked away, a young woman, perhaps in her late teens, caught my eye from the passenger seat of the truck and smiled at me. I smiled back. She returned her focus to her phone and I thought nothing more of it.
When I came back about fifteen minutes later, the truck and the young woman were still there. As got into my car, out of nowhere, a middle-aged woman came whooshing in like a tsunami between the two vehicles and jabbed her finger angrily at three small lines on her dusty door. It looked as though someone had brushed up against the door with a coat. As such, they weren’t necessarily scratches, but rather voids in the dust.
It took all my courage to lower the window to the clearly agitated woman.
She got right in my face and shouted, “My daughter told me what you did! Look at this! Unbelievable!”
“Um. Uh, uhhhh…”
What else could I say? She was breathing fire! Then she launched into a diatribe about how careless and disrespectful I’d been. One insult after another, while at the same time, not telling me what she wanted me to do about it.
It doesn’t help that I have an irrational fear of confrontation. Rather than standing up for myself, my natural reaction to someone’s anger is to clam up or flee altogether, even if I know I’m right. Given that this woman was beyond confrontational and bordering on hysterical, you can imagine how hard it was for me to sit there and serve as her verbal punching bag.
Thinking about it now, I may have been able to respond better if she’d opened the conversation with, “Hello. I’m wondering if these little scrapes might have happened when you opened your door? My daughter said she heard a bump.”
To which I would have answered, “I was pretty careful, but let’s take a look,” eager to prove that my door couldn’t have made the marks.
Instead though, the woman ran to the front of my car and whipped out her phone and started taking pictures, for what reason, I have no idea. In Alberta, our cars don’t have front license plates. Maybe she was trying to prevent me from fleeing.
But I didn’t leave (yay me!). Desperate to turn this into a reasonable conversation, I gathered my wits and said, “Can I show you what I did?”
She skulked back to my window. By this point, she was so deep into her tantrum I thought she might punch me in the face, but instead, she let me demonstrate. So, using the exact same care I took the first time, I opened my door. When it made gentle contact with the running board—and nowhere else—the woman realized my door couldn’t have been responsible for the marks on hers. But now stripped of a reason to be angry, her rage actually intensified, and she started screaming even louder. I caught a glimpse of her daughter in the truck and she was smirking. Smirking!
At that moment, a crazy thought crossed my mind: That the daughter herself had been the target of her mother’s fury all her life—which certainly seemed possible from my perspective—and that she actually got a kick out of setting up her mother to rage on someone else for a change! Seriously! That was my thought process.
All right, all right. I might have been overthinking it.
But I write fiction for a living. I’m always looking for character flaws and what motivates people to do the shitty, messed-up things they do without actually having to encounter them in real life.
By that point, I still didn’t know what the woman wanted me to do. She was just…yelling. She wasn’t asking for my insurance or my phone number or trying to be rational in any way.
So I said, “My door didn’t make those marks. Guaranteed.” And then I rolled up my window and proceeded to leave. This prompted a fresh barrage of shouting along with a series of photos of the back of my car driving away. Or maybe video, I don’t know, but she has my license plate on her phone. At least that’s what she would have me believe.
I’m still shaking, twenty-four hours later.
And now I’m waiting to see if the cops show up at my door for having left the scene of a…what exactly was that anyway? There was no crime, no damage, except for what I now suspect was a pre-existing scratch on the woman’s truck that she was trying to pin on me. And listen, my friends and family would all tell you I would have wanted to do the right thing…to stay and exchange numbers if I knew I’d caused the damage.
It begs the question: How could a trivial little event like this spark such a wild fit of outrage? Why? Why? Why, with all the atrocities going on in the world, can someone go berserk over a tiny scratch? It’s incomprehensible to me.
Not long ago, I witnessed a screaming match break out in a Superstore when a guy got too close to a woman in line. Granted, this was early in the pandemic when everyone was trying to navigate the strange new world as best they could, at a time when social distancing was a fairly new concept. But when the woman asked the man to step back a little, it would have been so easy for him to say, “Oh, sorry about that.” Instead, he muttered, “Get a life, bitch.” And the fight was on.
It’s not just the pandemic bringing out humanity’s dark side.
It’s been building and growing for years. I’m stressed about it. Can you tell? The stay-at-home component of this disease has actually been a blessing for me, and not just because it’s given me more time to write. The longer I can stay holed-up in the comfort of my own home, the less chance there is that someone will berate me in a parking lot while my ice cream melts.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t get angry. It’s a natural—and necessary—human emotion. And a reasonable amount of it is healthy. I get it. When I was a child, my mother often had fire-breathing-dragon meltdowns. That was my first exposure to acute, unbridled rage. But really, as I look back, who could blame her? She gave birth to four children in three years, so in my opinion, she should have been awarded a medal for not strangling one of us. But I didn’t understand her anger when I was a child, and maybe that’s why I’ve shied away from it as an adult.
Anyway, thanks for letting me get that off my chest. This blog wasn’t meant as a soapbox to vent my frustrations because remember? I’m a positive person! My glass isn’t half empty or even half full…it’s totally full. No matter what crap goes on in the background, I make a point of finding the little nuggets of sunshine everywhere I go.
And do you know? I feel rather sorry for that woman in the parking lot. I wonder if she knows that excessive, chronic anger isn’t only unpleasant, but it’s bad for the heart and the immune system. That it can make you more susceptible to depression, high blood pressure, and migraines. And that she might even live longer if she approached challenges in a calmer, more reasonable way. Hopefully it was just a one-off event. Maybe her cat died or her daughter announced she was pregnant. Or her husband left her. Or she found out I’d bought the last carton of Tahitian Vanilla.
Your turn!
Do you agree that the world is becoming more and more bitter? That people are losing grip with what’s really important? That they should be directing their outrage at bigger issues? You know, like poverty, famine, wealth inequality, homelessness, racism, war, climate change, and rampant consumerism? And if they’re not willing to be angry about the things that truly matter, maybe it’s time they tried building their fellow human up instead of looking for ways to drag them down. That is my hope anyway.
