You Piss Me Off

I am sometimes asked this:

"Andy, why are you such an angry and bitter little man?"

Of course, I am rarely asked this more than once by the same person, although there are those with pretty flat learning curves. Mom comes to mind. My mother, that is, not our Mom?, who is a perceptive fellow and understands the response range associated with such a question, having no small challenge in the area of emotional response-suppression his ownself.

I digress, of course, because that's what I do.

There is no simple answer to the question, although like everything, it probably goes back to some weird environmental thing that occurred between the ages of four and seventeen and is therefore almost certainly BdR's fault. BdR and I are verging on 35 years of friendship, no small accomplishment given what incredible honking jackasses each of us has managed to be during occasional years of those 35, and considering how very, very few other things have attained any sort of permanency for either of us--the few that come to mind are my smoking and his not ripping baby bunnies to shreds with his bare hands at mealtime.

BdR neither asks nor wonders why I am such an angry little man, because he's angrier about some of the same stuff, and not-at-all angry about more stuff. And the stuff I'm angry about, he understands perfectly fine, having had most of a geological age to study its development. It is likely enough that he will comment on this post to tell you something cryptic and funny about my anger, and you will laugh. It's remotely possible that he will enlighten you, although I doubt it. It's not like he's your fucking monkey or something.

Of course, it all goes back to parents, because everything does, yes? I'm not here to say bad stuff about my parents, who did, after all, a pretty good job of escaping the weird strictures of having been young adults when Eisenhower was President. Life had to have been pretty odd back then, even for people whose minds were relatively open to the massive cultural and social changes of the times.

This is not to say I'm not angry at my parents. Dad and I handle it pretty well, recognizing a common strain when we see one. My mother and I are handling it better than we used to; she niggles at me about why I'm so uncomfortable around her, and I scream, "Because you're a goddam Nazi control freak, Mom, why don't you just Fuck the Fucking Fuck Off and worry about your own Fucking Shit for a Fucking change, BITCH!"

Then we just talk about politics. I mean, all I wanted was a Pepsi.

This post is dedicated to Psyche, talky-talk doc extraordinaire.