the rix mix

All my life I've had to deal with my anger, temper, resentment. I got the temper pretty much under control during my twenties. As a teen, I was so explosive that I once pulled knife on my brother Jim. My siblings, naturally, knew exactly what buttons to push. Occasionally, my parents weren't above pushing them. I was taken to a therapist in 8th grade because of my behavior at home & worsening stutter.  I wasn't a problem at school. Only my grandmother, Nana, who had an  terrible Irish temper, seemed   able to deal with it & calm me down. But she also knew why I was so troubled so young. My family had a rather large skeleton crammed in the closet - an event that occurred shortly before I was born, so I was born into a household coping with a complex & tragic emotional situation in what was still the Dark Ages of family therapy. My mom also was  a functioning  alcoholic. The more I've thought about it, the farther back in time I've pushed her illness. Her alcoholism was a response to depression - which ran in her family - & to the tragic event. Mom was emotionally unpredictable. She wasn't harsh or punitive. She was rarely visibly inebriated.  She was quite sweet at her best, like the  popular teenage girl I know she was. She just wasn't consistently accessible in a maternal sense.   Dad was also hot-headed. That, as it turned out, was partially due to a malfunctioning thyroid. But he was downright scary when pushed to the brink.  Still, there was little physical punishment in my family. I knew kids who were ritually whipped with belts by fathers who considered it completely normal.  The one impulsive big spanking by my mom I recall was well-deserved.  She came upon me in the upstairs hallway about to stick a bobby pin into an electrical outlet & it totally freaked her out.

As I got older, the more I controlled my anger by internalizing it, the the greater & deeper my swings into depression. Understanding the anger didn't  seem to help much.

Only twice have I had to cope with extended rage. The first time was after the woman with whom I'd lived for 17 years left me. I wasn't enraged by the breakup - I'd felt that coming for five years, had been trying to plan for it, but she beat me to it. The rage came because she went directly from me to one of our co-workers. Even Dr. Joyce Brown on radio strongly advises against that. It  put me in a very difficult position, working in her business. I had a deep emotional investment in that business -  a music school - part of its personality - a good part, a playful part  - was mine, because I was a playful teacher & musician. I taught children & adults who wanted, in some instances needed,  a no-pressure kind of instruction, informal music therapy. In addition to a piano, my studio room had a Farfisa organ, an xylophone, a synthesizer, bells, rattles, wind chimes, & an old crank up phonograph. It was a play room of sounds, not a shrine to Clementi sonatinas & Hanon exercises.  But with my ex there was no possibility of detente & a gradual withdrawal.  She & the new guy had conspired against me. I'm a Scorpio, I'd been tracking it for months before the official break. I was compelled beyond rationality to hang on at the business. They literally had to move the business to get rid of me.

I gotta say, that lovely profitable business, though it moved to a better location, went downhill after I was gone. It became invisible & now doesn't exist, & I suspect some of the other teachers have unpleasant memories of its decline.

I was enraged for nearly two years. Fortunately, I had the sense to go back to college. It didn't give me a new career, but I threw myself into it & I'm proud of what I achieved, & proved to myself.

The other rage was against a guy living over me in an apartment building in Rahway. He was a miserable man, a sneak  &  creep  who scared two consecutive  female tenants out of an adjoining apt on his floor.  When I had a girlfriend with me,  I  imagined him with his ear to floor trying to hear us having sex. But I like music during sex, ha ha.   His crummy car was parked beneath my apt in an open garage, & when he warmed it up on cold mornings my apt filled with exhaust fumes.  He had a terrible snoring problem, almost definitely sleep apnea, judging from some of the long periods between snores when he'd suddenly snort as if catching his breath.  That was what finally drove me nuts. I had eye surgery, spent a restful week with my sister, enjoying her routines, regular suppers,  the quiet of her neighborhood. But I needed another week with lots of rest. I did not know about Ambien, & my eye doctor had no cause to believe I needed it.  Until then, somehow I'd been able to ignore the man's snoring, But that week at home recovering, it was all I heard. I tried to be nice about it. I got some information of snoring & sleep apnea off the web & gave it to it. I said it's a treatable problem, & would be a kindness to me & himself if he had it treated.  But he was stupid guy, an asshole, from some Mideastern nation, I never cared which. He was a gas station pump jockey. I declared war on him. It went on for three years.  I wanted  to kill him. Seriously. I thought about pushing his car out of the garage, across the small lot, & into the  narrow river next to the building - the river was the main reason I lived there. I loved that ditch, & miss it here.    When the  apt next to mine became vacant, I was so crazed I didn't go to the landlord & ask for it to get out from underneath him.

Thinking about anger because a friend is justifiably enraged about something. & the guy next door told me he's moving at end of month to another town, a wise move given that his kids are reaching the age when they could benefit from a somewhat better public school system.  He was here when I moved in. Took me awhile to get him trained about when it was & was not o.k. to play loud music with thumping bass. After that we got along fine.