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VOL 3. NO. 19 Friday, May 18 - Thursday, May 24, 2001
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AGAINST THE GRAIN
The Angry Type
By C.D. ELLISON
To answer the sobering questions of several readers: I plead the fifth to explain why my writings may seem too angry to read and handle. If I have offended you, hey, let me know once you've finished the first set and I'll adjust the volume a bit … then we'll decide which work ends up in the littered halls of which mind. I concede: it can be a trite loud - can't it? Maybe not … I think it could be worse. The language could hit even heavier. But, I have to admit anger is a friend in comfort, it is something rudely familiar and these days it is the only comfort I know. If you have been beaten enough, and are powerless to prevent it from happening again, then the anger residing within your soul is a tight vice to hang on to.

I have convinced myself that I really don't seem like the angry type. My composure is always so … composed. My disposition seems almost tranquil. Sometimes, some say I am in another world of my own creation. Anger, even under increasing pressure, can be strangely peaceful for me - yet, I am aware of the consequences. I know - it shows in the writings. The reason being is that I usually put tremendous faith in keeping myself cool and even-tempered, even though I get a little angry once in a while and bust an uneven, wobbling chip on my shoulder. But, you wouldn't be able to tell where the chip is. It is where the chips fall somewhere beneath the catacombs beyond anger's dungeon. I keep it hidden, in a closet, submerged. It does not care too much for an audience.

I'm not fooling you though. And, if you know me entirely too well, you know I possess this unhealthy and dangerous talent when emotions are bottled and disrupted into an acidic fizzle, until the blood runs and spills over.

Therefore, as therapy, I write. I paint the most plain speaking frustrations one can paint on paper. Sooner or later it should be adequate enough to extinguish and forever quell the oppressive waters of this surreal, expressive rage I'm living with. In such a state, I am the untested weapon. I am the loose cannon, loosely searching for the perfect moment when ammunition can be unleashed like a hot whiz of concentrated water spraying straight from the tip of a rocking tea kettle. This is the most dangerous kind of weapon; since it has no controlling mechanism - it doesn't even have a trigger - since it builds energy from within and struggles against the tendency to idly wait for the fire or for someone else to start it. An untested weapon makes the fire. A loose cannon spreads it.

Don't misinterpret me. I'm really not looking for a fight. I don't deserve some unplanned, untamed, irrelevant and rabid rage so you can point at that "angry guy over there." No. I can only write what is and what is … is on my mind.

Here stands a man angrily faced down in the mud of his own convictions clashing with the intention to deny his humanity. Considering this, one should only assume that anger is but a passing rain cloud feigning a great storm, while it really teases a drizzle.

Anger is therefore "relative" and merely a simmering precedent to a steaming, consistently tapped and tortured rage.

Don't you sometimes feel this great, angry storm as the crucial remedy? But, yes, I forgot we are too angry. Many of us remain in a mental and spiritual stasis while anger has been historically proven and in certain cases rightly justified. Yet, we tend to give our anger to the magnificent, omnipotent "powers-that-be" in exchange for a dull, constricted, controlled and restricted life. It reflects a sobering effort to dissuade us from conjuring "conspiracy theories" and believing that the dangerous reconfiguration of this particular social landscape is a madness of engineered frontlines, trenches and genocide driven mechanisms.

If anger was as thoughtless as compromising, contemplative and content mainstreamers would have us believe, then such a concept should not exist. In the absence of anger, there is only misdirected rage. Rage usually preys on the rim of "fundamental fairness," the fairness which never really existed, because in Rome, fairness is an abstract subjected to the "rule of law." It all depends on how the law is made, who makes it, and for what purpose.

C.D. Ellison is Contributing Writer to Metro Connection. He can be reached at againstthegrain@metroconnection.info.


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