THE WAY OF ANGER
One of my favorite songs to sing when I'm incensed is "Rise" by Public Image Limited (1986), a band fronted by John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols. In the refrain, Lydon repeatedly growls out
Anger is an energy! Anger is an energy! Anger is an energy!
and man, I have lived by those words. I may die by those words too, though I'm doing my best to avoid it now. If I am a metaphorical power plant, I've spent almost my entire life running on the energy called anger. I inherited this anger from my father (who probably inherited it from his father, and so an ad infinitum) and I wear it like a Scotsman wears his family Tartan.
Anger isn't just an emotion or a habit, it's a way of life. If you live The Way of Anger you'll always find reasons to be angry, you'll do just about everything out of anger, you'll subsume other emotions until they make you angry, etc. You'll find people who make you angry, facts that make you angry. You'll feed on what makes you angry like a pack of piranhas feeds on a blood cow in the Amazon, and when you've chewed that cow down to bone you'll swim downriver in relentless search of another. Anger will become the center of your life because you've made it your energy source, and without it you can't run. You can't bully people, you can't get your way, you can't get anything accomplished in this world.
Moving away from anger as your energy source is as difficult for a human individual to do as moving away from fossil fuels is for 21st century society. But neither is ultimately sustainable. Anger breaks down the body and destroys the self just as fossil fuels shit the nest of earth. If I keep using anger as my fuel, I'm going to die young and condemn my sons to using it as their primary fuel, too. My metaphorical atmosphere will be clouded for generations, and I don't want that. So I need new fuels. Solar, wind, geothermal… you name it, I'll try it.
This path is all about living The Way of Anger and what it has done to me. Whet your palate for it by watching the video for the 12" version of "Rise" and accept no other version! At the very end of the song Lydon breaks down that refrain into a beautiful vocal orgy that I've sung along with until my throat hurt. Shorter versions of the video have a tame fade-out ending that doesn't do the song justice.
And it doesn't do anger justice, either. Anger is a primeval force that should not be disrespected. It can't be swept under the rug of the self, because that's where it grows best. It has to see the light of day, because if it stays in the darkness, it will always rule.
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