Well, kids, your weary old Uncle MJB isn’t feeling any better today, in fact, you might say he’s feeling more than a little poorly, and….

You know what? Fuck that. I feel like shit and I don’t give a fuck who knows it.

It’s gotten worse since yesterday. I still feel like all my joints desperately need direct lubrication, but now it’s spread to every other cell of my body. I feel like I am slowly roasting inside with a deep, intense, dark heat, like one of those smoldering swamp fires that burns under the peat moss for centuries, just waiting for that one extra dry summer to unleash the long delayed inferno.

And so, mood = bad. I feel angry and surly and bitter and vicious and violent and seething with the fire that does not cleanse.

And it only seems to be getting worse. Yay.

I have feared this sort of thing for a long time. The fear is that, at some point, all the anger and pain and frustration and rage that I have completely disowned and dispersed and “disappeared” for all these decades would reach some sort of critical mass and ignite, and from there, it would be impossible to go back. I would just become angrier and angrier and angrier until I was nothing but an incoherently bitter old crank who foamed at the mouth at the slightest provocation and who was impossible to be around.

You know, like George Carlin post his What Am I Doing In New Jersey? concert.

And I do not invoke one of my comedy idols (despite himself) lightly or flippantly here. I have suspected for a long time that his personality transformation from the hippy dippy observational comedian of the Seventies, with his material about how we use words and odd things we do to him, to his eventual status as a horrible bitter, misanthropic, venom spewing crank as being a case of someone who was too “mellow” to express his anger or concern for a long, long time, until old age and Reagan set it free, and from then on, it was goodbye mellow Doctor Hyde, hello hateful Mister Hyde.

And what bothers me most is not just the prospect of that happening to me, but the fact that I feel dangerously close to not giving a shit if it does any more.

What do you do when you carry a vast unregulated toxic nuclear dump of radioactive anger inside? Where is the Superfund to clean up this mess? It’s past the point where blame can be meaningfully assigned. Sure, it would have been a lot easier in the long term if all this stuff had been dealt with at the time. But that’s besides the point now. The only thing that matters now is, what the hell do we do with it?

I feel this poisonous free-floating hatefulness coursing through my veins and filling my mind with bilious fumes, making me feel like a caged animal who is more than willing to rip a huge piece of flesh off of the first person stupid enough to stick a limb within reach.

And I don’t know how to handle this. That’s the real problem. Angrier people, I suppose, learn how to deal with this kind of thing. But I am normally a mellow guy, although times like this make me realize just how much my usual friendliness is just so much artificial grass atop an abandoned nuclear silo.

They say that depression is just anger directed inward, and I have always intuitively sensed the wisdom of that. Taking out your anger on yourself might not be smart, but you never have to go looking for a victim and so you really can’t beat it for convenience.

And it’s true, then maybe the silver lining here might be that this recent decline in health both physical and mental will force me to find some way of expressing all this anger that I lock deep down inside, and that once I do, I will be a saner, healthier, better person.

The dump will be empty and I will no longer live in a haze of toxins and radiation while pretending everything is just fine.

Because some of us were never allowed to be anything but fine.

Some of us, in fact, are terrified that if we are anything but perfectly lovely and nice and pleasant and funny and fine, people will abandon us forever.

Hmmm. Guess next time, it will be time to bitch about my parents.

Bet you’re all looking forward to that!