Slam I am

I took hold of the refrigerator door with both hands and cranked my shoulders back as far as I could.

I was going to show this irritating icebox who was boss.

This was Wednesday morning. I was running late for my ferry and now, for no apparent reason, the refrigerator door, which has always worked perfectly, had suddenly decided to stop closing.

I’d closed the door and it would snap back open. I moved around some items on the shelves, convinced that I had removed the obstruction, and closed the door again.

And it promptly bounced back open.

Okay, I thought, there must be a logical reason for this. Let me and rearrange the stuff on the shelves again. This time I had it right. Except that I didn’t because the damn door refused to close.

I have been trying to stick to my Hey 19 resolution for the (former) new year where I put a brake on the anger, one of my most destructive habits.

I’ve been making some decent progress in this effort, if I say so myself, but this refrigerator business was making me boil over. What the hell could possibly be causing this?

And that’s when I got ready to smash that door closed, all set to overreact as I had so many times before.

Only this time I stopped. I told myself that if you do this, you’ll probably break the door or crack the shelves or inflict some other kind of serious damage that cost you a pile of money and a ton of grief.

So, I looked one last time and I saw a vitamin bottle had tipped over and was causing the all the aggravation. And I thought vitamins were supposed to be good for you. I set the bottle upright and the door closed easily.

Ice Rage

I was so happy that day—and I am still am—because I broke an old, unhealthy pattern and if I can do it once, I can do it again until I create a new pattern.

I’m going to be 62 years old at the end of the week and I’m just too damn old to have these temper tantrums.

Or so I thought. Life has this way upping the ante, as I learned on Friday during my evening commute. I had worked out at the gym, so I was pretty tired and crabby and when I got on my bus, a woman with this hideous cough decided to sit behind me and hack all the way to Brooklyn.

I know it sounds selfish and mean-spirited, but I’m card-carrying hypochondriac who freaks at the very mention of the word “germs.”

And why the hell did she have to sit behind me on a nearly empty bus? She could’ve polluted the last 5 rows of seats and nobody would’ve given a shit.

I was too upright to change my seat for fear of hurting this woman’s feelings, which is pretty ridiculous as I didn’t know her and would probably never see her again. At least I hope not.

I jumped off the bus at my local pizza parlor for a spaghetti dinner and another coughing woman got behind me. Hey, do I look like fucking Doctor Kildare?

And the pizza guy had the TV and the radio blasting at the same time, which did wonders for my nerves. I was one angry dude when I left that place.

I’m tempted to think that I destroyed all the good work I had done on Wednesday, but I’m not going to give into that point of view.

It’s so easy to just throw up your hands and so there’s no hope. But I recognize that curbing my anger is work, serious work that I have to do every single day.

The universe sent me a message on Friday, telling me that I have to be on my guard at all times, change that old behavior, and keep working until I slam the door on my anger.