Insomnia and early rising don’t mix. In fact, insomnia doesn’t mix with much, except perhaps a slow slide towards psychosis and the occasional rage-induced homicide. But having scored some work experience at the London offices of a major publisher (saying it that way obscures the fact that I’m still on work experience at 25), I’ve got to get up in the morning. The fact that I don’t live in London doesn’t help. It’s especially jarring as my last commute to work involved walking to the end of my road and then climbing over the wall into the pub car-park.
Even after a (at this point probably mythical) good night’s sleep I’m not a morning person. So a broken 5 hours leaves me crusty-eyed and pale and, more importantly, venomously spiteful. I was seriously worried that, even if I didn’t straight-up murder somebody on the tube, I might still catch myself being horribly rude to some undeserving passenger or barista or shop-assistant. It has since dawned on me that even if I were to be so unpleasant, nobody would notice. It seems like the rest of the world can’t stand mornings either.
I first realised it while trying to take a seat on the train. The scenario was one most people would recognise: only one seat – a window seat – was available, and a suited and briefcased gentleman was sprawled in the aisle seat next to it. His coffee was on the shared table, his newspaper supplements spread over the free chair. I lingered nearby, waiting for him to notice me and let me by. I continued to wait. It became obvious that he had noticed me. It is doubtful he misinterpreted my reason for standing there (“Man, this new cologne is really excellent!”), and so he was clearly waiting me out, hoping I would give up and leave the free seat in his churlish employ.
Bastard, I thought (not, I hope you’ll agree, unreasonably). I grunted aloud, preparing to give him my patented ‘I’ll kill you and all your relations’ death-glare. But the look in his eyes startled me right out of it. It was a version of my own murderous stare, with a trace of desperation and shame in it too. He needed that seat. Really needed it. And he obviously begrudged me my selfish, unnecessary attempt to wrest it from him. His eyes spelt out a self-righteous, self-justified, class-A fuck you.
The venom in his glance had me momentarily taken aback. But my legs were tired and my bag was heavy and most importantly screw you mister so I awkwardly clambered over his legs and then stood hovering above him: a strange tableau that threatened to become sexually charged if he took no action. Suitably abashed, he removed his magazines and I sat down next to him. We spent the next hour avoiding each other’s gaze, frowning fixedly, and hoping against hope that our latent telekinetic powers might finally manifest so that we could slam our antagonist like a ragdoll against the ceiling of carriage. Hate condensed in the air around us. The train lights flickered and sparked with pent-up aggression. People in the seats around began to develop radiation-induced tumours.
Since then I have noticed a palpable undercurrent of malice in my morning interactions. It filigrees through our communications like a fracture in glass, a tiny but visible flaw in our otherwise transparent connections.
“Can I take your order? …please ask for ritual suicide.”
“Just a cup of coffee please…and you have ten seconds before I throttle you.”
“I’m terribly sorry, but could you move down inside the carriage slightly… or a swift death will be your greatest blessing.”
People aren’t rude to each other, heavens no. They are either frostily, mockingly polite or stony-silent. Occasionally a tourist might commit the cardinal sin of British bad manners (pointing out someone else’s bad manners), and then develop a gushing nosebleed as they suddenly find themselves the subject of a collective psychic assault. The rest of the time we all just sit and stew…
… and then when we get to work we swallow it all down, compose ourselves into smiles and ‘How was your evenings,’ and get on with our lives. The train home is better, but only because most people appear too dog-tired to conjure the energy for physical violence.
There’s an easy happy-clappy message here: do as you would be done by, if-that’s-how-you-feel-how-do-you-think-they-feel etc. Well, for your own safety I suggest you drop all that joy to the world crap and think practically about it.
Look at it this way. You are a paragon of self-restraint and justice. You are a strap-hanging saint, a paladin of the platform, the ethical emblem of the escalator. And when that guy accidentally jarred you with his suitcase it was all you could do not to light him on fire and dance around the flames.
So do you really want to risk pushing that bald man with gimlet eyes and his bag on the seat, or try reading over the shoulder of that clearly psychotic woman with the iPad? They don’t look quite so well-balanced.
Morning people? How morning are we talking? We are biologically programmed to wake at sunrise. There are no morning people when, like most commuters, you have to leave in the dark for much of the year. Think about your personal safety. Let’s just assume that, before 9am, everyone we speak to is a short-fused passive-aggressive timebomb. Why risk turning your trip on the Northern Line into a scene from The Hurt Locker? Follow my example. In maudlin, eyes-to-the-floor silence.
See you at work, everybody.
Updated only when you aren't looking.
Showing posts with label rage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rage. Show all posts
Monday, 24 October 2011
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
The Grid
Hello again. Sorry about the break, but my tupping laptop packed in. AGAIN. This is the second machine in less than two years to go down the electronic plughole, and I’m not best pleased about it.
The first frustration is that my laptop may not actually be quite dead yet. It’s entirely possible that my complete lack of computing knowledge is preventing me from taking the right course of action to fix it, and I don’t really have the funds to keep securing outside help only to find that it truly is kaput.
The main annoyance, however, is the fact that I don’t really like my laptop. At all. Or, for that matter, any computer that isn’t controlled by a brightly coloured set of buttons and joysticks. I’m a big fan of my Xbox, but computers in general can 10001101010101010 right off.
My laptop was essentially an evil little box in the corner of my room, that distilled stress from the ether and printed it on a screen to ruin my life. Or a glorified typewriter, that as well.
I’m not good at the internet. I use it for email. I read online comics. I read about comics. I look at stupid videos on youtube. I watch pornography. I (occasionally) blog about the stupid stuff I think about and my own personal disasters. I use Facebook, although I’m pretty crap at it – I don’t really contribute to the community as a whole and then get sulky when I am ignored as a result. Apart from the first two and the final two, there’s nothing I really miss when I don’t surf the web every day.
So I spent yesterday trying in vain to fix my old lappy, stressing out hugely about an object that, even if I fixed it, would only serve to open up another minor avenue of stress into my life. It sounds like the simplest thing would have been to just smash the offending machine with a claw hammer and light a joint from its smouldering carcass.
Unfortunately life doesn’t allow this, at least at the moment. Maybe some day when I’ve secured my dream job (failed novelist), I’ll be able to use the computer on my terms, and use email in the same way I might a nice stationary set. At the moment the world clamours to contact me through the net, and I don’t seem to be able to make plans or learn anything new without resorting to computers. I can’t hand in my essays without typing them up first (partly because it’s university policy, party because my handwriting absolutely stinks).
But there’s a big upside to all this: I’ve got a sexy new Notebook! It’s what I uploaded all this crap with, AND I can watch pornography again (hell, I’m probably watching it now!).
I feel pretty sorry for my old laptop, banished to beneath the bed. It might still work, might have the resources deep inside itself: only it doesn’t know it, sort of like a washed out boxer in a Sunday special.
Still, I feel better now that I’m back on the grid, instead of more stressed out. It allows me to share my ponderous musings with the world, for one thing. And it’s difficult, knowing that there’s an avenue of communication you aren’t currently a part of. I’d better get used to it, I doubt this is the last technological jump I’ll witness in my lifetime, and I can’t be a crotchety old git forever. I’m only 23, for one thing. So internet, meet my new computer (I shall call her Christine). Hopefully we’ll have a good time together, until I spill beer on her, or drop her in the bath, or download a crippling virus trying to find naked pictures of Christina Hendricks.
The first frustration is that my laptop may not actually be quite dead yet. It’s entirely possible that my complete lack of computing knowledge is preventing me from taking the right course of action to fix it, and I don’t really have the funds to keep securing outside help only to find that it truly is kaput.
The main annoyance, however, is the fact that I don’t really like my laptop. At all. Or, for that matter, any computer that isn’t controlled by a brightly coloured set of buttons and joysticks. I’m a big fan of my Xbox, but computers in general can 10001101010101010 right off.
My laptop was essentially an evil little box in the corner of my room, that distilled stress from the ether and printed it on a screen to ruin my life. Or a glorified typewriter, that as well.
I’m not good at the internet. I use it for email. I read online comics. I read about comics. I look at stupid videos on youtube. I watch pornography. I (occasionally) blog about the stupid stuff I think about and my own personal disasters. I use Facebook, although I’m pretty crap at it – I don’t really contribute to the community as a whole and then get sulky when I am ignored as a result. Apart from the first two and the final two, there’s nothing I really miss when I don’t surf the web every day.
So I spent yesterday trying in vain to fix my old lappy, stressing out hugely about an object that, even if I fixed it, would only serve to open up another minor avenue of stress into my life. It sounds like the simplest thing would have been to just smash the offending machine with a claw hammer and light a joint from its smouldering carcass.
Unfortunately life doesn’t allow this, at least at the moment. Maybe some day when I’ve secured my dream job (failed novelist), I’ll be able to use the computer on my terms, and use email in the same way I might a nice stationary set. At the moment the world clamours to contact me through the net, and I don’t seem to be able to make plans or learn anything new without resorting to computers. I can’t hand in my essays without typing them up first (partly because it’s university policy, party because my handwriting absolutely stinks).
But there’s a big upside to all this: I’ve got a sexy new Notebook! It’s what I uploaded all this crap with, AND I can watch pornography again (hell, I’m probably watching it now!).
I feel pretty sorry for my old laptop, banished to beneath the bed. It might still work, might have the resources deep inside itself: only it doesn’t know it, sort of like a washed out boxer in a Sunday special.
Still, I feel better now that I’m back on the grid, instead of more stressed out. It allows me to share my ponderous musings with the world, for one thing. And it’s difficult, knowing that there’s an avenue of communication you aren’t currently a part of. I’d better get used to it, I doubt this is the last technological jump I’ll witness in my lifetime, and I can’t be a crotchety old git forever. I’m only 23, for one thing. So internet, meet my new computer (I shall call her Christine). Hopefully we’ll have a good time together, until I spill beer on her, or drop her in the bath, or download a crippling virus trying to find naked pictures of Christina Hendricks.
Teapot
I have, of late, been puzzling two serious mysteries. They are related, and both are far beyond my mere mortal understanding. The first is:
Why can’t I find a teapot that just pours tea into the cup, instead of all over the table?
And the next, quite obviously, is:
Why won’t they let me road test teapots in the shop?
Now, these may not strike you as serious laments, but for one thing, I drink an awful lot of tea. I blame my caffeine addiction on my mother, who started me drinking tea at the age of, I think, 18 months. The older I get the more delicious and comforting a good ol’ cuppa seems to become, and now every morning I clutch at my mug like it holds the elixir of life.
I had assumed that when I left home for university the volume of tea I consumed would decrease (presumably replaced by alcohol). Instead, the opposite occurred; all the people I moved in with were serious tea drinkers, and the cycle of tea-making and tea-drinking soon became self-sustaining. Someone made everybody a cup of tea, and eventually someone else would feel motivated to make one by way of thanks. Finally, after seven or eight people had made you a cup of tea, you would suddenly be seized by guilt and make another round. With twelve people living in a flat, I wound up drinking roughly six thousand cups of tea every day.
A teapot, then, seems like a useful idea. Tea tastes better out of a pot, and you can put a tea cosy on it and maybe have another cup later. Plus there is something civilised and refined about pouring from a collective vessel into smaller ones. It makes you feel like a Japanese daimyo.
Or it would, if the bloody stuff didn’t just spill all over the worksurface. I must be on my fourth model by now, and that’s all they seem to do. It isn’t enough to just rely on the standard teapot shape, either, the last one I bought from Sainsbury’s betrayed me at the first opportunity.
Now, if you bought another product and it failed to fulfil its primary function, you would be well within your rights to complain and get a replacement. If you bought yourself a fridge and filled it with food, only to discover that the fridge was failing to keep things cold, you would understandably be annoyed. You’d get another fridge.
If the teapot just failed to pour out the tea, well, that’d be a bugger and I’d still probably want another one, but I suppose there are ways around the problem. You could get the tea out with a straw, and imagine how louche and bohemian you would look drinking out of a teapot! Can you imagine it? I certainly can’t, and it’s my blog!
But seeing as the tea actually does pour out, but all over the table, you’re actually getting a new, inferior function, that you certainly didn’t pay for. It’d be like if you filled the fridge with food it couldn’t keep cold and then when you opened it a boxing glove came out and smashed your face in.
The solution, obviously, is to test the teapot in the shop, but for some reason proprietors seem to have a problem with this. I can’t see why, frankly. I’m allowed to have a drive in a car before I buy it, just to make sure the wheels don’t fall off after I get out of the garage. Admittedly a teapot is less likely to plough off the road and kill me, but my point stands.
The moral of this story? If you get a teapot that works like it is supposed to, you should hang onto it forever and ever. Or send it to me in the post, as I’m clearly in desperate need of it, and apparently have little else with which to occupy my time. Well, as I said, I do drink a lot of tea.
Why can’t I find a teapot that just pours tea into the cup, instead of all over the table?
And the next, quite obviously, is:
Why won’t they let me road test teapots in the shop?
Now, these may not strike you as serious laments, but for one thing, I drink an awful lot of tea. I blame my caffeine addiction on my mother, who started me drinking tea at the age of, I think, 18 months. The older I get the more delicious and comforting a good ol’ cuppa seems to become, and now every morning I clutch at my mug like it holds the elixir of life.
I had assumed that when I left home for university the volume of tea I consumed would decrease (presumably replaced by alcohol). Instead, the opposite occurred; all the people I moved in with were serious tea drinkers, and the cycle of tea-making and tea-drinking soon became self-sustaining. Someone made everybody a cup of tea, and eventually someone else would feel motivated to make one by way of thanks. Finally, after seven or eight people had made you a cup of tea, you would suddenly be seized by guilt and make another round. With twelve people living in a flat, I wound up drinking roughly six thousand cups of tea every day.
A teapot, then, seems like a useful idea. Tea tastes better out of a pot, and you can put a tea cosy on it and maybe have another cup later. Plus there is something civilised and refined about pouring from a collective vessel into smaller ones. It makes you feel like a Japanese daimyo.
Or it would, if the bloody stuff didn’t just spill all over the worksurface. I must be on my fourth model by now, and that’s all they seem to do. It isn’t enough to just rely on the standard teapot shape, either, the last one I bought from Sainsbury’s betrayed me at the first opportunity.
Now, if you bought another product and it failed to fulfil its primary function, you would be well within your rights to complain and get a replacement. If you bought yourself a fridge and filled it with food, only to discover that the fridge was failing to keep things cold, you would understandably be annoyed. You’d get another fridge.
If the teapot just failed to pour out the tea, well, that’d be a bugger and I’d still probably want another one, but I suppose there are ways around the problem. You could get the tea out with a straw, and imagine how louche and bohemian you would look drinking out of a teapot! Can you imagine it? I certainly can’t, and it’s my blog!
But seeing as the tea actually does pour out, but all over the table, you’re actually getting a new, inferior function, that you certainly didn’t pay for. It’d be like if you filled the fridge with food it couldn’t keep cold and then when you opened it a boxing glove came out and smashed your face in.
The solution, obviously, is to test the teapot in the shop, but for some reason proprietors seem to have a problem with this. I can’t see why, frankly. I’m allowed to have a drive in a car before I buy it, just to make sure the wheels don’t fall off after I get out of the garage. Admittedly a teapot is less likely to plough off the road and kill me, but my point stands.
The moral of this story? If you get a teapot that works like it is supposed to, you should hang onto it forever and ever. Or send it to me in the post, as I’m clearly in desperate need of it, and apparently have little else with which to occupy my time. Well, as I said, I do drink a lot of tea.
Monday, 19 October 2009
Fight
You might have already decided, having spared a glance at the unexplainably tiny mugshot that rests on the top right of this page, that I am not really the fighting type. Perhaps it is the lovely pink tassels on my hoodie. Perhaps it is the fetching blue fingerless mittens. Perhaps it is the fact that it is clearly the middle of a cold night, and I am eating an iced lolly with apparent enjoyment.
You would be correct in your supposition. I am strictly a lover, rather than a fighter. (And how!)
Despite the aforementioned rages, I like to think I have a long fuse, especially against human provocation. It takes a fair bit for people to piss me off, a lot more in fact than is required by inanimate objects like low coffee tables and tins falling off shelves. This means that I am unlikely to respond with violence to all but the most hearty smack talk.
This makes me sound like some kind of pacifist Zen master, who fears to tread the path of anger lest the ancient kung-fu dragon imprisoned in my soul once again ventures forth to punish evildoers by kicking them in the face until they fall over. What it really means is: I am an abject coward. Like, totally. I’m frightened of everything, especially getting kicked in the face until I fall over.
I am, therefore, not going to be starting any fights, unless they are the sorts of fights where you hide until your assailant has given up and gone to watch a movie or started making toast, and then you wallop them over the head with a half brick. Now I know Hollywood exaggerates everything but I’m pretty sure that if those sorts of encounters counted as legitimate scraps we would have been told by now. The only time I’m going to get into a proper fight is after I’ve exhausted all my other options. These include but are not limited to:
1. Running.
2. Hiding.
3. Paying someone else to fight on my behalf.
4. Asking to work off my incurred debt to my assailant, perhaps by becoming their valet or PA.
5. Getting on my knees and begging them not to hit me.
This ought to mean that I manage, through a combination of sheer cowardly custarding and patience, to avoid getting in a rumble at all. Not so, and why? Because I’m the sort of guy people love to fight. On the face of it, it seems obvious: I’m an obnoxious bad dancer with a sharp tongue, who spills his pint a lot. But that isn’t the real reason. People want to fight me because I am a coward.
Nash has, as always, made this point before, and accurately described the sort of person that takes part in nightly street brawls. I would, if I may, like to explore the concept a little further, to demonstrate that not only is violence against others reprehensible, but also a big sack of bullshit.
The masculine culture of fighting in public operates under some pretty fuzzy logic. We are taught from a young age that hitting people isn’t nice, no seriously Billy stop that or you will get SUCH A SMACK. No weekend warrior, despite their level of intoxication, really thinks that clobbering another person is all fine and dandy. The actual act, therefore, requires some pretty hefty rationalisation to make it palatable.
Fighting is seen as a competition, or a means to settle disagreements. Two men enter, one man leaves upright. It brings to mind the epic wrestling bouts of the Olympian Greeks, or perhaps the gladiatorial contests of the Romans. Maybe even the seconded duals involving sword and pistol partaken in by Jacobean gentlemen to settle arguments and pay debts of honour. Well, it brings them to my mind, but I doubt a significant fraction of these recreational rumblers paid close attention in history lessons.
The point I’d like to make is that the fights I see in and out of clubs, in train stations and house parties, the sort I can sense arriving like the electricity in the air before a thunderstorm, aren’t a competition of any sort, and settle no arguments. Perhaps if the gladiatorial aspect was stronger one might claim that they were battles of honour and perhaps the occasional few are. But I can say in all honesty that I have never seen a fight in which none of the following took place:
a) One participant was significantly larger, more aggressive or better armed than another.
b) There was a discrepancy in numbers, i.e. one poor bastard was outnumbered.
c) The fight was begun instantly and without warning, to the shock of one party.
The last one is one I see most often. You upset another young man through some minor or imagined slight, and they nut you before you can assess the situation. The next morning they tell their friends about the sarky cunt that started on them, and how they sorted him out. I’ve been shoved, punched and headbutted without warning. I have NEVER been challenged to a fight.
The myth of ‘talking it outside’ is exactly that, existing only in BBC1 soaps and romantic comedies. People that are regularly involved in fights are bullies, sorry chaps. You don’t start a fight you can’t win, and so you don’t start a fight you aren’t certain you can win. Unfortunately, well… I look like a fight you can win. Maybe I should change my profile picture.
You would be correct in your supposition. I am strictly a lover, rather than a fighter. (And how!)
Despite the aforementioned rages, I like to think I have a long fuse, especially against human provocation. It takes a fair bit for people to piss me off, a lot more in fact than is required by inanimate objects like low coffee tables and tins falling off shelves. This means that I am unlikely to respond with violence to all but the most hearty smack talk.
This makes me sound like some kind of pacifist Zen master, who fears to tread the path of anger lest the ancient kung-fu dragon imprisoned in my soul once again ventures forth to punish evildoers by kicking them in the face until they fall over. What it really means is: I am an abject coward. Like, totally. I’m frightened of everything, especially getting kicked in the face until I fall over.
I am, therefore, not going to be starting any fights, unless they are the sorts of fights where you hide until your assailant has given up and gone to watch a movie or started making toast, and then you wallop them over the head with a half brick. Now I know Hollywood exaggerates everything but I’m pretty sure that if those sorts of encounters counted as legitimate scraps we would have been told by now. The only time I’m going to get into a proper fight is after I’ve exhausted all my other options. These include but are not limited to:
1. Running.
2. Hiding.
3. Paying someone else to fight on my behalf.
4. Asking to work off my incurred debt to my assailant, perhaps by becoming their valet or PA.
5. Getting on my knees and begging them not to hit me.
This ought to mean that I manage, through a combination of sheer cowardly custarding and patience, to avoid getting in a rumble at all. Not so, and why? Because I’m the sort of guy people love to fight. On the face of it, it seems obvious: I’m an obnoxious bad dancer with a sharp tongue, who spills his pint a lot. But that isn’t the real reason. People want to fight me because I am a coward.
Nash has, as always, made this point before, and accurately described the sort of person that takes part in nightly street brawls. I would, if I may, like to explore the concept a little further, to demonstrate that not only is violence against others reprehensible, but also a big sack of bullshit.
The masculine culture of fighting in public operates under some pretty fuzzy logic. We are taught from a young age that hitting people isn’t nice, no seriously Billy stop that or you will get SUCH A SMACK. No weekend warrior, despite their level of intoxication, really thinks that clobbering another person is all fine and dandy. The actual act, therefore, requires some pretty hefty rationalisation to make it palatable.
Fighting is seen as a competition, or a means to settle disagreements. Two men enter, one man leaves upright. It brings to mind the epic wrestling bouts of the Olympian Greeks, or perhaps the gladiatorial contests of the Romans. Maybe even the seconded duals involving sword and pistol partaken in by Jacobean gentlemen to settle arguments and pay debts of honour. Well, it brings them to my mind, but I doubt a significant fraction of these recreational rumblers paid close attention in history lessons.
The point I’d like to make is that the fights I see in and out of clubs, in train stations and house parties, the sort I can sense arriving like the electricity in the air before a thunderstorm, aren’t a competition of any sort, and settle no arguments. Perhaps if the gladiatorial aspect was stronger one might claim that they were battles of honour and perhaps the occasional few are. But I can say in all honesty that I have never seen a fight in which none of the following took place:
a) One participant was significantly larger, more aggressive or better armed than another.
b) There was a discrepancy in numbers, i.e. one poor bastard was outnumbered.
c) The fight was begun instantly and without warning, to the shock of one party.
The last one is one I see most often. You upset another young man through some minor or imagined slight, and they nut you before you can assess the situation. The next morning they tell their friends about the sarky cunt that started on them, and how they sorted him out. I’ve been shoved, punched and headbutted without warning. I have NEVER been challenged to a fight.
The myth of ‘talking it outside’ is exactly that, existing only in BBC1 soaps and romantic comedies. People that are regularly involved in fights are bullies, sorry chaps. You don’t start a fight you can’t win, and so you don’t start a fight you aren’t certain you can win. Unfortunately, well… I look like a fight you can win. Maybe I should change my profile picture.
Sunday, 2 August 2009
"Who knows, you might LOVE me when I'm angry!"
The Incredible Hulk sure did Hulk out a lot. Which is fair enough, really. You don’t invent one of the worlds most iconic pop culture characters and then leave him out of the comic book. But it meant that the writers had to work pretty hard to get Bruce Banner good and angry. Not that hard, because Banner was the unluckiest, clumsiest fuck ever to grace the art form. He couldn’t go fifteen feet without nearly being run over by a truck or falling down a manhole (In the television show, these both happened in sequence. He was hit by a car and then knocked into a manhole). He was forever being accosted in bars and threatened with violence. Yes, the world fell over itself to make Bruce Banner angry. If you want to see an entire list of the things that made him Hulk out in the TV show you can find it here.
As the decades rolled on it clearly dawned on writers that they wouldn’t have to come up with plot devices to make Banner angry; not if they could just make him into a colossal weenie and let his neuroses do the work. Banner was now an unlucky, clumsy fuck with anger management issues and deep-set feelings of abandonment. He’d be batting below average even if he hadn’t contracted a gamma-activated disease that ruined all his clothes and caused several million dollars worth of damage every time he stubbed his toe. It definitely got difficult to listen to though:
Sidekick: Hey Bruce, we’ve run out of milk. I’m going to the shops. Be careful if you go outside, the army are still looking for you.
Bruce: Why won’t they just leave me alone? God, what have I done to deserve this curse?
Sidekick: Christ Bruce, I’m just going out for fucking milk. You will be FINE watching Sesame Street in your pyjamas till I get back.
Bruce: They’ll never stop looking for me, never. I can’t cope with this pressure! I can’t cope with this—huuurgh… gah!”
Sidekick: Oh for God’s sake, I swear this is-- *SMASH* Argh! My limited edition Dodi and Diana collectors plates!
I can’t remember the exact issue number but I’m pretty sure I’ve transcribed that scene with at least 95% accuracy.
Basically Banner had no need to get angry if going on a five-star whinge was enough to Hulk him out. And seeing as Banner made whinging into a hobby, comic book readers were safe in the knowledge that him making a sad face was guaranteed to lead to a tank being picked up by its barrel and swung through a petrol station.
This was all done in the name of character development, so that the people that read the book could successfully pretend that they weren’t only reading it to see the Hulk pick up two cars and wear them like boxing gloves. In the issues where Banner is the Hulk the entire time the plot can wear a little... thin. There’s an issues from the mid seventies where the Hulk fights his own shadow. For the entire issue. And it’s a draw. (The evil shadow monster is defeated by some automated floodlights. Really)
It was nice of them to bother, and completely unnecessary, because let me tell you this: if I had the Hulk serum pumping through my veins, I’d Hulk out at least four times a day. And I consider myself a relatively placid person. I like to think I have quite a long fuse, especially in my dealings with other people, but even I have a few seconds of incandescent rage a day. About a week ago I bought a copy of the video game Mass Effect. I’ve wanted to play it for ages and, as previously discussed, my Xbox normally just sits gloomily under the telly with nothing to do, so I was kittenish with excitement as I popped the game in and turned it on. I had got about as far as the ‘enter your name’ screen when I noticed the Xbox was making a loud noise, and that I had inadvertently covered the fan port by placing it too close to the wall. I didn’t want it to overheat, so I leant forward and slid the machine forwards. In doing so, I jogged the disc playing inside the machine, irreparably damaging it. Pure, distilled fury shot up through my torso. If my subsequent actions could have matched my anger, my parents would have come home to a house in ruins, with me sitting on the ruined stairs, wearing tattered jeans and a ‘what can you do?’ expression.
Examples today: accidentally deleting the wrong episode of a show I’d Sky+’sd. (That’s the correct way to write that, yeah?) Dropping my laptop charger on my foot on the way down the stairs. Discovering that the automatic address correction on Amazon has sent the new copy of Mass Effect I ordered to the wrong place. Hulk SMASH.
I’m lucky, therefore, that I’m not the Incredible Hulk. I’d be a nightmare to live with (and I’m a hassle even now). But the ease with which I mock Brucie Banner losing his rag means I should be able to see the funny side of my own rages. Which of course I can’t, because there’s NOTHING funny about the world being specifically out to get me. But it makes me wonder which is healthier, to try and suppress those occasional, flashing bouts of wrath or to just let them out quickly and forget about them. Who hasn’t felt better after a good, loud “Oh for FUCK’S SAKE!” Actually there’s an argument that angry behaviour can be self-reinforcing, but it’s my blog and I’ll ignore what I want to, all right?
Maybe the reason I can keep my temper in public is because I lose it so frequently in private. It seems silly to really enjoy losing your cool over a minor thing that can’t be fixed, but all that rage has got to come out somehow. If Bruce Banner had been a real guy, I’m sure he would have been pretty chillaxed in between rampages.
Admittedly I’d have less to get angry about if I wasn’t such a clumsy fuck myself, so I feel like a share a kinship with Dr. Banner. Every time I see him rage out over some minor obstacle I wonder to myself, “Would I have dealt with the same situation so smash stuff up-ingly?” The answer is invariably yes.
So I’m going to let my fury flag fly when I’m angry about small things, that don’t affect anyone but me; so the big problems come around, I hope I can keep my anger in check as much as is appropriate. And if you don’t agree… well then I’ll just have to smash YOU.
As the decades rolled on it clearly dawned on writers that they wouldn’t have to come up with plot devices to make Banner angry; not if they could just make him into a colossal weenie and let his neuroses do the work. Banner was now an unlucky, clumsy fuck with anger management issues and deep-set feelings of abandonment. He’d be batting below average even if he hadn’t contracted a gamma-activated disease that ruined all his clothes and caused several million dollars worth of damage every time he stubbed his toe. It definitely got difficult to listen to though:
Sidekick: Hey Bruce, we’ve run out of milk. I’m going to the shops. Be careful if you go outside, the army are still looking for you.
Bruce: Why won’t they just leave me alone? God, what have I done to deserve this curse?
Sidekick: Christ Bruce, I’m just going out for fucking milk. You will be FINE watching Sesame Street in your pyjamas till I get back.
Bruce: They’ll never stop looking for me, never. I can’t cope with this pressure! I can’t cope with this—huuurgh… gah!”
Sidekick: Oh for God’s sake, I swear this is-- *SMASH* Argh! My limited edition Dodi and Diana collectors plates!
I can’t remember the exact issue number but I’m pretty sure I’ve transcribed that scene with at least 95% accuracy.
Basically Banner had no need to get angry if going on a five-star whinge was enough to Hulk him out. And seeing as Banner made whinging into a hobby, comic book readers were safe in the knowledge that him making a sad face was guaranteed to lead to a tank being picked up by its barrel and swung through a petrol station.
This was all done in the name of character development, so that the people that read the book could successfully pretend that they weren’t only reading it to see the Hulk pick up two cars and wear them like boxing gloves. In the issues where Banner is the Hulk the entire time the plot can wear a little... thin. There’s an issues from the mid seventies where the Hulk fights his own shadow. For the entire issue. And it’s a draw. (The evil shadow monster is defeated by some automated floodlights. Really)
It was nice of them to bother, and completely unnecessary, because let me tell you this: if I had the Hulk serum pumping through my veins, I’d Hulk out at least four times a day. And I consider myself a relatively placid person. I like to think I have quite a long fuse, especially in my dealings with other people, but even I have a few seconds of incandescent rage a day. About a week ago I bought a copy of the video game Mass Effect. I’ve wanted to play it for ages and, as previously discussed, my Xbox normally just sits gloomily under the telly with nothing to do, so I was kittenish with excitement as I popped the game in and turned it on. I had got about as far as the ‘enter your name’ screen when I noticed the Xbox was making a loud noise, and that I had inadvertently covered the fan port by placing it too close to the wall. I didn’t want it to overheat, so I leant forward and slid the machine forwards. In doing so, I jogged the disc playing inside the machine, irreparably damaging it. Pure, distilled fury shot up through my torso. If my subsequent actions could have matched my anger, my parents would have come home to a house in ruins, with me sitting on the ruined stairs, wearing tattered jeans and a ‘what can you do?’ expression.
Examples today: accidentally deleting the wrong episode of a show I’d Sky+’sd. (That’s the correct way to write that, yeah?) Dropping my laptop charger on my foot on the way down the stairs. Discovering that the automatic address correction on Amazon has sent the new copy of Mass Effect I ordered to the wrong place. Hulk SMASH.
I’m lucky, therefore, that I’m not the Incredible Hulk. I’d be a nightmare to live with (and I’m a hassle even now). But the ease with which I mock Brucie Banner losing his rag means I should be able to see the funny side of my own rages. Which of course I can’t, because there’s NOTHING funny about the world being specifically out to get me. But it makes me wonder which is healthier, to try and suppress those occasional, flashing bouts of wrath or to just let them out quickly and forget about them. Who hasn’t felt better after a good, loud “Oh for FUCK’S SAKE!” Actually there’s an argument that angry behaviour can be self-reinforcing, but it’s my blog and I’ll ignore what I want to, all right?
Maybe the reason I can keep my temper in public is because I lose it so frequently in private. It seems silly to really enjoy losing your cool over a minor thing that can’t be fixed, but all that rage has got to come out somehow. If Bruce Banner had been a real guy, I’m sure he would have been pretty chillaxed in between rampages.
Admittedly I’d have less to get angry about if I wasn’t such a clumsy fuck myself, so I feel like a share a kinship with Dr. Banner. Every time I see him rage out over some minor obstacle I wonder to myself, “Would I have dealt with the same situation so smash stuff up-ingly?” The answer is invariably yes.
So I’m going to let my fury flag fly when I’m angry about small things, that don’t affect anyone but me; so the big problems come around, I hope I can keep my anger in check as much as is appropriate. And if you don’t agree… well then I’ll just have to smash YOU.
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