HOW TO KEEP CALM: Anger Management 101

There will come a time when you cannot take it anymore.

Something has snapped.
You realize that every time a Bad Thing has happened, a single fist has been forming inside of you, built upon nothing but hateful thoughts and violent actions that have gone unexpressed your entire life.
All waiting for this moment.

Your hands close up like frightened pillbugs, and anger rises in your chest like a tree catching fire.

In your scattered, shaking mind, you see the gumball machine shatter to the floor. Your knuckles beat through walls, beat him down, your knees hold his chest to the floor. Your hands close around his neck. Windows are shattered. Neckties are bloodied. The vending machine is broken into, and all of the Twix bars are gone. 

But then you realize that children are watching. You cannot kill anyone or break anything because people would be traumatized and you would go to jail, and then probably end up in an asylum. You have a sinking feeling, in this moment, that maybe you belong there.

The wall is waiting for your fist.

You have to keep calm. You cannot lose it again. Not again. Not after what happened.

And so, here is a public service announcement to help you keep calm and not break gumball machines, brought to you by, yours truly, The Tree Monster © .

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1. DON'T LOOK.

If you can't see it, it isn't happening. Your eyes are locked on the event of madness, and you know a terrible injustice is being done, but you also know you cannot do anything, so you just look away.

Do not look.

Do not look.

See? Perfect! Like nothing's even happening.

2. Hum a tune.

Getting a song in your head distracts from any possible outburst of anger, and helps you to relax, by focusing on something other than the madness. Something more important than whatever's making you angry. 

Like how to hit those high notes.

3. Breathe.

You might forget how to.

4. Count.

You might forget how to.

5. Curl up into a ball.

Pretend you're a turtle! Everybody loves turtles!

6. Scream.

Try keeping it muffled, please.

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After following these steps, you will find your anger has diminished quite a bit, and you no longer have the urge to burst. You are now completely cooled down, and ready to move on in life and society. The fist inside of you has opened and calmed and sits relaxed inside of your heart, never threatening to close again. 

Just remember to never, ever release that anger, and, whatever you do, 

KEEP CALM.

A Handwriting Story

It was only after looking at it this closely that I realized, at this point in my life, my handwriting looks so much like Elmer's.

When me and him were six, every day in class we'd have to practice tracing over letters and U.S states to improve our handwriting. I seriously don't know why the teacher didn't separate us, because every day he'd be writing speedy-fast to make me mad and I'd be writing speedy-fast to catch up with him and he'd look over at my paper and I'd look over at his paper and he would beat me by a single split-second, every single day. We would jump up noisily at almost the same instant, rush over and give it to the teacher, while the rest of the class was still on the 'W' of 'Wisconsin'.

Because of this, we both just have really shoddy handwriting.

Since you only ever hear from me by blogging, you only ever hear my voice in one font. I posted this so that, the next time I blog something, instead of imagining a grumpy teenage tree monster typing away in the dark by itself, you can imagine a six-year-old girl shoving her best friend off his desk and writing the word 'Mississippi' on the dotted line with a hurried wrist and a chewed-up broken Ticonderoga pencil.

I still like Elmer's handwriting better.

That stupid kid...

A Moment of Shame in a Kitchen

My sister standing in the kitchen eating ice cream. "So, what's new?"

Me, standing across from her with my finger marking the place left in a book. "Oh, you know. Just..." waving the book above me, "working on a book."

Realizing what that must have sounded like to someone who wasn't watching. "You're writing a book?!"

"No, no! Just...I was...I wasn't...no..." I was rambling. I shook my head. "No...no, I'm not."

I sighed. Looked around. Ran away.

A Thought on Tire Swings

Tire swings look like this.

Sometimes they also look like this.

For me, they always look like this, and this is the tire swing we're going to be talking about tonight.

These are usually located at neighborhood parks by the other swings. They are attached singularly by three chains tied to a heavy-duty coil connected to a large iron pole system that touches the ground at four separate points, which also serve as boundary lines of how far the tire swing can and will go to crush wandering children under its speed and force.

These tires can be ridden in two main ways.

1-
One kid sits in the tire with their back against one third of the tire and their legs hanging off the other two thirds, with their bottom in the middle and their hands grasping desperately on two of the chains. The other kids push them.

2- 
All the kids sit in the tire, circling it, with their bottoms on the tire edge and their feet in front of them, holding on to a piece of chain or whoever is closest to a piece of chain, as some creepy uncle or lonely teenager or scaredy-cat pushes them.

The thing about these tire swings is that you absolutely cannot play with them by yourself. It just doesn't work.
This is because

1- Your weight is only focused on one third of the tire, and the imbalance prevents it from being used properly.

and

2- You cannot push yourself.

That's because of the science of the tire swing. With normal swings, it is fun and relaxing and you can pump your legs and watch the clouds and stay there forever all by yourself. But with the tire swings? Absolute death. Screaming and crying and clutching the dirty chains with dirty little hands, little-kid arm muscles straining, sinews snapping as you spin. This is because tire swings do not just swing, and they do not just spin.

They spin inside of a spin, and they swing inside of a swing.

They are death inside of death, and they are fear inside of fear.

I was at a park sitting in a tire swing today with my two-year-old sister, and was gently spinning and swinging the best I could with no one to push us, when six little kids with skinny brown legs and lollipops in their mouths walked up and stood there watching us. Accepting that we were outnumbered, I quietly removed ourselves from the situation and stood outside of the death boundaries and watched the six kids play.

There are two kinds of kids on the playground, and there are two kinds of people on the earth. There are the ones in the tire, and there are the ones outside of the tire.

The kids inside the tire are there for one of 5 reasons:
1- They like the feeling of death.
2- They don't want to be left out.
3- They were dared to.
4- They like to.
5- They're hopelessly in love with the kid who wanted to push.

The kids outside the tire are there for one of reasons:
1- They like the feeling of murder.
2- They want to prove their strength.
3- They were forced to by whiny kids.
4- They like to.
5- They're hopelessly in love with the kid who wanted to swing.

Most kids are both, and for all the reasons above.

I like watching kids play on the tire swing. It forces strangers to benefit from strangers and friends to benefit from friends, and when you're spinning at 40 miles an hour and the tears are being sucked from your eyes and your shoes fall off and your thin little fingers start to slip, and every tiny muscle in your body is pulling and straining and it feels like you're dying, you know you're not alone.

You can never be alone, with a tire swing.


And that's where I want to die.

Sometimes Oscar just has to be a dinosaur.

I was at a shop with my dad when he ran into this old friend. She had a three or four year old son named Oscar who was hiding behind her dress. When my dad tried to say hello to him, he made a "RCHAAAAAAAAH!" sound and ran back to hide. Oscar's mother apologized by saying,

"Sorry, sometimes he just has to be a dinosaur."

Sometimes we all just have to be a dinosaur.

The Goodbye Limbo

Life is a constant goodbye. But after every goodbye, there comes a hello.

When you're going for a walk, and you pass by a rosebush, you keep walking, and the rosebush stays. You said goodbye to the bush. You moved on. But then, see, you get to say hello to a mailbox or something up ahead. If you had stayed with the rosebush and never left, you would never have known there was a mailbox up there waiting for you.

When you drink coffee in the morning, you're saying goodbye to the night and hello to the day. Your dream has successfully been forgotten, and reality slowly kicks in with the flow of caffeine in your veins.

Every time you learn something, you're saying goodbye to a piece of your ignorance. Unlike the rosebush, which you can always walk past again, once ignorance is gone, you will never see it again.

Unless, like how the daytime forces you to forget your dream, you forget the knowledge you learned. Then, you don't have to leave your ignorance.

But you do. You really do.

That's the thing about goodbyes. Because they are a constant state of life, you absolutely HAVE to have them. You cannot sit for your entire life beside a rosebush you walked past one day on a walk. You cannot live in the dream you had last night, or spend your life in ignorance. Life is not about saying goodbye, for life is really a constant hello. If you never said goodbye to the rosebush or the dream or the bit of stupidity, you would never say hello to the mailbox or the morning or the bit of intelligence.

These are small things though. It takes only moments to reach the mailbox from the bush. It takes only minutes for caffeine to wake you up when you're halfway done with a blog post. And it takes hardly anything to look up the word 'tacit' in a dictionary and use it at a very sad party enough times to remember it forever.

I've noticed that, with larger, longer, more meaningful goodbyes, there's a bigger space between the goodbye and the hello. There's a sort of Limbo of Nothing involved. There's a waiting room.

The people sit with wide eyes and sweaty palms, staring at magazines but never flipping the pages, looking around and sighing and crying and whining and dying and waiting and waiting for something, anything, to say hello to.

When a goodbye is big - such as leaving a town, or losing a friend - we know we must wait for a hello that is just as big as the goodbye. A new town, a new friend. Not a mailbox. Not a word in a dictionary.

This waiting time is a time of trust. We trust, in the end, that the inevitable hello will come. But while we wait. While the goodbye is fresh and sweet in our hearts, while the loss seems so great and the future so insignificant, what can we do but wait? And for how long? A day? A month? A year? What if we're so busy grieving a loss we ignore every possible welcome that could heal it?

What if we wait our whole lives?

These are the thoughts that come when the mug is half full in my hand and the coffee means nothing at all. The dream is long forgotten.

As if it were never even ever there.

My glasses are smudged and smeared and I can't care enough to clean them, so I just rub them tiredly with my hands until they're nothing but blur and lines of light. I can't think of what I should be thinking because the thoughts that are there are too large and real to shove aside. And every fear    I can remember is suddenly at my doorstep, and another thought comes, and the thought crowds out all else until my hands are shaking and the mug is black and empty.

What if I can't remember?

If you say goodbye and forget whatever happened before that point, then it is as if it never happened.

Memories come at strange moments. While I'm lying on my sister's bed hugging a bear, I remember a line of dialogue as I stared out the window as a kid I knew got knocked out cold by a soccer ball: "You're so in love with him, aren't you." While I set my dog's water bowl down on the concrete, I remember being asked by a first-grade classroom if I was happy, or happy-plus, or happy-plus-plus, and not having the heart to tell them I hadn't been happy-plus-plus in a long, long time. While I'm twisting my camera lens closed at a party, I remember a kid in the middle of the street in the rain, twisting an imaginary gun sideways, behind him and in front of him, between his legs, turning back to look at me as I fall onto a cold, rainy parked car, laughing.

If I someday forget these things, and if everyone involved in the memory forgets it too, then there is no proof that it ever happened. Without the memory of the fall and the catch, it is simply a broken branch and a footprint on a rock. Anyone could have broken it. Anyone could have fallen. But the thing is, it was you.

When you say goodbye to a physical thing - like a person, or a place - the only comfort to find is in the memories. In the memories that come at random moments, during songs and meals and random actions that shouldn't remind you of anything, but that somehow make you cry in the middle of a dance floor in the dark and in the loud and no one can hear the goodbye echoing through you as you hold on to the memory and force yourself not to forget it.


I forgot my dream last night.

I don't know what it was about.

I don't even know if it ever happened.

So, it probably didn't. Right? There's nothing to say goodbye to if you don't remember anything that happened. You can just enjoy the hello of daytime, in a blanket on a Saturday morning, saying hello without ever having to say goodbye.

I hate the waiting limbo. I hate the in-between space between goodbye and hello. What am I supposed to do? I have to do something. I know I'm just going to have to keep walking until I reach the mailbox, but it's so far I can't see it, so how do I know it'll even be there when I reach it?

There's no way to know when the next hello comes.

After the goodbye, all you can do is wait.





(PS: I'm allergic to coffee.)