Wednesday
Then: Anger
“Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself,
And so shall starve with feeding.”
William Shakespeare
"Anger as soon as fed is dead
'Tis starving makes it fat."
Emily Dickinson
In earlier chapters I wrote about external forces, behaviors and internal attitudes as probable triggers to the onset or advancement of disease. Depending on your propensity to pop a cork, anger actually might occupy the most insidious role in the charade of life as a seemingly modern man.
Even today I often ask: Could anger be the possible culprit that sets off my remaining cancer again in the future? After all, if even one hormonally insensitive cancer cell thumbs its nose at my drug therapy, it can trudge along on a nasty mission.
Another quote from Susan Sontag is interesting to me: “With the modern diseases, the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease – because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.”
Whether the following stories of flaming anger were or will be contributors to my disease before and in the future, I have no idea. But it underscores a subtle change in me post surgery. Most of my friends know me as either liking most people or staying tolerant of those with interpersonal flaws. However, I have had a ‘bemusing’ dark underside for many years. It’s based on a statement I’d often made to my closest friends: “Assholes Must Be Punished.”
What did I mean by this? As I think about it, it stems from a deep-rooted anger that swirled and boiled around inside me fairly often, but rarely erupted. What triggered this anger in the past were my encounters with people who weren't simply acting obnoxious or mean-spirited, but instead acted like they were smart and right when in reality I knew they are stupid and misguided in behavior, and ignorant about how to live and work with civility.
My family has only seen me erupt in anger a couple of times, and I know it shook the kids to the core because they still talk in fearful tones about Dad’s ‘freak outs.’ Once I lit into a pimply-faced snack bar teen who’d probably just smoked a joint on break after he served us food that was ice cold. Another time I was in an office for a limo service to a New York airport, and despite having a ticket for a specific trip, the counter man would not let me in the limo because I’d didn’t call to confirm. My screaming made him call a second limo to haul me, the mental patient, alone to the airport.
My mantra of the past almost got me in trouble once. When we moved to the Twin Cities from Des Moines and rented our house to another couple, they broke the lease. I decided to sue them in small claims court and an attorney friend, Buzz Bennett, assigned a new young attorney in his office to my case.
On the court date during cross examination by the couple’s attorney, he asked me at one point, “Mr. Garretson, do you live your life by a certain credo?” My attorney, realizing what was happening, immediately objected and asked to approach the bench. In writing Buzz to say I wanted to pursue the case, I had signed off by saying something like: “As I’ve always said, ass…..” And my attorney had turned over copies of documents in my file to the other lawyer. She explained to the judge that this was a friend-to-friend exchange, so the judge ruled that I did not have to go on record with this proclamation.
During the year before and after surgery, I examined the past brushes with anger mentioned above, and the following two instances. And I changed after that.
I still shudder at the event four years ago when a chap I’ll call Eddie touched off physically disabling anger that I’d never known before.
I’ll call this chap Eddie, based on the Leave it to Beaver character, Eddie Haskell. One review characterized Eddie as ‘oily’ and ‘weasel-ly’.
Eddie was a smooth-talking ‘Internet consultant’. I had offered him leads and tips in the past, but nothing ever happened with them because his consulting really had no depth to it. In this case, he had a client that I was certain would want to talk to me about leading their new business new team because my experience matched their needs so closely. Eddie knew this too. Yet, despite numerous detailed email and snapshot voicemails explaining the win/win of his recommending me for the team, as the deadline approached he returned not one message.
What happened to me the day of the deadline? I of course had heard the term about being so mad that your blood boils, but to have it literally happen is unsettling. I was standing in line at a restaurant to order lunch when it felt like my head and whole body was full of molten lava. I had to wheel on my heels, and with some difficulty, walk about 20 paces out the door to a bench outside and sit down. It probably took nearly a minute for me to regain my composure.
Whether anger like this affected my prostate disease, I can’t say. But it wasn’t good.
Today Eddie seems to have found his true calling. As a recently elected government official, he is doing a marvelous job of squinting his eyes and squaring his jaw for very earnest-sounding proclamations in front of TV news cameras.
I tell this story as a way to set up a similar story post-surgery to reflect on my possible progress in controlling anger as a way to stay healthier now.
For my job I needed some writing assistance. I hired a guy I’d known a long time. I’ll call him Nathan, based on Martin Short’s sniveling lawyer character Nathan Thurm, who, when he was backed Into a corner with the truth behind his mistruths, was always proclaiming.. “I know that.”
I had been in touch with Nathan for the year prior because he had a startup company concept, and I had contacts to help him among potential investors, advisors and staff mem bers. I was a bit nervous about Nathan because of contacts at companies where he had been involved in the past. There was cloud of doubt about whether Nathan was a valued contributor to any of these efforts. When asked, these contacts would stay pretty tight-lipped, or Minnesota nice.
In any event, I needed some writing done on a deadline and Nathan portrayed himself as a highly skilled writer for my genre, talking about winning a national writing award, a fact that may be true, but the voluminous Internet didn’t seem to hold any confirming information.
His initial work should have sounded a warn ing, especially as I felt tinges of anger at his failure to respond to requests and suggestions from me, his client. The anger really started to mount the week before he was to complete his assignment because he stopped working on the project and instead started to concentrate on verbally battling with me on topics where he was in the wrong. It was my project, not his.
When I told him I needed him to stop and listen to me, his client, and rework his drafts, he went completely passive aggressive as the deadline neared, and simply stopped responding to my multiple emails and voicemails.
So, with lessons learned from the past, I simply did not let my anger boil over. My wife saw me sulking around the house and tossing and turning at night and she told me in no uncertain terms to “fix it, now!”
So, I fired Nathan, only to spend the weekend before the deadline completing the project myself. The firing took the form of an email where I simply said things didn’t work out. No insults or emotion. Just a simple request ˜for the sake of my health˜ that we both simply move on.
I’m still shocked that the Thurmeister decided to ignore this request and pile on me for weeks, simply for the sake of his bruised ego. I started to get voicemails and emails full of ridiculous and blasphemous folderol. I read a couple of emails the first few days, deleted all his voicemails at the first whiny tone, and then simply ignored everything else.
In order to keep my emotions in check, I refused to participate in Nathan’s vituperative and petty shenanigans. I did feel my blood begin to percolate a few times when I heard about the manure he was slinging to other people, and frankly, I’m worried about effects of even these brief, seemingly innocuous slips of anger, on my cellular well being, especially after a rise in my PSA right after this.
Not only did Nathan throw another hissy fit when he wasn’t paid for 90 percent of his contract, even though he completed less than half the assignment, he had the further audacity to poke my anger button again by writing to ask that I not tell others about his actions.
He then ‘piled on’ my boss with lies, and in a weak moment because of his own shaky footing in the company, my boss capitulated and paid Thurmy. The result? My boss soon asked me to step down because he took it as a personal affront that I had fought so vehemently against his decision to pay NT. And the end result of that was a grant of 2,000 shares of company stock I had as part of my employment agreement went ‘poof’ three month prior to their vesting, and I was out 10s of 1000s of dollars. And so, with simple shake of the head, the last thing I’ll ever do for him is honor this request by masking his name as the snake of sophistry, Mr. Thurm. ¶ 1:52 PM
And so shall starve with feeding.”
William Shakespeare
"Anger as soon as fed is dead
'Tis starving makes it fat."
Emily Dickinson
In earlier chapters I wrote about external forces, behaviors and internal attitudes as probable triggers to the onset or advancement of disease. Depending on your propensity to pop a cork, anger actually might occupy the most insidious role in the charade of life as a seemingly modern man.
Even today I often ask: Could anger be the possible culprit that sets off my remaining cancer again in the future? After all, if even one hormonally insensitive cancer cell thumbs its nose at my drug therapy, it can trudge along on a nasty mission.
Another quote from Susan Sontag is interesting to me: “With the modern diseases, the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease – because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.”
Whether the following stories of flaming anger were or will be contributors to my disease before and in the future, I have no idea. But it underscores a subtle change in me post surgery. Most of my friends know me as either liking most people or staying tolerant of those with interpersonal flaws. However, I have had a ‘bemusing’ dark underside for many years. It’s based on a statement I’d often made to my closest friends: “Assholes Must Be Punished.”
What did I mean by this? As I think about it, it stems from a deep-rooted anger that swirled and boiled around inside me fairly often, but rarely erupted. What triggered this anger in the past were my encounters with people who weren't simply acting obnoxious or mean-spirited, but instead acted like they were smart and right when in reality I knew they are stupid and misguided in behavior, and ignorant about how to live and work with civility.
My family has only seen me erupt in anger a couple of times, and I know it shook the kids to the core because they still talk in fearful tones about Dad’s ‘freak outs.’ Once I lit into a pimply-faced snack bar teen who’d probably just smoked a joint on break after he served us food that was ice cold. Another time I was in an office for a limo service to a New York airport, and despite having a ticket for a specific trip, the counter man would not let me in the limo because I’d didn’t call to confirm. My screaming made him call a second limo to haul me, the mental patient, alone to the airport.
My mantra of the past almost got me in trouble once. When we moved to the Twin Cities from Des Moines and rented our house to another couple, they broke the lease. I decided to sue them in small claims court and an attorney friend, Buzz Bennett, assigned a new young attorney in his office to my case.
On the court date during cross examination by the couple’s attorney, he asked me at one point, “Mr. Garretson, do you live your life by a certain credo?” My attorney, realizing what was happening, immediately objected and asked to approach the bench. In writing Buzz to say I wanted to pursue the case, I had signed off by saying something like: “As I’ve always said, ass…..” And my attorney had turned over copies of documents in my file to the other lawyer. She explained to the judge that this was a friend-to-friend exchange, so the judge ruled that I did not have to go on record with this proclamation.
During the year before and after surgery, I examined the past brushes with anger mentioned above, and the following two instances. And I changed after that.
I still shudder at the event four years ago when a chap I’ll call Eddie touched off physically disabling anger that I’d never known before.
I’ll call this chap Eddie, based on the Leave it to Beaver character, Eddie Haskell. One review characterized Eddie as ‘oily’ and ‘weasel-ly’.
Eddie was a smooth-talking ‘Internet consultant’. I had offered him leads and tips in the past, but nothing ever happened with them because his consulting really had no depth to it. In this case, he had a client that I was certain would want to talk to me about leading their new business new team because my experience matched their needs so closely. Eddie knew this too. Yet, despite numerous detailed email and snapshot voicemails explaining the win/win of his recommending me for the team, as the deadline approached he returned not one message.
What happened to me the day of the deadline? I of course had heard the term about being so mad that your blood boils, but to have it literally happen is unsettling. I was standing in line at a restaurant to order lunch when it felt like my head and whole body was full of molten lava. I had to wheel on my heels, and with some difficulty, walk about 20 paces out the door to a bench outside and sit down. It probably took nearly a minute for me to regain my composure.
Whether anger like this affected my prostate disease, I can’t say. But it wasn’t good.
Today Eddie seems to have found his true calling. As a recently elected government official, he is doing a marvelous job of squinting his eyes and squaring his jaw for very earnest-sounding proclamations in front of TV news cameras.
I tell this story as a way to set up a similar story post-surgery to reflect on my possible progress in controlling anger as a way to stay healthier now.
For my job I needed some writing assistance. I hired a guy I’d known a long time. I’ll call him Nathan, based on Martin Short’s sniveling lawyer character Nathan Thurm, who, when he was backed Into a corner with the truth behind his mistruths, was always proclaiming.. “I know that.”
I had been in touch with Nathan for the year prior because he had a startup company concept, and I had contacts to help him among potential investors, advisors and staff mem bers. I was a bit nervous about Nathan because of contacts at companies where he had been involved in the past. There was cloud of doubt about whether Nathan was a valued contributor to any of these efforts. When asked, these contacts would stay pretty tight-lipped, or Minnesota nice.
In any event, I needed some writing done on a deadline and Nathan portrayed himself as a highly skilled writer for my genre, talking about winning a national writing award, a fact that may be true, but the voluminous Internet didn’t seem to hold any confirming information.
His initial work should have sounded a warn ing, especially as I felt tinges of anger at his failure to respond to requests and suggestions from me, his client. The anger really started to mount the week before he was to complete his assignment because he stopped working on the project and instead started to concentrate on verbally battling with me on topics where he was in the wrong. It was my project, not his.
When I told him I needed him to stop and listen to me, his client, and rework his drafts, he went completely passive aggressive as the deadline neared, and simply stopped responding to my multiple emails and voicemails.
So, with lessons learned from the past, I simply did not let my anger boil over. My wife saw me sulking around the house and tossing and turning at night and she told me in no uncertain terms to “fix it, now!”
So, I fired Nathan, only to spend the weekend before the deadline completing the project myself. The firing took the form of an email where I simply said things didn’t work out. No insults or emotion. Just a simple request ˜for the sake of my health˜ that we both simply move on.
I’m still shocked that the Thurmeister decided to ignore this request and pile on me for weeks, simply for the sake of his bruised ego. I started to get voicemails and emails full of ridiculous and blasphemous folderol. I read a couple of emails the first few days, deleted all his voicemails at the first whiny tone, and then simply ignored everything else.
In order to keep my emotions in check, I refused to participate in Nathan’s vituperative and petty shenanigans. I did feel my blood begin to percolate a few times when I heard about the manure he was slinging to other people, and frankly, I’m worried about effects of even these brief, seemingly innocuous slips of anger, on my cellular well being, especially after a rise in my PSA right after this.
Not only did Nathan throw another hissy fit when he wasn’t paid for 90 percent of his contract, even though he completed less than half the assignment, he had the further audacity to poke my anger button again by writing to ask that I not tell others about his actions.
He then ‘piled on’ my boss with lies, and in a weak moment because of his own shaky footing in the company, my boss capitulated and paid Thurmy. The result? My boss soon asked me to step down because he took it as a personal affront that I had fought so vehemently against his decision to pay NT. And the end result of that was a grant of 2,000 shares of company stock I had as part of my employment agreement went ‘poof’ three month prior to their vesting, and I was out 10s of 1000s of dollars. And so, with simple shake of the head, the last thing I’ll ever do for him is honor this request by masking his name as the snake of sophistry, Mr. Thurm. ¶ 1:52 PM
