Rage
I cut someone off today.
It was totally my fault, and I acknowledge and accept that. I was making a right on red, only checked oncoming traffic from the left, and darted into the lane just ahead of a minivan that was zipping in, making a left from the opposite corner of the intersection. (For anyone from Rockledge who is reading this: It’s the right you make turning onto Barnes from Murrell.)
In any case, I got the full blast of that woman’s horn. There was no accident, because I was quick to accelerate out of the turn and she braked in time. But there was plenty of anger. She honked twice, flipped me the bird in my rearview, and rolled down her window to yell something as I prepared to make a left turn out of the lane to my left.
I couldn’t hear her—I live in Florida, I drive with the windows up—but I’m sure it was some profanity with an exclamation point at the end.
And that was really the purpose of the exercise, wasn’t it? I wronged her; she got to be righteously angry and respond in kind. No one got hurt, and because anger just sort of diffuses when let out into the world like that, it’s fun, even cathartic, to let it go.
But this question kept popping up: Why get mad about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?
Like with everything else in my life, I thought about this in the context of something that happened on the Internet.
Deadspin’s new purge of commenters today (which is the second-most trafficked post on Deadspin today, behind Ozzie Guillen doing something unspeakably awesome with a baseball) reminded me of the last time that happened.
It eventually, indirectly, led to this (miss you, pictures), which led to this, which led to this. I was sincerely mad then; I get sincerely mad when I’m not taken seriously or dismissed, when my mom gets involved, or when something significantly injurious is done to me or to someone I love. That’s about it.
But the Internet makes tossed-off diatribes even easier than a extended middle finger. Someone has to see you, and your middle finger, for the bird to be effective; you can fire barbs at people anonymously on the Internet after a bit of gnashing and wailing at the keyboard, and never visit that site, read that blog, look at that person on Twitter, or watch one of that person’s YouTube vlogs again.
Sniping is cool, but it’s an ultimately lonely thing. Take someone down from afar and anonymously with a bon mot, and you’re just masturbating with your diction. Attach a name to it, though, and it gets better, because you can share it and gang up on people, and enjoy the second-best thing about snark—the first is that it’s infinite—it’s regarded as a valuable weapon in the writer’s arsenal in the 21st century.
Flipping the bird is done because you get to do it to someone, and in that moment, it’s you-on-me violence. A snarky comment is doing something to “someone,” but even though it takes a moment, it will likely last and could lead to something more. That’s got something to do with the permanence of words, whether agate on newsprint or Tahoma on WordPress, and the way a moment of rage can turn something on the Internet into a singed garden instead of the cigarette burn it would have caused in reality.
Anger, bizarrely, matters more on the Internet than it does in real life.
I can’t really replay getting the bird. But I can go back and look at pithy, pissy blog comments.
I wonder why I sometimes leave the latter and never flip the former.
