Wreck It Room

Rage. Rage. Rage. I ask a friend, what do you do with your rage? Where is your healthy outlet? How do you avoid burning it all down? Shoulders rise. Shoulders fall.

When I speak of my rage, I smile and laugh at the enormity. I shake my head and chuckle. To where shall it go?

I book tickets to Monster Jam as a solution for rage. Then, I no show the event. Even the biggest tires fall flat. The fuel I have to burn it’s too hot for those engines. The feelings can’t be run over.

Suggestions for a visit to the “Wreck it Room” have come my way more than once, when a twinkle of fury sparkles in my eye. I’ve never been one to be above novelty. And yet… it’s still a loss.

I picture the old television sets. Old furniture. The tossed out outdated PC’s and electronics. I see useless glass or metal or plastic. I see all these things as familiar, after trips to my local dump. They set these things aside from the garbage. These things are the garbage of the garbage. And, I see nothing precious in this, nothing breathtaking or relatable in the landscape, nothing real. I pity it. None of these things are like the things we’ve lost.

If I picture myself in a wreck room, it maybe need stocked like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. The sunrise, sunset, stars, the most abundant garden, the most precious face. Can you imagine stomaching the destruction of such a scene?

With a baseball bat go after all the things most tender, first. Take the sledge hammer, next. Swipe at the sweet low hanging fruit, so perfectly youthful and ripe. Take to the fragrant moon-sized rose blossoms, each red petal a puddle of blood, beaten till nothing but thorny stem and pulp remain. Pulverize the pearlescent seashell. Trash the perfect daisies thru the mud, without plucking the petals for their mystery. Me not.  Me not. Crush the avocado, smash the persimmon, hate the herbs, punch the peaches, wail on the watermelon, waste it all. Gasp so deeply you suck the oxygen from the room. Knock the walls down. Roll in mud. Scream till they all cover their ears. Fight to make it heard. Set fire to burn what’s left, through and through.

I see ashes and an exhausted girl covered in soot, sitting in a disaster with her head hanging low. She has lost her voice. What a senseless, incomprehensible loss. And, what a loss of energy. You know, I don’t think the wreck room is the right concept of catharsis for me… 

I have been going to the garden with my rage, though… ripping Bittersweet vines from blossoming branches. My arms don’t looks so crazy failing in all directions, when pulling at the vines this way. 

I still set a fire, but it’s to the dead wood I’ve collected from the cold season and it’s the unruly new growth that doesn’t belong. I’m warmed and humbled by the careful, mysterious, powerful alchemical release of fire, time over. The way the dry and the dead beg to be consumed, while the wet and lively bits resist, almost poetically taking their time in that heat.

I want my body to be as this fire, and for my rage to be my fuel. I want my voice to sound like the flames, hushed yet sharp like the crackle, whispering with a quiet roar. Those sounds that make us lean in and really listen.

I think rage is hot; it is profound. Around heat we warm. Around light we gather. With fuel, we go on.