BillLindau

Or, the story of Little Chrissakes

One way to make people laugh: Lose your temper
From The Post, Troy, N.C., April 2005
By Bill Lindau
I wish I had five dollars for every time I cussed out somebody more than he/she deserves and felt silly for my outburst an hour or so later. You may feel good right after you do it, after such a buildup of frustrations, but when you cool off you start thinking you might have made a fool of yourself.
I think about all of us can use a little help keeping our cool at some time or another. I think the two best ways are to find a level-headed, diplomatic way to tell the offending person what’s made out so mad, and find a way to laugh at it sooner or later. Don’t just stew about it too long or blow up at the slightest provocation.
I’ve learned the hard way what can happen when you let your temper get the better of you. You can get fired, drive your friends away, and the businesses and services you depend on will take their own sweet time getting around to you, because they’d rather not deal with you.
It can also take its toll on your health. Research reported in a Washington Post feature indicates the release of stress hormones from anger and other negative emotions can have such detrimental effects as suppressing the immune system and restricting blood vessels. This includes hormones such as adrenalin and cortical, the ones that gear up the body in a “fight or flight” situation. In my own case, sometimes when I get het up over something, I’ll start having an asthma attack. I’ve never had an asthma attack from a good mood.
And, as I said before, you can make a fool of yourself.
It’s amazing how that kind of karma can work against you. Sometimes it can bite you in the tuchus at that very moment.
Here are some instances I can think of, including one in which somebody put on the proverbial brakes in the nick of time:
Shortly after I finished high school, I had a little party on the basement of my parents’ house. The gas heater hung from the ceiling, low enough to be at forehead level, with the grid in the living room where it generated heat. During this little get-together, “Linda” got mad at her boyfriend. The argument escalated to the point where Linda stood up and started walking out. As she was walking, she turned around to give “Alan” another salvo of abuse. Not looking where she was going, she hit her head on the metal corner of the heater.
Not that I took pleasure in anybody getting hurt on the family property, but I think it‘s the worst sort of manners to fight with your companion in another person‘s house. The thing to do when you have an argument brewing is to go get away from everybody before you have it out. Linda’s accident with the heater corner didn’t cause any serious injury, but it taught her a lesson about popping off like that.
In another instance, a young man was acting macho with his car one Saturday evening. “Davey” whipped it into a nightclub parking lot. The 20-year-old car hit a bump in the pavement at such a high speed that it knocked something loose in the chassis.
The 1956 Chevrolet station wagon sputtered to a halt, and you could hear something on the underside of the car scraping along the pavement. “Davey” looked under it, went into the bar and got a mechanically inclined friend to help him out.
The damage was so bad they‘d have to call a certified mechanic, and in those pre-AAA days there was none to be found at that time of night.
Davey and his friend pushed the car into a lot across the street, and Davey pitched the biggest public temper tantrum you ever heard in your life. He beat on the hood, the top and the windows as he screamed curses at the top of his lungs, and at one point got out a tire tool and beat on the car with that, until he broke the front window. This commotion got the crowd out of the night club, and about 20 people stood around gawking at this bit of street theatre. Some people were laughing at it. Everybody knew what caused it and nobody bothered to help him. The nightclub didn’t have live entertainment, but Davey sure provided some that night.
This happened more than 30 years ago, but the people who witnessed it still laugh about it.
Confucius had a saying, “If you plot revenge, you must first dig two graves.“ A friend of mine heard pharmacist Joe Graedon say that on a segment of the National Public Radio program “The People’s Pharmacy”. A friend of mine heard this show, which dealt with the ill effects of long-term resentment.
Unfortunately, “Chandler” had an unresolved issue of his own. He had lost a job several years ago, and although he later found another job and even liked it better, he still stewed sometimes over the way his former supervisor treated him.
Around the anniversary of his departure from that company, Chandler went out for a jog early one weekend morning. He was about a block from his old plant when he finished jogging. At that moment, he felt a call of nature and decided to answer it -- in the company’s parking lot. There was nobody working in the plant at the time, and so he figured it wouldn’t be doing that much harm.
As he walked to the plant, Chandler changed his mind about this particular act, but he had to go so badly that the lot was the only secluded place he could go. He started across an adjacent parking lot to carry out what he had originally planned.
This adjacent lot was being resurfaced -- and it had a portable toilet for the work crew.
Chandler dashed into it and did his stuff, sparing his old employer’s property, without carrying out an act of vengeance that he would have certainly felt silly about later.
“I don’t believe that happened,“ Chandler said. “It’s like, Somebody Up There put that portable toilet in my path, like it was a way of telling me to back off and put it behind me.“
“I hated that boss for years. I kept my mouth shut at the time he was letting me go, knowing he was prepared to call the police if I lost it. I wanted to bad to go in there and chew him to the bone after that,“ He added.
“It’s been a week since that time I stopped myself from doing my business in the plant parking lot -- or I think more accurately, Somebody Up There stopped me,“ Chandler said. “But you know what? I don’t have the anger spells I used to have after I got fired. I‘m not going to go over there and say, ‘Let‘s be buddies again,’ but I‘ve just quit stewing over it and having all these fantasies of throwing Molotov cocktails and siccing rabid Rottweilers on the manager. Thoughts like that have just stopped burrowing into my head.“
I had planned to include among these anecdotes an encounter between a friend of mine and his rather vindictive neighbor, in which the neighbor got his come-uppance. Before I started this column, however, my friend “Ross” asked me not to put down the details, and so I‘m respecting his wishes.
“I don’t want him thinking he can still push my buttons,“ Ross said. “I have bigger things to deal with than this dumb feud. The difference between him and a gnat buzzing around your head is, you can’t use an insect repellent on his species. It’d be nice if you could. End of subject, man.“
One last little tale: Writing this column brought back a childhood memory.
When I was 12 or 13 I used to catch bees and fireflies inside jars, poking holes in the lids so they could breathe. I let them go after awhile and even put things in the jars that I thought they could eat.
One bumblebee I caught didn’t exactly appreciate my hospitality, so he (she?) started buzzing up a storm. It was a hot July day and my parents and I were sitting around in the dining room. The jar with the bumblebee sat on one of the cabinets, with the unwitting tenant carrying on. Well, after awhile, that buzzing got on my father’s nerves so badly, he cried out, “Oh, for (Pete‘s) sake!”
Suddenly the room fell silent. The bumblebee had shut up at the exact moment of Dad’s outburst.
Mom and I almost fell on the floor with laughter. It was as if this five-foot-seven ogre had scared the wits out of my little friend. At that moment Mom and I gave the bumblebee a name: “Little Petessakes.“ (NOTE by the author: My father really said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” and the bumblebee was christened -- pardon the pun -- Little Chrissakes. I took the liberty of euphemizing my father’s exclamation for the sake of publication).
Then I went outside with the jar and set Little Chrissakes (the insect’s real name) free.
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Contact reporter Bill Lindau at blindau52@yahoo.com or (910) 582-6610.

posted by Bill Lindau @ 3:48 PM