Anger management

 Anger management 

“I read what you wrote,” Roz said.
     “You’re doing more of that lately,” I said. “Why?”
     “I almost always read what you write. I just don’t often say anything about it.”
     “Oh,” I said. My left ear was buzzing again. “But you have something to say this time.”
     “Yes.”
     I waited. The buzzing stopped and started again: it’s like a cricket that can’t stop screaming. It doesn’t go buzz-buzz-buzz; it goes zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz on the D above the D above high-C – on our piano, which is out of tune. I waited.
     “You sounded angry,” Roz said.
     “Oh.” Then: I was afraid of that.”
     Now Roz waited.
     “I was angry, but I didn’t want to sound angry.”
     “Why?”
     “Maybe only to you,” I said hopefully. “I sounded angry maybe only to you – you know me so well.”
     “But why were you?”
     “Angry?”
     “Yes!” Now she was trying not to sound angry. And she was succeeding. She wasn’t succeeding in not sounding impatient, however.
     “When people are illogical, it upsets me,” I said. “Smart people. But if they have an opinion about something and they’ve decided they’re right, which they pretty much always do, they just bang ahead and argue it any which way. They don’t think that d doesn’t follow k.”
     “Or that you can’t draw a straight line from one place to another because there are hills in between.”
     “And ditches. More ditches than hills. They think they’re leading blind men and there are no ditches.”
     “Yes,” Roz said because she knows about Jesus the same as I do. What he said about the blind leading the blind, only this case the lead-ers weren’t blind, they just didn’t believe in ditches. But ditches there were, every ten yards or so.

Flat-screen, cellphone drawing by m ball

 “Are you watching that?” Roz said because I was sitting in front of the flat-screen, and there were pictures skating across it but there was no sound coming from it.
     The screen was in front of me. Roz was standing to the right of it but closer to me. The farther-away pictures were of golfers. The sound was off because the golfers were accompanied by commentators. I like to listen to the swish and click of the clubs hitting the balls, but you can’t do that without voices telling you about what the clubs and balls are thinking, as if they could. More illogic.
     “I was,” I said, “but I don’t have to.” And I turned it off. “Why?” I said.
     “I wanted to ask you about your medication,” she said. I waited. “Are you taking it?”
     “Yes,” I said. “Some of it,” I said. I looked at the TV as if the golfers might have come back on of their own accord. They had not.
     “Most of it,” I said. “Most of the time.”

09.18.21