Here's hoping the past isn't prologue

I received a piece of spam yesterday that, in the subject line, informed me that “being antiquated don’t matter,” and suggested that, via whatever the hell it was the spam was supposed to be marketing, I could look, and feel, years younger.
I said a lot of angry things in the general direction of the spammer, which is to say, at my monitor (which I also gave the finger), then I deleted the spam.
Of course, such a spectacle is hardly unusual. I spend a good portion of time saying angry words at my computer monitor and my TV, and giving the finger to both.
This is, of course, because I spend a great deal of my time actively engaged in being angry.
You may wonder why. Why am I so angry?
There are lots of reasons, many of which I’m sure date all the way back to my childhood, and I have no intention of delving into them here.
However, while I can’t/won’t give you any insight into what made me so angry in the first place, I can explain to you some of the things that keep me angry.
Let’s take an imaginative walk in Jon’s shoes, shall we?

It’s 6:30 Sunday evening and you’re getting into your car to go home. It’s been a long three days filled with a fair number of annoyances, but at least it’s all over now and you can go home to…
Well, what can you go home to? Your wife? No. Girlfriend? No.
Okay, so there won’t be anyone waiting for you when you get home, but at least once you’re there you can kick back and enjoy a nice cold beer, right?
Oh, wait. No, you can’t.
A relaxing cigarette?
Uh uh.
Okay, so you don’t have anyone waiting for you and you can’t engage in any of your former beloved pastimes, but at least you’ve got “Dead Like Me.”
For two more weeks, anyway.
In any case, whether you really have a reason to rush home or not, the fact of the matter is that your work week is over and, if for no other reason than sheer habit, you are in a rush to get home.
You make the turn onto the road that will lead you to the toll road. You need to move over two lanes to the left, and you don’t have a lot of time in which to do it. It’s not helping your mood any that there is someone in the lane next to you who keeps speeding up and slowing down in order to match your speed, preventing you from making the move. Finally, you floor it, move over a lane, continue to floor it, move over another lane, and slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the person who, seeing that you’ve made it into the lane and are behind him, feels that he needs to piss you off by inexplicably braking.
You make it onto the toll road and move uneventfully toward your exit.
There are two lanes that lead to your exit, and, ideally, the two lanes would split into three, each one leading to a different toll booth.
Recently, for over a month and a half, one of the toll booth lanes was closed for them to do…something. Exactly what they were hoping to accomplish in that month and a half hasn’t really made itself apparent.
In any case, you stay in the left lane as you take the exit and you try to pull ahead of the U-Haul truck that’s in the left lane.
Unfortunately, you’re unable to do this, as the U-Haul truck is straddling both lanes, not only preventing you from getting past it, but also forcing you to slow down even more than you already have. Eventually the U-Haul picks a lane: yours. You now have one more vehicle ahead of you in line, and experience has taught you that one vehicle can translate into several additional minutes stuck waiting for your chance to throw your toll in the basket.
Traffic at the toll booths is backed up, though you can’t quite see why, since you have a big U-Haul blocking your view. You move a little, the right lane moves a lot, you wait, you move a little, the right lane moves even more, and eventually you see that only one of the three toll booths is open.
Your first real piece of luck is that somehow you've nanaged to get in the correct lane.
However, even though they can now clearly see that they need to move over to the left, everyone in the right lane is waiting until the last possible second to squeeze in.
You keep yourself as close as possible to the rear bumper of the U-Haul. You don’t mean to be an ass, but there’s no reason you should have to suffer just because the people in the right lane are too stupid to have moved over when they should have.
Even so, a jackass with an SUV and a sense of entitlement is trying to intimidate you into letting him in, and he edges in closer and closer to you.
He nearly sideswipes you before he finally accepts the fact that you’re not going to let him in.
You wait behind the U-Haul for two minutes while the driver digs around for money and makes idle chitchat with the toll booth attendant.
Eventually you make your way through the booth and onto the last major leg of your journey home.
There is altogether too much traffic for a Sunday evening, and you find yourself frequently sitting behind a dozen cars watching as no one ahead of you reacts to the fact that the light has turned green.
The new interchange that has just opened is supposed to have alleviated the biggest bottleneck on this route. Though it hasn’t completely alleviated the problem, it has reduced the average wait from two minutes to 30 seconds, and eventually, as all cross-traffic is moved onto the overpass, the light will be removed completely.
In the meantime, though, the light is still there, and people still don’t seem to understand that only red means stop.
Presumably in an effort to maintain balance, a light further down the road has begun to stay red longer than it used to. You can't see any other reason for the increase in the duration, since there is very little traffic, in relative terms, coming off the cross street.
As you make the approach to the last major stopping point on your journey, you are stuck behind a car that is going 35 miles an hour.
Because of this, you miss your light. You wait for the northbound light to turn red, then you wait for the green arrow allowing the southbound traffic to turn from the west to turn red, then, wait for the light for all of the cross traffic to turn red, and finally your arrow turns green.
You cruise quickly along with no one ahead of you. Further down the road you see traffic from a side street merging into your lane, and even though there is no earthly explanation for it, you see all of their brake lights flare into existence, and suddenly where you once had clear sailing you suddenly have half a dozen cars ahead of you going twenty miles an hour slower than you are. You swear and slam on the brakes.
After making your way through two four-way stops, where, as usual, confusion as to how four-way stops work reigns supreme, you finally get to the home stretch, which, after two years of construction, one-lane roads, and flagmen, is at last a thing of beauty with passing and turning lanes that allow you to gracefully speed past any obstacle.
And you’re home.
Of course you can’t find a parking space near your building, but that’s hardly anything new.
You walk in the front door thinking about writing a blog entry about why you’re so angry all of the time, and how there are always a million little things just hammering away at you, trying to make your temper explode.
Your apartment door always closes itself as soon as you let go of it, and usually when you step into your apartment, the first thing you do is turn and lock it, since you know from experience that if you don’t lock it right away you’ll forget.
At the exact moment that you’re turning to lock the door you’re thinking about how you wish you could learn to let go of the anger, and how you just wish it didn’t always seem as though the universe is out to get you.
Distracted by these thoughts, you fail to notice that as you’ve been standing in your foyer the door hasn’t closed because it’s been caught on your left foot, and you only discover this as you whirl around and slam the side of your head, hard, against the door.

Fortunately, as a huge lump formed on my head, the rest of my evening proved fairly uneventful, and I did enjoy my television viewing.
But that gives you at least an idea of the sort of things that keep the embers of my anger smoldering, and while I can appreciate the amusing irony of the thoughts that were in my head right before I used the door to knock them out of it, it was still pretty irritating, and was pretty representative of what my life is like ALL THE TIME.
Being Jon means that even the most mundane activity can, without warning, become a life or death struggle. I typically don’t enjoy slapstick humor that involves someone clumsily stumbling along, simply because it usually feels all too familiar. As I watch it I’ll think, “That’s not funny; that hurts! That happened to me this morning.”Apart from the fact that I was born without any sort of natural grace, I think a great deal of my bumbling stems from the fact that I simply don’t pay that much attention to what I’m doing.
Given that said bumbling tends to account for a great deal of my anger, I once resolved to try to put a stop to it. I decided that my every action would be deliberate and considered, and I would scrupulously avoid the careless and haphazard actions that invariably led to cuts, bumps, bruises, cursing, and rage.
Carefully taking my time to do things pissed me off even more, though, so I soon abandoned the approach.
Besides, even without frequent blows to the head, there are plenty of other things in the world to piss me off, most of which I have absolutely no control over.
Because I have no control over these things, acceptance, it seems, as anyone who’s ever been in a 12 Step program would tell me, is the answer.
I have to accept the fact that I’m clumsy and as such am likely to injure myself on a regular basis. I have to accept the fact that other people are going to get in my way on the highway, and in all other areas of life. I have to accept the fact that at the end of the workday I’m going to come home to an empty apartment, and that unless I make some kind of change to my fundamental nature, which I seem to be either unwilling, unable, or both, to do, I’m going to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
However, the fact of the matter is that I DO accept all of those things. When I wake up to start the day, I understand that all of them are going to be a part of the day that is ahead of me.
But acceptance can only go so far. Acceptance keeps me from acting out some scene straight out of “Falling Down,” and it helps me rein in the anger, but it doesn’t get rid of it.
I realize that there are people who are much, much worse off than I am, and that God, the Universe, Fate, or whatever, is (probably) not “out to get me,” but there are times when I’m pretty sure that there are things that happen to me that couldn’t possibly happen to anyone else.
So yeah, I get angry.
I suppose I should do something about it, but I’m not sure that there’s much that can be done, and honestly, I think that writing things like this is about the most effective thing I can do.
In any case, that’s it for this little trip down “Anger Avenue.”
There are a couple of related topics that came up today, though. I mentioned how I have to accept that there are people who are going to get in my way.
Today I was thinking that there are people who exist solely for that purpose.
Not to just get in my way specifically, but in general. That’s their function in life: being in the way.
By way of example, over the weekend I started on a new workout routine. It involves working out more days during the week. So, after working out Friday and Saturday, and taking off Sunday, I went over to my apartment complex’s weight room today.
There was a guy, in regular (non-workout) clothes in there making use of the machine. Okay, that’s fine, I guess. A little irritating, since it would throw off the order of my routine, but not a big deal.
So I made use of some of the other parts of the machine (this is a multi-purpose machine with several different attachments) while I waited for him to finish.
It soon became apparent, though, that this guy was one of those “random workout” people.
He was the sort of guy who, every six months, just walks into a weight room and starts randomly exercising as if he’s going to somehow gain some benefit from just lifting a dumbbell a couple of times.
In this guy’s case the main focus was the bench press.
He’d sit down, push it a couple of times, get up, adjust the weight, sit down and do nothing, get up, turn the TVs on, sit down, do a couple of presses, get up, adjust the weight, go into the room set off to the side for kids, turn on the TV in there, come back in, make a rush for the bench press attachment before I could get to it, push at it, discover that he had set the weight too high, get up, etc.
He did this consistently the whole time I was in there. Eventually he moved on to other exercises, but kept doing it in such a random way that it was impossible for me to complete any kind of circuit.
It occurred to me that he had to realize that he wasn’t really accomplishing anything with his haphazard approach, and that the only possible reason for him to be there was to simply be in my way.
So rather than club him over the back of the head with a dumbbell, I gave up and came home.
I thought maybe I’d go for a walk to get a little bit more exercise in, but I didn’t feel up to it, so I decided to take a nap.
Shortly after I dozed off, two kids started playing a game outside in the parking lot.
I’m not sure what they called it, but my name for the game was “Let’s scream at the top of our lungs outside Jon’s window while he tries to take a nap.”
So I gave up on that.
My anger flared up again at 6 when I turned on the TV to watch “The Simpsons” and found baseball on in its place.
Turing off the TV, I sat down and began writing this.
Overall, “failure” seemed to be the word of the day, and it wasn’t limited to my failure to properly work out or nap.
This month I have three paydays, with this past Friday being the second. Thanks to careful planning, after a few expenses are taken out, the bulk of this paycheck is mine to do with whatever I’d like.
For the most part that means putting money in my savings account, but I did intend to buy a few things, like a new desk.
I went to a couple of places but couldn’t find a desk that suited my needs. I looked for a few other things to buy, but decided that since I don’t have nearly enough money to buy all the things I want, I shouldn’t bother buying any of the things I want.
So, after failing to buy most of the things I went out intending to buy, I came home, and that’s when I ran into the roadblock to my workout, and, inevitably, found myself here, writing this.
So that pretty much brings you up to speed on today. Hopefully it’s not a day that indicates what the rest of the week is going to be like.