(A chapter in You Have Upset the Balance of the Universe by Being Born, by Dr. Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html)
Anger simply cannot be made to disappear. Not by you.
It isn't like sex. Sex can sometimes be commanded away, at least for the moment (see SEX). It doesn't have to deform the judgment.
Anger does. It can be appeased by the object of your anger. He/she/they can acknowledge your value, recognize your pain, reward your effort and dissolve your anger from without. It's like reading a book that has an effect on you, seeing an exceptional film, falling in love with a painting--it can change your rate of metabolism for hours, days; alas seldom forever. This can be done to your anger but, I repeat, only from without.
In the absence of the world's solicitude your anger lies there wedged, a boulder in a gorge, blocking you. You have to go around. You have to climb. You have to leave behind much--sometimes everything--that you were. Your comfort, your dignity, your sense of being able to control what happens to you. You will resume these in another life, the life that awaits you on the far side of the boulder.
This, by the way, is why so much of the world believes in reincarnation (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR). You are never sure whether reincarnation is to be looked upon as a reward or a punishment. As much as you revel in your own existence you find the idea of having to do it over and over again, odds are in relatively wretched circumstances, dreary beyond relief. Be assured. The fact that half the world believes in reincarnation is no more reason even to glance in that direction than the entire world's believing the earth is flat. Theories of the hereafter are invariably pictures of the now. Panic looks in the mirror. When it realizes it's looking in the mirror it disappears.
You reincarnate several times a day, and never more so than when you are angry.
There is something essentially unfair about anger. With every other emotion--love, sex, hunger, ambition, even fear (see FEAR)--you go forward to engage with the world in a way on which you can reasonably expect to follow through. Follow through on anger and you can wind up on Death Row.
(Freud ascribed guilt feelings to sexual desire. This may have been the case for the Victorian culture he rose to diagnose--see FREUD--but not for you. What makes you feel guilty is anger.)
It is seldom, to the point of negligibility, that your anger can be harnessed to some project that will benefit you. You want to destroy. You want to annihilate. It is irresistible, exponentially self-generating and inevitable. Anger, that is--and as bulky as these observations are they can crowd onto the pin prick of a murderous wrath--makes you angry.
Pretentious Pictures Presents:
CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE
A comedy with a dark center
A Beverly Hills woman wakes up "older" and finds her life with a younger man undignified. The stage version was produced in at the Creative Place Theatre in NYC.
Attached: Bo Derek
Diana, the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she can’t handle—except getting older.
She deals with a birthday by throwing him out. They're right for each other, she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back, because her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.
Proposed, to direct and to star: Alec Baldwin
So she makes do with the respectable but empty life she'd thought she needed, with her lawyer Griff—more her age, and on her success level. Griff has been in love with her for years. Now’s his chance.
Proposed: Gael García Bernal
Jim is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that never comes. Together they’re fast company. They must have been brilliant at her birthday party last night.
This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s spooked. She tells him he has to go. She wants something more presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late. Which shocks him. He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.
Proposed: Jennifer Coolidge
Betsy, the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take him with her. He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.
Proposed: Adelaide Clemens
Jackie, Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at and defy her. Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy. She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a father.
Proposed: Owen Teague
Proposed: Owen Teague
Betsy's son Dylan—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans uncontrollably. He disgusts her.
Proposed: Rosie Perez
Maria, Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.
Proposed: Amy Brenneman
GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego. She'll take Jim if Diana doesn't want him! Just kidding. In an attempt to bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them, but it turns into a confrontation....
And the final character is Beverly Hills—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide.
Pretentious pictures presents
a comedy with a dark center.
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