Joanne, my most frequent commenter, suggested yesterday that perhaps my last blog, full of complaints, was less about complaining than about anger.  But no.  Along with guilt and regret, anger seems yet another gene I missed out on.  Sure, my blood pressure rises every time I see Mitt Romney or Eric Cantor or Kansas's governor Brownback (just to stick with one theme), but that anger is short-lived and rather abstract.  In personal relations, anger just isn't part of my nature.  A shrink once suggested that it must be that I was afraid to express what I must really be feeling.  It was difficult to convince him that I wasn't fearful of expressing it because I really wasn't feeling anger.  I've tried it a few times: it was rather like putting on an ill-fitting costume.  It wasn't natural and and seemed like playacting, and I wasn't even very good at it.

At a more philosphical level, I can't be angry either.  First, there's no one to be angry with.  When the four men in a boat in Stephen Crane's story "The Open Boat" realize that they are likely to drown, they are baffled and angry and want to throw bricks at the temple, but they finally realize that there are no bricks and there is no temple.  There is no god, and nature is flatly indifferent, neither benign nor malign--just unconcerned and, as Crane says in a poem I mentioned earlier ("A man said to the universe / 'Sir, I exist.'"), having no sense of obligation.  But I can't even get to that stage since I have nothing to be angry about.  I've been very lucky.  (Is that word getting tiresome?)  I exist, a statistically infinitesimal probability.  I've lived longer, much longer, than the vast majority of people who have ever existed.  I've never known poverty or hunger.  I've never worked on an assembly line or dug a ditch.  I had good parents who didn't pass on anything more than garden-variety neuroses.  Unlike anyone else in my family, I went to college and grad school, and had a good education and bright, funny, feisty friends.  I spent 45 years in a career that I loved and that gave me unusual opportunities to live and teach in five different countries on three different continents.  I've got supportive friends, good doctors, and a wonderful partner.  So what's to complain?  But, friends have said, you didn't deserve this (i.e., the bad thing, the cancer).  If I didn't "deserve" the cancer, does that mean I didn't deserve all the good things?  Except in a very limited sense (the student wrote an excellent essay; therefore, s/he deserved the A), I'm not comfortable with the word 'deserve' and what it implies.  We simply don't live in a world where fairness obtains.  Our tragedy is that of Aeschylus, not Aristotle. 

So sometimes a complaint is only a complaint.  Then again, maybe that's too simple and Joanne is onto something.  I may not be disguising anger, but perhaps it's something else.  When Julian Barnes wrote "There's nothing to be frightened of," the doubleness of his meaning is lost on me.  I'm not afraid of nothing(ness).  I'm not afraid of death.  But dying--well, that's another matter; that's a real something that does frighten me.  When, as the last few days, my right leg hurts and my left shoulder hurts even more, it's not that the discomfort has turned to pain (so far, I can suck it up for this level of pain).  It's the fear of what is really going on and what whatever is happening bodes for the future.  And that scares the shit out of me.

(As I was typing this, the "Today" show was on in the background, and a TV psychologist who specializes in anger management was asked by the interviewer, "Some people say that they never get angry.  Is that possible?"  You don't have to be clairvoyant to guess what her answer was.  And, she continued, those who deny their anger and thus bottle it up suffer physical consequences and diseases.  Damn!  If only I'd yelled at a few more people, I could've avoided cancer.  I guess I had it coming.)