Rage...

Brent and I went downtown for breakfast this morning. Driving back home and the freeway was filled with people just doing their own things. Going way under or way over the speed limit, not paying attention to lane closures, cutting people off, speeding around people like those cars were orange cones on an agility track.

I had been telling him on the way down there that it was crazy yesterday. I kept getting "yelled" at by the car for being too close to the car in front of me because I was getting cut off constantly. I HATE being yelled at by people or by things. It makes me really tense. And so I was really tense while I was driving. And now today it was the same. Still so much craziness on the road.

I told him I had to keep recentering myself and saying my driving mantras like, "You aren't stuck in traffic, you are part of the traffic" or "everyone has someplace they are trying to be, you don't know why they feel that they need to get there so quickly, maybe it's an emergency." The sort of reminding yourself that you aren't being inconvenienced on purpose sort of things.

Does it work? Not really. Or at least not much.

I told Brent I wasn't sure why I was so filled with road rage yesterday but I was. He had two theories one was that now that I had been downtown to breakfast and had a lovely flakey biscuit in my belly I would be calmer (and yes, for sure, a belly full of biscuit does slow you down a little) but probably the more likely thing is that during this current administration, if you are of a certain belief system, you are always pegged at 8 or 9 so it doesn't take much to tip you over into 10.

And that is very true.

Little things that used to not bother me at all can spin me into a rage now. My patience is almost non existent on a daily basis. And I didn't help myself by my reading choice last week. The book was good, but it was all about what needs to happen if the democrats/progressives/liberals take back over. The things that need fixed, the things that need to be permanently changed, and most importantly an honest look at how bad things are right now. How MUCH has already been trashed and how hard it's going to be to fix it all. It's not a single four year term that we are looking at to make things right, and it's not an oh good the normal people are back in charge so let's stop paying attention moment.

It's going to be work. Hard work. And a lot of it.

But the part that was really tough reading is he recapped a lot of what has happened over the past two years. Living through it is a constant onslaught of what the fuck, seeing it laid out point by point is always kind of breathtaking. You do forget all of what has happened because so much has happened.

But reading that book, all while knowing that yes, it's a current book but between writing and publishing so much other shit has happened, and reading current stories about the environmental damage they are doing in Big Bend and Bear's Ears and....

Yeah. It's a lot. All of the time. The rage is always just simmering away ready to take over.

But the biscuit did really help.