Wednesday

I think it's incredibly important to just be able to say "Fuck it."

There's been a problem brewing in my personality for a while that I either couldn't understand or continually buried so far within my psyche that when it manifested itself I never associated it with the original issue. I'm an angrier person than I thought. You'd never really know it either, because I'm cordial, polite, funny and outgoing. But underneath all of that is a witch's brew of random, seemingly non-important agitators building to an overflowing boil.

Months worth of "Why won't this damn thing open?" or "Where the hell is that noise coming from?" amass inside of me until, one day, when I can't get the aluminum top off of a single serving applesauce, my fumbling useless digits will curl into a fist and I'll just hurl it into the sink at sixty miles per hour. In that moment of insanity, I'll blow off the appropriate amount of steam and then I'll be good for a little while. I'm like Ned Flanders without the "diddily."

Recently, I bought a new set of wiper blades. I usually buy Bosch blades because they've always lasted a good long while. They're more expensive than most of the other options, but you get what you pay for. This set, though, hasn't been good. During the first storm I exposed them to, they flaked off rubber onto my windshield and left streak marks across my whole field of view. Once I scraped the rubber off, they started to chatter. That vomp, vomp, vomp, vomp....screeeeeeeech every single swipe. An hour's drive in the rain with that going on is enough to drive you mad. And it did.

I lost it. I pulled off the road into a rest stop parking lot, tore the blades off their mounts and hurled them into the woods. I watched them careen down into the trees, bouncing off of branches and disturbing the sheltered wildlife, and in that moment, I felt so good. It was as if I told every engineer that designed those blades down to the person that packed them in those neat little plastic holsters (along with anyone who had ever designed anything that didn't work the way it was supposed to) to go fuck themselves. That they had failed me and this was their punishment.

But it wasn't that way at all. As I stood there in the rain on the side of the highway, breathing hard and tasting sweet vindication, a woman who had witnessed my entire mental breakdown from the car parked two spaces over rolled her window down. "What're you going to do now, hang your head out the window?"

The rain was pelting off my face and soaking deep into my hooded sweatshirt. I looked at her, confused for a second, and then looked back at my car. The bare wiper blade mounts looked like an ice cream cone after a kid licks the whole scoop off and it falls onto the ground. The only worthwhile part of their whole existence was gone. Defeated--by my own rage, no less--I went inside to the Mobil station and bought whatever blades they had. Neither of the two I obtained were the correct size and they immediately taunted me, no more than five miles down the road, with their vomp, vomp, vomp vomp....screeeeeeech.

The door not opening at work on the first pull, my computer becoming useless after extensive virus infection, that puddle I stepped in that got my shoe a little too wet, every little thing that added to that ridiculous bubbling cauldron of frustration in my head. If I had just stood back and taken a second to say, "Fuck it," with one of those incidents, I would've just been another idiot driving down the highway with annoying wipers who turned up the radio a little louder and got over it.

"Fuck it, right? They're just wipers."

I need to get there.