Squirrel asks Crow, "What happened to your Flock?" Crow says... "Murder." Paul keeps a blog/journal/diary of sorts where he vents his frustrations and also scribbles his insights about the world. I put it here, with the intention that it offer those who wish to interact with him a valid, relevant direction from which to assault.
Paul's Blog Tuesday 7:40pm
In hindsight, too many things over which I scold the others and argue with them during the shift seem of too little significance to mind, let alone anger over.
I had an interesting exchange with Daisy. "You are a good shift manager," she told me, "But you have this thing. Everyone deals with anger differently. It's easy to see when the boss is angry, she just shouts at everyone who comes near. But you - when a single person pisses you off you put up these walls nobody can scale, and freeze yourself inside. You turn cold and formal - I know, you're actually refusing to take out your anger on the rest of us - but that's because I know you. Whoever doesn't know you doesn't even realize you're angry. You just become so distant all of a sudden. Like you're looking at us from space."
She is right. She is so precisely correct they should name some measurement device after her. 7 on the Daisy Scale would be an unorthodox perspective of truth. 10 would be blunt reality in your face. Yet I do not remain speechless.
"You are right Daisy," I tell her, "You are piercing in your perception of things and correct in the way you choose to phrase them. I know this. I know you know this. And yet, even as I know this thing, this behavioral pattern of which you speak, I cannot avoid it. Have you ever been in a car accident, Daisy?"
She hasn't been. She doesn't have a driver's license and has never crossed a street in a country with unmarked roads. Not that I have, but I've been in an accident. I tell her that -
"I was involved in a car accident, when I was 16. I was riding a scooter with my uncle and a car didn't give us the right of way. The driver slowed down enough to prevent a serious collision, but we got knocked off the scooter anyway. I am telling you this because the process leading from calmness to anger is not unlike the process of bracing yourself for a car accident. You see it coming, you KNOW it's headed your way. Just a second before it happens, you know it's going to hit you. You have a sharp, accurate estimate of when it's going to happen, which direction, what will happen to you when it hits. You know all of these things before the blow comes.
And yet you can't avoid it. Because when you see it coming, it is too late. It takes some sort of outside intervention for you to avoid being hit by a car, or not become angered once your course there is set.
You also can't learn from one accident to the other. The fact you recognize the certainty with which you know what's going to happen from past experience does not enable you in any way to change the outcome. Once again, you know you are about to get hit. A second later, you do get hit. The foresight, that prophetic vision, did nothing to help you. These realizations offer no alternative - They're just vivid illustrations in your mind, sponsored by an inevitable fate."
Daisy is silent. Her face shows understanding, a certain level of comprehension regarding the forces I and all others deal with, forces we cannot escape or defeat, when our anger takes over us.
"That's how it is with anger, Daisy," I conclude as the clock strikes 11:00, "Every time I see it coming and every time I can't get out of the way. My life is a perpetual car accident. So, even though you're absolutely right... I'm sorry,"