Rage Against the Unseen

Apologies to the three of you who stopped by looking for me earlier. Dreamhost caught a major case of the IT hiccups and many of its hosted sites were down.

If, like me, you'd check in for the occasional update on their status page, you'd have thought the friggin' world was going to end. I enjoy a good comment war as much as the next Towleroad gasbag commenter (they do like to beat their dead gay horses, don't they?), and Dreamhost's VIP (they ARE important, just ask them) customers gave me my money's worth today.

I guess everyone needs a place to vent.

Take, for instance, the woman I walked by a few minutes ago on Baker Street. She was a tall, slender Indian woman with silver-streaked black hair cut just above her shoulders. Very Anne Bancroft in her later years. Probably in her late 50s, wearing black pedal-pushers, flip flops and a medium weight winter coat. She was just standing on the pavement when I first saw (heard?) her, shaking her hand in the air and screaming for anyone to hear while no one was listening. "The Indian government is a conspiracy," she bellowed. She'd rant on some more. Not being posh like Shilpa Shetty (who wouldn't have yelled in the first place), I could only understand snippets of her heavily accented rage. "It's only for Africans," she went on. She'd walk … well, stagger … a bit more, stop, and start yelling again. Don’t walk too close. Crazy is catching.

And then I start to think about my own sanity. How close am I to being nuts?

I harbor a few anti-social thoughts and probably more than my share of displaced anger. I often consciously turn off the bickering voices in my head and tell myself to breathe on back to a happy place ... especially when I find myself on Oxford Street in a sea of idiots. Or on the phone with an HSBC or BT customer lack-of-service rep.

However, as much as I'd like to, I don't physically pick up and move the chatty Asian girl on her mobile who has stopped dead in her tracks, right in front of me. I don't push back when I seem to be in some yob's way, in such a hurry to get somewhere that he can't find the time to pull his tracky bottoms back up over his saggy ass. I don't scream on Wardour Street and try to pick a fight with two bouncers who just stare at me like I'm a roid-raging buffoon (okay, so he was probably on Friday night bender in Soho, but still ... ). I don't stand in the middle of HMV, stomp my feet and scream "I want a Wii!."

I internalize it. Maybe I'll write about it here or in my journal (story fodder, y'know) or, better yet, I'll just let it go.

When did the Baker Street Banshee stop holding it in? If she had a website would she have found a more quiet outlet, where she could whinge to her keyboard's delight? Would she have found a sparring partner in someone's comment box? What was the straw that broke her camel's back?

How close are any of us to snapping and just standing on the street, screaming to the world till we're hoarse, unable to keep it in anymore?