I was saying to my therapist last month, "So then that was the second time I tried to kill myself and it didn't work. Can't get my thyroid working, but a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of aspirin? No sweat."
That's a funny joke, I think. I laugh at that all the time. I laughed when I said it to my therapist.
My therapist groaned. She asked, "Don't you feel something--sadness, anger, anything--when you say something like that? You know that's you, right? Not some character you're writing."
"Uh..." She stumps me.
I don't. I don't feel anything when I talk about that stuff. It's a chronological order of idiotic actions, shitty interpersonal relations and self mutilation. That's my life, I guess. I don't remember what it felt like. I don't usually feel. I just get really fucking angry every ten minutes or so.
How many emotions do you have? There's a lot, or so I've heard. I don't know what they feel like. Maybe in the abstract. I think I have two: "pissed" and "fine."
I don't get just a little pissed, though. I get Incredible Hulk mad and break shit. I broke my hand on a wall last month, like I'm some goddamned steroid case. I was ashamed of myself. What, am I a twelve year old boy?
Sometimes I wonder if that Rage Virus thingy from 28 Days Later is totally real, and I catch it breathing in bits of infected saliva when someone sneezes in line at the bank, because all of a sudden, in an instant, like BAM, I'm a fucking cunt and I want to kill someone. Not, like, rip their intestines out or anything, but definitely kill them, and really for no good reason.
But I think Danny Boyle got the concept wrong--he must have--because, from personal experience, the virus tends to mutate back into "fine" in like ten minutes or less, and then it goes away, and the only lasting negative affect of the infection is the notion that not ten minutes ago, I wanted to kill someone I didn't even know for no good reason. That person then usually reminds me, not physically, but spiritually, of either of my grandmothers, and then I'm met with undeniable evidence that there is no such thing as a Rage Virus. I am just homicidally angry about the shit family I grew up in.
Though, wouldn't it be nice if there was a Rage Virus you could blame all your problems on?
Posted by The Bunny at 6:05 AM