Anger Blackouts

You know those moments of anger… when you are silently shaking with rage and have curse words and retorts and tears and foreign languages swirling around in your head, but nothing comes out?

The kind that makes the blood rushing through your ears SO LOUD that you can’t hear anything, even the person patiently pulling at your elbow trying to calm you down?

I call those my anger black outs.

I go into hyper-mode. It’s as if the world around me slows down and I acquire magical powers that would allow me to lift a car over my head or jump over a 6 foot brick wall. It is the time that I am so powerful, that the person in front of me would probably shrivel into nothing if I had laser beams for eyes.

I haven’t had very many full blown episodes … mainly, they tend to be only half-strength … but those full blown ones tend to stick in my memories.

One of the times must have happened when I was in 5th or 6th grade. I have no clue what the buck-toothed blond boy in front of me did to raise my ire, but it shot through the roof and that was that.

For whatever reason, that day we had our desks pushed together in groups of four as we ate our lunch. The anger blackout struck, and I sat quacking in silent rage. I couldn’t stop staring at him, thinking of the many nasty things I could do to his face, or what I could say to make him stop being such a jack-hole.

I was eating my pudding cup. I hadn’t even taken a bite of it yet … but I didn’t care.

I peeled off the lid and dipped it into the cup to get a nice coating on the metallic-paper surface

Then I reached across my desk and plastered it on his forehead.

It may not have been the best way to deal with the situation at that point, but oh … did it ever make me feel better. When the teacher told me to apologize I told him that I simply couldn’t … I wasn’t the least bit sorry and would surely do it again if I had another pudding cup.

Curiously, I was never sent to detention.
Maybe the teacher was scared that he was next.