Anger Management for Pacifists

Or "How I thought myself down from strangling my neighbor AND his pet rooster" and how you can [metaphorically] do the same.

People are angry these days. I am angry these days. And although I’ve done a lot of work on my anger response in the past year—especially per the excruciating back pain that I was able to cure by talking to my rage (yes, you read that right)—there is, alas, always more fuel being dumped on this particular fire.

In times like these, I often turn to a tip from my book Calm the Fuck Down, a little mental exercise I like to call “Plot Your Revenge.”¹

Today’s post is about how I came up with this strategy and how it could work for you too.

---

---

Cock-a-doodle-Oh-no-you-don’t

I live in a small fishing village on the North Coast of the Dominican Republic, surrounded by natural beauty and bounty. We have sparkling aquamarine waters and gently swaying palm forests, mangos and passion fruit free for the roadside picking, and fish served straight off the boat from which they were caught an hour before lunch.

We also have roosters, also known as “nature’s car alarms.”

In the summer of 2018, when I was drafting Calm the Fuck Down, a guy who was renting the house next door while in town working on a film crew decided it would be “neat” to “get a hobby” that involved erecting a pop-up chicken coop in an unsuspecting homeowner’s yard.

To be absolutely clear: the hobby thing is a direct quote. This gentleman was not feeding his family on farming proceeds. He wasn’t raising baby chicks to sell. He literally only wanted the novelty and the fresh eggs, FOR WHICH YOU DO NOT NEED A ROOSTER BUT I DIGRESS.

Don’t ask me what he was planning to do with his new pets when production wrapped. I don’t know and I don’t care. All I do know is that I was trying to use my brain to craft sentences and piece together cogent arguments while Señor Chucklecluck was making a goddamn motherfucking racket. All. Day. Long.

(If you thought roosters only crowed at dawn, then I’m sorry to say you’ve been taken in by the greatest lie Big Poultry ever sold.)

It thus transpired that while writing a book about, among other things, getting a handle on your emotional responses, I myself was becoming increasingly angry. Like, furious.

Day by day, hour by hour, rooster-cidal thoughts filled my brain. I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t regulate. I was practically twitching in anticipation of the next strangled caw emanating from the yard next door.

It was not only an uncomfortable and disconcerting response; it was an unfamiliar one.

Anger has never been one of my go-to freakout modes. I’m more of an anxiety-plus-occasional-sadness gal, with a soupçon of avoidance mixed in for variety. (And given that “repressing my anger” for forty-plus years appears to have been at the root of my aforementioned excruciating back pain, that tracks.)

In fact, until the Summer of the Rooster, the only time I could remember giving in to incandescent rage was twenty years earlier when I jammed a refrigerator door across the top of my foot and it hurt so bad that I started screaming and throwing things around the kitchen like Keith Moon at a Holiday Inn circa 1967.

Anyway, it soon became clear that while exhaling bitchily, shouting “Shut the fuck up!,” and rising from my laptop every five minutes to jab a broom through the hole in the fence was one way to pass the time, it was not an effective long-term strategy.

Unless/until I could somehow convince my neighbor to get rid of his mobile airhorn and get a new hobby,² I needed an interim solution for the sake of both my sanity and my manuscript.

And before you ask, no, I couldn’t un-hear it. Our tropical home is wide open to the elements, noise-cancelling AirPods were not a thing at the time, and my regular foam earplugs were no match for this all-out aural assault.

Sadly, I also couldn’t summon the wherewithal to ignore it completely, because I am not some kind of Buddhist goddamn monk.

So where did that leave me?

Naturally, my mind went straight to revenge.