irritation

the word has been spinning around my head in one way or another for the past weeks. yesterday somebody mentioned being irritated by my use of a particular honor title and the spinning has become acute. irritations often turn to pearls of wisdom in due time.

i was irritated when i did not wake up on time for the dawn zazen.
i was irritated yesterday when i could not get to training on time because of the disruption carnival brought to the public transportation.
i was irritated by the mention of physics in dharma talks.
i was irritated by what was said to me yesterday that generated the other's irritation.
i was irritated when a confused man told me that there was something spiritual about our chance encounter.
i was irritated last tuesday while doing karate randori.
i was irritated each and every time my pc crashed in the middle of a simple "word" operation and the work since the last save got lost.

i wanted to punch him out when he told me "tu hésites" for a whole of a femtosecond. i was not irritated, i was stunned.

irritation happens. it happens often here.

language is irritating. language is fairly abstract and arbitrary within a certain set of rules. feelings, those states of emotional disorder that we call feeling are real.

within this realm of feelings i have been trying to get out of my skin in the past couple of months. today, that is what it feels like, all this time i have turning around ideas in my head, asking myself the same questions, getting no attractive ideas, no leads, nothing that i wanted to grab and run away with. i have the inspiration, i have the story, but how do i unwind it? how do i unfurl it? how do i debungle it?

it started that i had the impression that someone had gotten under my skin. eventually i slipped out of the grasp of the illusion, broke the magic spell, and found myself blissfully here. my skin, that largest organ, protective, sensual and in my case extremely sensitive. my skin under attack! my skin under literary attack. i felt something, it was real, the spell was under my skin. today i look back and it starts to make sense in its very own serendipity. i know the balance is delicate, and i know that i sometimes lose it.

have you ever seen me mad? i mean really mad? would you know when i am really mad?

i have known frustration, i have known being upset and contradicted, i have known been furious, enraged. i have been fuming on occasions. fuming?

i can scream, and i can yell very very loud. i can make my voice a whisper and and i can make it fill a room with hundreds of people. if i am furious, frustrated, contradicted and fuming, i go silent. i lose the ability to verbalize when i am pissed off. one day some clueless graduate student will study the endocrine secretions of very very upset humans. will the student find madness' chemical essence?

language is based on the physical world that we experience. duh! i am not fuming when fuming mad, or enraged... but heavens knows that inside the chemical soup is indeed fuming. i have always been puzzled by the observation that the sensations caused by fear and excitement are to me undistinguishable. either way my pulse rate quickens, and there is this thing about anticipation and thinking of what may or may not come that gives me these butterflies fumbling with my innards. this insipid observation has my son's claim and attribution to my ability to state the obvious validated while my hard disk backs up one week's meager output.

the time has arrived for me to look into my irritations, especially those that i have in the past insisted in ignoring.

(duh! these are half-baked thoughts, but i am not promising a more complete rebake either)