Anger Management Breakthrough

Yesterday, I developed a new way of “dealing with fucking awful pedestrians”. My previous method was to imagine the whole-walking-down-the-street business as a computer game, making “swip-swip” sounds as I strafed in bullet-time through an endless stream of ever more aggravating “sprites”. If I ducked between two fuckers with their umbrellas up (even though it stopped raining five minutes ago, you massive set of pricks) I’d make the sound of Sonic picking up a ring. And if I jumped really high when entering a shop, I’d demand 7650 points from the security guard.
“Come on, man – that was high enough,” I’d growl. “Give me the fuckin’ points.”
This hasn’t been working recently. The games I’ve been playing have largely involved a spooky little girl who’s your mum, and rolling up the creatures of all cosmos into a ball. Great games, but they don’t make great analogies for walking along Oxford Street. So, this time, I had to come up with something else.
THE SITUATION
I was walking down some steps at Baker Street station. The woman in front of me was walking incredibly slowly. I was in a bit of a funny mood, as I’d just had a vodkaless diet coke in a pub, which had made me feel slightly desolate. I just wanted to be home, and not using up excess steps in a useless sideways motion because I refused to slow my leg speed down.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
I harumphed a couple of times, working myself up into that state where you beg with your eyebrows for anyone to recognise your anguish. When it got too much, I looked over her shoulder, I noticed that she was helping a medium sized girl down the stairs. In my irrational head, “girl of moderate and pleasing size” was translated into “JESUS CHRIST MOVE you fat fucking bitch”. I can stop myself saying these things, but sadly I can’t stop myself thinking them, again and again. And again.
As an aside at this stage, I don’t think disabilities is a fair word. It’s like saying “they simply cannot do what we can do”, and that’s not true. A more accurate word would be “shitabilities”, because they can do everything, just with varying degrees of shitness. It would also take into account the wide range and severity of disability.
“Doctor, is it serious?”
“I’m afraid you’re shitabled in both legs.”
“Damn. How shit is it?”
“Pretty shit, actually. Not like OMG shit, just… pretty fucking shit.”
“Shit.”
“Pretty much.”
MY NEW SOLUTION
When I got the bottom of the stairs, I noticed that Down’s Syndrome had rendered this young girl mildly shitabled, with a localised heavy shitability in bending her knees. Before I managed to summon a shred of guilt, I thought “Aha! Well, I guess they don’t call it Down’s syndrome because it helps you go down stairs faster, eheeegh, well done me.”
The sheer shitness of my involuntary comment made me slip my thumbs underneath a pair of invisible braces and sing the bit from Little Drummer Boy that goes “Then, he smiled at me pa-rum-pa-pum pum”, still inside. And I wondered what would have happened, if I’d turned around, and wryly said it to the person behind me.
“Sir, a most amusing contradiction has occurred to me,” I would have started. “This afflicted creature is labouring under a condition popularly known as Down’s Syndrome. How ironic that this does little to enhance her downward mobility!”
“Yes,” the man would have replied. “My dear mother has Parkinson’s, and her interviewing skills haven’t improved one iota. It’s the cruellest blow, really, as she had Joan Collins and Andre Previn around last week, and her lines of questioning were uninspired and led nowhere.”
“I have kinky hair syndrome,” a voice would have piped up from the back, and myself and the Parkinson’s guy would have gone “ppft” at each other, as though to say “he totally doesn’t get our sophisticated sense of humour”. Two years later, we were married and living in Newstead Abbey, and the kinky hair guy was our fuck butler, demonstrating once and for all that it’s (fucking) funny how things turn out.
“What’s for dinner, Dave? Oh cool, sex.”
CONCLUSION
After just ten seconds, I no longer felt any anger towards the mother of the Downer. I also had a semi-on that made me walk in that classic upbeat fashion, when your arms swing in full circles, full of shopping bags and hat boxes, and I’ve got a new way of dealing with shit pedestrians.
I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not the best human being in the world.