Anger is a Gift 🎁

The Youth would call this crashing out

When I drove around the San Fernando Valley after school in 1994 listening to Live Through This with the windows of my Ford Escort rolled up so I could scream along, did I imagine myself doing the same thing 32 years later? Of course not.

Getting older was the loser behavior of parents and teachers who didn’t get it. The injury on top of insult — knowing I’d be just as impotently angsty while operating a vehicle at the age of 47 — would be a reason to drive myself into a wall before I got oh-so lame.

But here we are. Or there I was on Saturday night after getting turned away from a 7pm restorative yoga class in Ditmas Park (it was “full,” even though I’d paid for it online ahead of time). The young lady at the door giggled when she said, “We ran out of props,” as if I, a middle-aged mom with limited access to nag shampa-scented spaces to sublimate the fury that had been brewing in me for months like an amateur IPA, would also find this cute.

I nearly foamed over before I huffed back to my (current, non-Ford Escort) car to blast my new favorite scream-alongs. Songs that would also horrify 16-year old me because they’re by Rage Against the Machine, who I didn’t like as a teenager because they were too base. The only male rockers I listened to were the nasally cerebral ones like Steve Malkmus who “sang” about like, architecture and Swiss cities and kept their shirts on during live performances.

Turns out it takes decades of continuous little disappointments, the slow burn of disillusion/dissolution of the American Dream, and a grand finale of watching a poetry-loving, also fed-up, (likely) yoga mom getting shot in the face by an agent of the federal government ostensibly for being “a fucking bitch,” for a 47-year old white woman to feel the un-nuanced, non-ironic, on-the-nose rage of a 15-year old boy with a Che Guevara poster in his bedroom. Late to the game, but fuck you I won’t do you what you tell me, indeed.

p.s. Are angsty young men even picking up drums or guitars anymore? Or is it just guns and YouTube manosphere now?

Anyway, here is is Freedom by my new favorite funk-rap-metal band:

Here is my favorite crowd-shot from the song’s climax

And here are some links and recs:

I loved Stoner by John Williams. It’s rage-free and more about the quiet, chop-wood-carry-water approach to life, trudging through disappointment, and making choices between duty and loyalty vs. romance and self actualization.

The rise of luxury studios. I’m telling you, this city is optimized for single tech and finance workers who can spend their money on rent and matcha because they don’t need child care. Neighborly reminder: We need all of us to make New York interesting and wonderful!

Are you a “people pleaser,” or just a normal, kind person who cares about others even when it’s not super-convenient?

First Jollibee and now a Bojangles in Brooklyn. I feel a Club Mid restaurant tour coming soon!

The “crazy” anti-authoritarian political thriller that no one promoted.

Mamdani wants to help parent coordinators actually help parents.

And in hyper-local news, Park Slope youth seem to be wearing velvet True Religions in a shape I’d describe as a baggy bootcut. I have no idea what this signals.

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