Anger Management by Crockery

One of the rules that had to be obeyed when I was growing up was: Don’t run in the house, because you might break something. Walk instead. Stay calm. Don’t get too excited. Getting excited might cause you to hurt yourself, something or someone else. It also seemed to irritate the grown-ups; it seemed that grown-ups just weren’t supposed to get excited.

Not when they were happy anyway. The only time grown-ups seemed to get excited was when they were angry; and then there seemed to no limits to how excited they could get. The rest of the time they seemed to be holding their excitement inside; but when they were really angry, they really let loose. I found that terrifying. I got in real trouble when I acted like that, but grown-ups were allowed different rules to me. And so I learned that I wasn’t allowed to get excited no matter how I actually felt.

The problem with not being allowed to get excited is that it suppresses joy, and makes life much less fun. And the problem with only getting excited when we’re really angry is that it’s frightening for other people. In addition to learning not to get excited, I learned not to get angry either because I could see how destructive anger could be. But in doing so, I made the same mistake my father did of suppressing it rather than expressing it; which is what led to his explosions that I found so terrifying in the first place. I very rarely feel or express my anger. I often feel frustrated, and have the subtle urge to break something though: car windows, shop fronts, my own TV set; and that’s before I’ve even seen what’s on it. I hold back though, figuring that the owners of said cars, shops and TVs aren’t going to share in my catharsis. I can’t get away with being a teenage hoodlum, but I’d still like to break out and break something sometimes.

With this in mind, my life coach recently assigned me the task of buying a set of cheap crockery from K-mart, and smashing the bejesus out of it. Even better, I thought, would be the left-over crockery from all the years of share accommodation that I had stashed down in my storeroom. I didn’t need it; wasn’t sure why I was even hanging onto it. It was just baggage from a bygone era. Smashing it would be a nice cathartic way of killing several birds with one stone: ditch some baggage, release some anger, and have some fun; all in the one hit.

So on a recent road trip, I loaded up the box of old crockery into the car along with my baseball bat. While driving back towards Sydney, I turned off the Hume Highway down a side street, which led to a dirt road into the forest. With nobody around except the occasional construction truck thundering down the road, I unleashed fury with my baseball bat onto some poor defenceless crockery, sending its fragments whizzing into the forest.

Most of the cups exploded nicely. My aim wasn’t too good at first, but it got better with practise. One cup with the old Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children logo on it took several hits just to get it to fracture. Maybe it was specially reinforced. Eventually it too relented. The bowls were good fun, and the small plates had a nice balance of being sufficiently solid to take a nice hard blow, but small enough to really fly into smitherines on impact. The large plates were particularly satisfying, as it was virtually impossible to miss them even with a poor swing. And many of the resulting chunks were big enough to afford a second or even third hit.

Gradually I worked my way through the whole box, smashing every last piece into oblivion. When my swing was really accurate, it gave a really nice satisfying thud feeling, as powdered ceramic flew every which way, and the larger chunks hurtled skywards into the trees with a really neat whizzing sound. It felt great. Very cathartic.

By the end of the session, my baseball bat was looking rather worse for wear, I had a blister on my thumb, and I was feeling kinda tired. But it turns out that breaking things is really great fun. I highly recommend it. And if nothing else, I’ve really done some great work on improving my baseball swing.