I got pissed off today and needed to throw something or break something. Then I remembered I’m one-handed now, and I got even more frustrated. I look silly trying to throw left-handed. (For that matter, I look sort of foolish throwing right-handed, but don’t tell anybody.)

Because my landlord never fixed my door assembly, I couldn’t even slam the door. That would have been a mildly satisfying gesture, slamming the door in the face of the fates who decided to jackknife a tanker truck on the blind curve on my street, just at the time I was coming home from the post office.

Why must everything happen to me?!?

Anyway, I got over it. And I know what you’re thinking. Anticlimactic denouement, right? But in a way, that’s the best part of the story. I didn’t break or throw anything because I couldn’t, so there was nothing to regret later when the feeling passed. I still have marks on the walls from the old days when I let things get to me and could do something about it. It never helped, and it just got worse later when I realized what I’d done.

So what have we learned from this?

Well, nothing, really, because I knew all this long before I ever had the urge to slam doors. In fact, it’s a lesson I’ve learned so many times in my life that you’d think I’d have internalized it by now. Sometimes incapacity is the mother of restraint, and I’ll have to settle for that for now.