Today is a random installment of Things You Don’t Know About Me and Probably Didn’t Really Want To But I’m Bored…
I have always had a short temper, in both senses: quick to get angry and quick to have it pass. When I was very young it was particularly bad, I would throw fits and sometimes even get destructive. When I was 13 I got into a fight with my mother and sister. I couldn’t begin to tell you what it was about, it’s irrelevant, I suppose. I’m sure it was something minor, and probably wrong on my part. At any rate, they left the house to go somewhere, the store or something, I don’t remember. I was still furious at them for whatever imagined slight I had suffered.
I started reading comics when I was 13. I still remember that Iron Man #115 was the first one I ever bought. The second one I bought was Marvel Team-Up with Spider-Man and the Not Ready For Prime Time Players (really. John Belushi was on the cover). By this time of this story I had 44 comic books, and I was pretty proud of that fact.
I started ripping every one of them in half.
To this day I still don’t know what that was supposed to accomplish, or how destroying my own prized possessions was supposed to get back at the two of them. But I was just full of rage and I started tearing them right down the center. What makes it so much worse was that, halfway through, I had started to calm down, and I knew what I was doing made no sense and that I should really stop. But I didn’t, until every single one of them was destroyed.
Then I grabbed some tape and tried to fix them. Two pages into the first book I realized there was no hope and I threw them all away. I knew then, in that dim way only a 13-year-old boy can think, that I had a real problem.
I have always kept a very tight rein on my anger since then. Most of you who know me might be surprised that I even have a temper, which is, of course, the point. It’s not that I push it down; it’s just that I deal with it on my own time, and I always keep in mind the stupidity that I am capable of.