Truth, Rage, and me

The Truth is elusive. The Truth we seek in therapy, in church, in spiritual contemplation, meditation, friendship, love.
Who the heck knows?
But every once in a while, you get a new angle from somebody. You were pretty convinced you had it right, then random guy out of nowhere gives you a gratuitous but nevertheless noteworthy shakeup. New Truth.

Here's mine. I've been inclined to think of myself as the sum of my defects (and others as the sum of theirs). This is defective. But I have been making some progress reducing the life-ruining aspects of my character defects. I have been seeking balance, trying to return to my authentic reliable self. Honest.
And as part of this work, this journey, I have dared to look up "rageaholic" in Wikipedia and man that article pissed me off.
And the H Simpson thing is funny (addicted to rageaghol). Anyway, it's real progress for me to be looking at rage and finally getting the obvious but hitherto elusive Truth about it. To wit: Rage is not OK, and some less obvious forms it can take were interesting to see in that dumb article, and none of them are OK either.
Cussing, gossiping, hyper-criticizing...and on up to throwing shit. Not OK. Rage. Bad, scary, overwhelming to me.

So here I am living as that overwhelmed guy on stage with Bob S. tonight. And when he introduces Ollie, Ollie is doing his "I've been up for 6 days, living on caffeine" funny as all get out routine. And then it's my turn, and Bob and I interact a bit, I mention rage, and Bob very sincerely says something to the audience like "So I think Danny has this outer layer of really smart guy, then a thin layer of rage, and then under that this really big glowing golden core --- no seriously Danny is one of the sweetest guys I know." And he meant it.
And it's true ladies and gentlemen.
Bob is smart.
Smarter than me.
One more thing. Hungry Man frozen dinners are f'in great! Especially the Salisbury Steak.