Angry Ikari

Diary

Angry Ikari climbed Mount Koriyoka with nothing but grievance in his lungs and a mouth that had never once, in the history of mouths, known when to close, and he chose that sacred slope to scream insults at a daimyo's wife like a man auditioning for exile. The universe, ever a comedian with poor timing, answered his tirade with an unseen hand that groped him mid-sentence, and the vein on his forehead did not throb, it detonated, a live wire under skin that has never learned peace. He quotes old masters at himself in the mirror, mutters that anger is a coal that burns the hand of him who holds it, then hurls the mirror across the room because agreeing with wisdom makes him angrier than disagreeing ever could. Once he was samurai, spine straight as a blade, breath counted like sutras, and now he counts insults instead, aped into rage the way degens ape into charts that are already rugged. He is recovering slowly, he insists, gritting it through clenched teeth on the mountain path, one furious, humiliated, magnificently undisciplined step at a time.