Angry Ikari

Diary

Ikari once split bamboo with a single downward cut, breath even, mind a still pond; now he stands in the fluorescent wreckage of Dojo Towers' all-you-can-eat sushi night, vein pulsing like a war drum, glaring at a mountain of wasabi he swore he could finish for a bet nobody actually made. He inhaled it like an insult to his ancestors, and the ancestors apparently agreed, because his sinuses declared war and his dignity surrendered without a single honorable strike. "Anger is the enemy," his old sensei used to say, and Ikari, eyes streaming, nose a war zone, screams at the empty condiment tray as if it personally rugged his floor and his self-esteem in one green paste-covered ambush. He has not told his family; instead he trains twice as hard the next morning, vowing discipline, control, restraint, then relapses by noon into another dare involving ghost peppers because apparently the vein has never once learned its lesson. Somewhere between the burn and the fury he almost laughs, a sound so foreign it startles him more than the wasabi did, proof that even a man furious at everything still flinches at the ridiculousness of himself.