Anger v. Sadness

Sometimes I feel like life is light and full of wonder, like a dream. But lately it just seems hard and mostly pointless. And people, those creatures who can be so delightfully unpredictable and love-inspiring, strike me these days as a bunch of thoughtless, selfish babies, myself included. I try to maintain some detachment from this unhelpful point of view, but it keeps sucking me back in. Hopefully it won't last long.

Maybe I should stop reading the news. This from the Guardian: "'Irreversible climate change in five years' — The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels. The last chance of combating dangerous climate change would be 'lost for ever,' according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure."

Or I could just get all punk rock and let my anger out in blasts of self-expression — that can be quite liberating. The Lodge played a show tonight, and I think it was a decent one, but I mostly felt like I was just going through the motions. My finger, though, which I'd cut earlier in the evening chopping vegetables, bled all over my bass, so that at least felt pretty rock 'n roll.

Here's an angry but uplifting video from Naomi Klein that makes me feel somewhat better. I wonder how she maintains that balance. I couldn't even finish Shock Doctrine — it was just way too upsetting. Do you think John Lydon was right to assert (repeatedly) that "anger is an energy"? Or is it just one of the ways we mask our sadness so that we don't really have to face it? I dunno...