I never understood the phrase ‘don’t bottle it up’.
But the day I took it literally was the day that changed my life.
It was also the day that changed the world.
Anger is an odd thing, I realised, and noticed that when I was angry, I got hot, bothered, fidgety, my mind raced. Basically, there was a lot of energy there. So, what if, I surmised, I actually found a way to bottle that.
And I did.
I made a machine that bottled up my anger. Literally. After a few months, I was more content, and I had two cupboards full of bottled anger. I half feared that those jars of anger would explode, but they never did. So the cupboards kept getting more and more full, and it got to the point where I was running out of space, and something had to be done.
I took a few jars out to the drain in the street. When I opened one up, I stopped myself pouring it away. Another thought occurred to me. I emptied the jar into the tank of my car.
It started.
And ran for twice as long as it did on a tank of petrol.
I bought and installed a generator in my house, and powered it with my own bottled up anger. Soon the supplies in the cupboards started to dwindle. I couldn’t supply my own demand. And artificial rage had no potency whatsoever.
I built an adaptor.
And I plugged my anger harvesting machine into the internet.
Within days, I was powering my whole street. Within a week, I was powering the whole town. By month’s end, the online rage was powering the country. And it seemed to be never ending. An infinite supply of anger, supplying everything we needed.
But like my own cupboards, the more anger we harvested, the less there was.
Luckily, we seemed to hit a sweet spot.
There was just enough of it in the world, at any one moment, to power the grid.
Rage kept the lights on.
Just.
We all got just content enough.
There was no festering spite. Only then did we realise the power of that spite. I’ve done it, we’ve all done it. Doing something out of spite, fuelled by anger to produce something better, something brilliant.
Art stopped.
We all just sat there, smiling softly. Until we remembered something someone had said, and the lights stayed lit for another night.
But no one used that anger to create.
It’s all very boring now.
