My blood was boiling so I cooled my heels. I am entering the decades of unflappability, a new era of serenity for me, a gradual onset of life-enhancing calmness which will peacefully terminate in the perfect tranquillity of death. I tell myself that I cannot afford these types of responses to events. Seething resentment and outrage are privileges best suited to people with something in reserve, the ones equipped with ample mental buffering, such as the profoundly stupid and the unassailably brilliant. I am part of the teeming middle, the undulating sea of grimacing, red-faced mediocrities. I have no choice if I want to save my skin. Stress is notoriously damaging to the skin and the psyche according to an informative article in Parade magazine which upon closer inspection was a paid advertisement for Neutrogena. I got one of those stress balls but it rolled under the couch and I couldn't reach it with my outstretched hand and I had to laboriously rake it out with a spatula, no not a spatula a whatsis, goddammit, a pancake flipper, and when I finally retrieved the damn thing it had gotten sticky somehow, and if there's one thing that sets me off it's stickiness, oh boy am I obsessively wiping down surfaces with a damp cloth or what, and the sticky part of the ball was covered in dust that wouldn't come off and basically I totally lost it at that point and long story short I started smoking again and I was forced to make a few really hurtful anonymous phone calls to calm down. I think later on I might go running down the street screaming and waving my arms with three lit cigarettes in each hand.