The Latest From Kirby

Hi there, I’m Kirby Ferguson. I’m best known for the series Everything is a Remix. I’m pivoting away from free content creation for financial and personal reasons. I’m seeking financial stability and personal fulfillment in the second act of life. I’m thinking aloud about all of this here. I might later revise, discard or ridicule anything said.

I don’t know how many people perceive me as angry, but anger is like my thing. I love it. It’s my trusty go-to. I’m pretty good at managing it and directing it, so I’m not sure how many of even my closest friends know how much anger I lug around. To be clear, I definitely experience far more happiness than anger. By a lot. But I regularly experience episodes of concealed rage. It’s a problem I have.

I’m gonna talk about my anger problem this week. I’m sure many of you have the same thing—maybe worse, maybe not so bad. Or perhaps you have a similar experience but with a different emotion, like sadness, guilt, fear or anxiety. Maybe the person you beat-up in your imagination isn’t another person, it’s you. 

Many men, especially men of my era and earlier, had anger demonstrated to us. We were subjected to anger, we were even expected to be angry at certain times. If you don’t display appropriate anger, that’s not masculine.

I understand my anger decently. Anger and violence were pervasive dangers of my childhood. Brutal, fearful boys reigned the schoolyards in the time and place I grew up. I suspect the abuse they took from their fathers flowed down to the rest of us.

Anger is so embedded in men, some of us don’t even recognize anger as an actual emotion. I repeatedly hear “strong” angry men describe others (generally women) as “emotional.” They can’t even see that it’s them who are the most emotional people around by far.

But hey, let’s give anger its props.

Anger is one of the secret ingredients of creativity. I don’t know how you create without at least some anger. I remember watching the Mr. Rogers doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor and thinking “Wow, Mr. Rodgers was pissed off.” He had plenty of anger and it drove him to create something bold and different. Fred Rodgers had an edge.

The edge gives you direction, it gives you something to push against, something to defy. What you don’t want to be is every bit as important as what you do want to be.

I used my anger as creative fuel. Lots of my early comedy stuff was inspired by the anger I had over being subjected to homophobia. (I’m actually straight, but homophobes are quite unconcerned about your real sexual orientation.) Everything is a Remix was a swing at artistic narcissism and superiority. I fought against conspiracy theories because I was attracted to the intellectual combat. 

I’ve always liked good provocation, the kind of controversy that has a purpose and spurs an interesting debate. This sort of conflict helps us all attain higher understanding.

But like everybody less, I’m also a sucker for bad provocation. Stupid arguments can be even more engaging and addictive than substantive ones. The triumphs of performative assholes like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the sports pundit Stephen A. Smith are due to them making the biggest, ugliest arguments around.

This is the problem with living with anger. It’s indiscriminate. We don’t just get angry over good provocation, we also get angry over bad provocation—and probably even more so. Cheap shots enrage us most of all. Engaging arguments are often the most worthless.

One of my most embarrassing pastimes is angry rumination. I like to dwell on an argument or insult then improv out imaginary arguments, one after the other. It’s like I’m workshopping different comebacks to the points of my opponent—who is an asshole and fucking idiot, by the way. I seek the ultimate comeback, the kind of righteous zinger that reduces my adversary to wracking sobs of shame.

I get especially angry when I think people are wrong, stupid, or domineering. And I have to admit, it really pisses me off when men think I’m not masculine and therefore weak or pathetic. The anger I experience over that, by the way, is strong, manly and virile and really very impressive.

Sometimes I only ruminate briefly, but especially toxic stuff can loop for weeks or even months. The arguments do sometimes evolve and improve through this angry looping. But ultimately, I don’t think angry rumination is about that. It’s too reactive and repetitive. The topics I ruminate on are the least worthy of extended examination. I’d be better off thinking nothing at all.

I’ve been ruminating a lot lately and it’s over a ridiculous situation. I made the mistake of giving my number to an eccentric and probably alcoholic neighbor. He started sending me weird texts which I mostly ignored. I think this eventually irked him, so out of the blue, he hurled a series of crazy cheap shots my way. For instance, this was in reference to me pushing my toddler son in a stroller: “you push your baby in the cart is it groceries I ain't criticizing but bro it ain't that heavy.”

That hits several of my sore spots: it’s wrong, stupid and he’s calling me weak and “not masculine.” (Y’know, I don’t even care about being masculine. Maybe it's the contempt behind remarks like these that bothers me. Maybe it bothers me because I think it’s wrong—I actually am plenty masculine.)

And does he have children or know anything about them? Of course not!

Anyway, I blocked him and moved on but his stupid insults somehow festered. So I’ve been having an imaginary argument with him since. This is someone who didn’t say anything meaningful and I don’t care about at all. 

Most disturbingly, I’ve found myself flipping back-and-forth between taking care of my son and a furious, imaginary and entirely worthless argument. I drift off into some incensed fantasy, snap out of it, and see my toddler son staring back at me on the change table. I’m flipping back-and-forth between tenderness and fury and I think my one-and-a-half year-old son senses me repeatedly floating off into some weird, tightened trance.

I’m not headed to a tidy resolution here, folks. But let me say this.

One of the most impactful things I’ve ever done was an email to you all that I wrote about resentment and disappointment. It was about when shit doesn’t work out, or in my case, didn’t last forever like it should have. It produced a flood of replies and people are still talking to me about it. I’m still trying to reply to all the emails because they were heartfelt and thoughtful.

In many ways, that message I sent is spoiled ranting and I knew that when I wrote it. But it was also real. It was where I was at and had been for a while. And the point of writing it was to let go. I wanted to acknowledge the ugly, self-pitying chapter I was in and close it.

By the way, folks, that worked. I’m not saying I’m fixed, but I’m much improved. Try it for yourself. You don’t have to write something public. Start a journal. Talk to your future self.

I used to think talking about my problems would reveal something horrible and repellent about me. I thought it’d just worsen my problems, it’d make them more real, it’d create a vortex that’d suck me in. The opposite is true. Talking about your problems, writing about your problems, is a way to create distance between you and the feelings. It’s a way to get some elevation. It’s like staggering out of a dense forest—scratched-up, exhausted, squinting—then hiking up a grassy hill, looking around, and seeing where you are.

I don’t have any great wisdom to share yet. Right now I’m just trying to get out of the forest. I think I’m almost there. And when I get up that hill, I’ll tell you what I see.

Love,
K

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