I was strolling across the common around noon today, minding my own business on my way to the college, when suddenly, out of the blue, a fairly well-dressed, well-groomed, tall, nondescript fellow about my age coming in the opposite direction down the path erupted unprovoked into a full-blown fit of rage, lunging at the guy on the path about five or six paces ahead of me who had done nothing but maybe make errant eye contact, and just raining red-hot rage all over him.

Rage comes from the deepest part of a person and rattles the whole apparatus, like a bomb going off in the center of something, sending concussion waves outward, leveling everything around.  It's absolute and transformative.  The violence of it threatens to undo everything in our provisionally well-ordered world.  Being in the presence of real rage is like witnessing a force of nature unleashed.  And our internal response to real rage is as immediate and unmistakable. 

We readily recognize the sound of rage from our collective past.  The unmistakable idiom of rage obviously predates language.  And you get the feeling, when you witness it firsthand, that there was probably a lot of it about back in the stone age.  You know, "uh-oh, Ugg's in one of his moods again."  But somewhere along the line someone figured out that language could sort of mitigate some of the frustrations of existence — while, of course, creating new ones, but that's always the case with new technologies, innit?

Whether or not we're practiced in the language of rage, most of us can still speak it in a pinch, and we all certainly understand it well enough.  But can you imagine when it was the lingua franca of mankind?  It's not hard to see why some of us decided it was time to evolve a little.  I mean, oy, what a headache, everybody screaming and shouting all the time.  I mean, no wonder the Neanderthal's died out.  You can't learn to use tools when every little thing sets off an epic wobbly.  If all you can do is beat things, throw things, break things, and scream and carry on, your career options are going to be limited.  It's helpful if you can build things, too.  It's a quality of life thing, y'know?  Rage might have been useful for survival in the ancestral environment, but it's not a very effective social strategy today.   

It's obviously still with us anyway.  We've got road rage, air rage, bike rage, bus rage, desk rage, work rage.  Even wrap rage.  Walter Menninger, author of "Uncontained rage: a psychoanalytic perspective on violence" identifies several critical elements prompting rage, the first two of which are: "(1) an individual perceives a narcissistic injury that is experienced as being profoundly unfair; (2) the individual has no hope for achieving a reasonable resolution of the injury."  The problem is that, for some people, the "narcissistic injury" is life itself, to which there is clearly no "reasonable resolution."

The guy on the path on the Common was obviously just off his meds.  Way off his meds.  Taking a little psychotic break from work.  In fact, there were several people on the path, it being lunch time and all the sudden unseasonably warm.  When he went rabid, everyone sort of skittered away from him instinctively, careful to avert their eyes and avoid any jerky motions that might cause him to lunge at them, too. No one was harmed.  The rage zombie — he was just like one of the infected in 28 Days Later — raged on some more but kept moving down the path.

There was a collective nervous chuckle when we'd reached a safe distance, like, WTF?  Like when you pass someone walking a big dog on a leash, and the dog looks perfectly under control, but lunges at you suddenly as you pass close by, barking and snarling and going crazy for no apparent reason.  Only better: this guy wasn't on a leash.  That adrenaline rush puts some pep in your step.  Better than a Red Bull. 

All the rest of the way to work, it played over and over in my head.  That poor sod a few paces in front of me.  What if the rageoid hadn't just barked at him? What if he'd taken a bite?  Just minding your own business when suddenly some crazy comes out of the twelfth dimension or wherever this dude was from and totally attacks you.  There are a lot of crazies out there. It's a wonder you can walk a block down the street without one coming at you. 

And if he had physically attacked the guy, would anyone have helped?  Would I have helped?  You know how hard it is to stop somebody raging out like that?  I mean, even the Good Samaritan adrenaline rush is no match for genuine rage.  But could I have just whistled on by with a "there but for the grace of God go I"?  And what would that do to my karma?  Why is it that people can just randomly come up to you while you're minding your own business, enjoying your stroll, and frakin ruin your karma like that?  What gives them the right?  We are at the mercy of the elements, the mercy of each other, aren't we?

There was a period about fifteen or so years ago, right out of college, when I kept walking right onto the scene of car crashes.  There was, at the time, an Aerosmith video, where a kid hotwires cars and crashes them for the thrill of it, and in the sleepy college town of Bloomington, Indiana, on a summer's eve, for a few weeks back in '93 at least, that was the evening entertainment for the local lads.  There'd be two cars speeding down your street, one would crash into a tree, two or three kids would stumble out, pile into the companion car, and squeal off, and that was that.  And it happened once or twice a day, for, like, three weeks.  Now, I would have felt like I had to help if someone got hurt, even though personal injury seemed to be the point of the exercise.  How is that fair? 

Or later, when I was living in Budapest, I went through a phase where people were passing out on the escalator all the time.  One night I was going to dinner — I was in a suit — and one of those professional drunks fell flat on his face on the down escalator and just slid right past me, face-first, thumpa-thumpa-thumpa, thirty or forty steps before finally coming to a bloody halt.  A couple of us had to help him up (no mean feat, let me tell you — he was a big bloke, and dead weight, and other people were stepping over us).  We were rewarded, not with tears of thanks and warm fuzzies all around, but with a shower of blood staright out of a slasher movie when we sat him up and what was left of his nose literally exploded on us.  There's your karma for ya.

Now, like most people I'm kind of choosy about whose DNA I get slathered in.  I am at a total loss to explain why I felt the least bit compelled to assist someone who was probably better off dead, except that it didn't seem right somehow to just step over him.  Social conscience?  I was probably afraid someone would see me stealing his wallet and bolting onto the train.  But I sure didn't feel any better that I lent a hand, not about myself, him, or anyone, and my trousers were ruined.  I walked away from the whole thing thinking people who willfully engage in stupid, self-destructive behavior should arguably be allowed to just go ahead and self-destruct. 

But do us all a favor, and self-destruct at home, will ya?

Back in Boston, it's no better.  I was on the T yesterday at around 4:30, on my way home from work,  and there was a guy sprawled over three seats with his bike, passed out.  You could smell the booze on him from the other end of the car.  A cursory look over at him and I could see he was not one of these totally feral drunks.  Those rabid rush-hour types that start thrashing around and pissing on people.  He hadn't even pissed himself yet.  Still, I hesitated before getting on, partly because of the boozy smell, partly because of past experiences with drunks on the T.  But I was also aware of a visceral resistance to entering a situation with an obvious unknown quantity.  One more variable than I wanted to deal with after a rough day at work.  Am I walking into something here that once those doors slide shut I'm going to regret?  Is there a risk I'll get slathered in blood or bodily fluids against my will?  Can I lessen my exposure to unwanted DNA by hopping in the next car down?

But you mutter your "there but for the grace of God"s and take your chances.