It's a law of nature that the most vulnerable are the funniest, too.  It's a survival mechanism.  That's how infants have traditionally made it to adulthood.  Here's the deal: if you're small, amuse us or die.  It's your choice.

Domesticated animals are usually pretty funny, too.  What would be the incentive to keep them otherwise?  Cats can get a little dour later in life, but they start out frisky, bringing to mind the old Ogden Nash poem:

The trouble with a kitten is
THAT
Eventually it becomes a
CAT.

If kittens were born cats, they'd have gone extinct thousands of years ago. 

Fish are an exception. They don't do much, but then they're more like interior decor. 

Even when they rage it's mostly fun for us.  In fact, we all know people who delight in whipping some helpless creature into a frenzy just for sport. (Some of us enjoy this as a vicarious pastime — the Mean Kitty Song, for example, has been viewed almost 22 million times on youtube.  22 million!  That's the population of Australia.) 

Human rage is not quite as amusing, of course.  Because even small humans sometimes carry guns.  But anyone who's ever been in a relationship knows that sometimes whipping someone into a lather can allay the onset of ennui.  You just have to be sure there are no guns in the house and you've hidden all the knives.  There is certainly a time and a place for rage, but you should always be careful not to waste it.  The least you can do is put it to some use.

The other day, I was on my bike, and encountered a very angry pedestrian.  Because I was on a bike, I found him amusing.  His rage was wasted.  If I had bumped into him on foot instead, I'm not sure I would be here today to tell the tale, so outsized was his hard-on against the world.  
 
Sidewalk rage is rarely covered in the media, but it does exist.  The reason you don't hear about it is that it doesn't have the potential for gruesome fatalities that road rage and air rage do, although having scalding hot coffee (sidewalk ragers' weapon of choice) thrown in your face is certainly no picnic.  But particularly where it is set off in pedestrians by those using other modes of transport it's the least likely to result in any real harm in the end. 

Futility and impotent rage have been staples of comedy almost as long as they've been staples of tragedy.  If you've ever been splashed by a passing bus, you know the feeling of futility and impotent anger I'm talking about here.  And if you've ever watched from your office window as others get splashed, you'll understand the difference. 

However warranted a pedestrian's rage, so long as you're in a car or on a bike or in an office across the street you know the pleasure the gods take in tormenting mortal men.

Like most people, I've played on both teams.  As a midwesterner who grew up in a mid-size city I can be polite to a fault as a pedestrian.  I look both ways before crossing, make eye-contact with drivers, and wave at cars who stop to let me pass, a quaint custom where I come from which usually elicits a polite "just cross the street, friggin douchebag!" from motorists here.

When I'm on my bike I try to remain sympathetic to pedestrians, but I have to admit it's not easy.  Something happens when you change modes of transportation, particularly from slower to faster, and lighter to heavier, successively more mechanized modes: a different part of the brain lights up.  The transformation from "pedestrian" to "jogger" to "cyclist" to "motorist" roughly parallels the journey of Jekyll and Hyde, or our modern-day Dr. Bruce Banner to The Hulk.  Power corrupts.  Horsepower corrupts absolutely.

I'm really not a ragey person.  Rage is like vomiting to me.  Even when I feel like I've got to, I won't.  It's just too abominable.  I probably owe my aversion to raging out to my father.  He was a bit of a hot-head (100% Italian — and 180 degrees from my mother's cold, northern temperament), and I found it so selfish, unbecoming and tedious that I vowed not only not to go there, but not to be there when others did.  

I have been mostly successful in this, although it's not as easy as it sounds.  I don't pretend not to have issues.  We all get angry, frustrated, threatened.  But rage takes it to a whole nutha level. 

A few years back I dated a tall, incredibly handsome, and frankly brilliant local boy.  He could be a little patronizing , and would editorialize unnecessarily at times.  It was always happening when he put music on.  We're the same age, and shared many interests, and yet he would always ask me if I knew who the artist was, and be sure to tell me how "surprised" he was when I did.  We're talking no-brainers, like Chet Baker singing "My Funny Valentine" here, not Yohimbi Orchestra doing "Psychiatric Care for Geese."

Still.  I endured it, and despite the fact that the sex was awkward at its best, we were sorta inching towards actually getting serious. 

I'd stayed over one night, and in the morning I asked to check my email on his laptop. 

The dude still had dial-up.  I was like, "wow, how does this work again?" 

And instead of answering "oh, just click the icon there," he unleashed a string of epithets on me that would make the ragingest Masshole on the Pike blush, and then went off to have his shower as if nothing had happened.  Now, if we'd had a little thing going where we playfully insulted one another, but this was out of the blue and bordering on Tourette's. Frankly, it was shocking.  And a deal-breaker for me.

The Orphanage has a hot-head-in-residence who occasionally unleashes the beast. The last time she lost it it was in front of everyone, and we all just shrank back in stunned silence.  Really, it was like watching someone helpless to stop themselves masturbating on the T.  We all felt like we needed a shower afterward. Rage, after all, is a kind of emotional incontinence — projectile incontinence at that.  It was like being psychically spewed on.  All these rancid, age-old but undigested issues of hers heaving out in flaming chunks. 

(She apologized some months later, and of course we forgave, but you never forget something like that.  I mean, you'll always remember that girl in fifth grade who puked all over her desk during the social studies test, and she will always be "that girl in fifth grade who puked all over her desk during the social studies test.")

Rage takes the primary emotion of anger, which, according to psychoanalysts Glick and Roose, provides motivation "when a goal is interfered with and when organisms wish to overcome the obstacle to that goal," and basically removes the primary obstacle and the goal, leaving "incomplete or disorganized forms of anger" to explode like a microwaved chihuahua all over more or less innocent bystanders. 

There are loads of hypotheses regarding sources of rage.  Some blame evolution, overcrowding, even brain-damage. Most psychoanalysts agree with Dartmouth's Jim Platt, who says it comes from suppressed anger about lack of control:

Frequently the underlying anger is related to a perceived loss of control over factors affecting our integrity—our beliefs and how we feel about ourselves.... Rage is the accumulation of unexpressed anger and perceived disrespectful transactions that after multiple “stuffings” finally flow to the surface. When we become enraged, usually there is the belief that someone is deliberately attempting to incite us to become angry.

There's no question getting around Boston is frustrating, whatever mode of transportation you use.  As a cyclist, my biggest frustration is the lack of connectivity in the broken network of bike lanes.  There are several trouble spots.  One is the Boston end of the Harvard Bridge.  If I take the Charles River bike path, this is my on-off ramp: 


The signs say to walk your bike, and if the ramp is crowded I do, but once you get to the top, if you're heading north over the bridge toward Cambridge there is no way to access the northbound bike lane, since there's a barrier between the sidewalk and the street: 


If you're headed south towards Boston there's no legal crossing for about a block, at Back Street.  And it's often not safe to cross until Beacon, two blocks down.  So, if the sidewalk's free, I take it down to Beacon and cross the street there.  I'm a pragmatic cyclist — I'm not one of these spandex-clad road warriors who cycles on principle.  In the real world sometimes you gotta improvise. 

The flipside is that I don't take offense at the fact that no one else, including said spandex-clad road warriors, are following the rules of the road either, within reason.  Who could?  Build me a city where it's safe to bike by your rules, and I'll bike by your rules.  Until then, I'll bike safe by mine.  I'm not totally lawless: my Prime Directive: do no harm. 

I follow the rules of the road when I can, of course.  But when it seems to endanger my life or the life of others to do so, which it sometimes does, forget it.  If I have to choose between a busy road without an accessible bike lane and a wide empty sidewalk, guess which one I'm taking? 

But, just so you know, I don't ride on the sidewalk like it's the street.  I basically coast with one foot on the pavement, keeping as far to the right as possible, making eye-contact and giving pedestrians a wide berth.  I really do.  I know it's a sideWALK.  I use 'em for walking, too.  But if we've got six feet between us, and we're aware of one another and can pass without event, why make a federal case of it? 

Of course I understand.  It's irritating.  Everybody wants everybody else to follow the rules, but at the same time everybody wants to be the exception to the rules.  And it's stressful when different modes of traffic mix.  I avoid it at all cost, but sometimes it's unavoidable. 

So, to make a long story short: one morning recently I had just crossed Back Street and headed down the empty sidewalk towards Beacon Street. I had no reason to expect a rage event before I got to the crosswalk.  But that's just what happened.  I'd hardly even hopped the curb before a sporty-looking guy — could've been an MIT student — gave me the evil eye, issued a huge, exaggerated huff, and made a big to-do of jumping over the guard-rail into the bike lane, as if there wasn't a block  separating us and more than enough sidewalk between us to share.  

As I continued down the sidewalk he stomped up the bike lane berating me.  OK, a little bit of that you expect when you leave the house in the morning.  This is Boston, after all.  A "douchebag" or two.  "Idiot", "moron". No biggy.  But it just went on and on.  It's times like these you wish you had a freakin' taser.  Just end it. 

As I passed him in slow-motion, I couldn't help but gawk at the spectacle he was making of himself.  I mean, from the itensity of his anger you'd think I had just murdered his first-born right in front of him.  He was very nearly ululating.  This was the closest thing to a jihad I think I've ever been on the receiving end of.   

If he had been more sensible — maybe had merely grumbled something as I passed — I might have explained to him, as I have to you, why I was abusing sidewalk privileges, and how I sympathize with his frustration with cyclists bullying pedestrians.  I really do.  And that if there were better options at trouble spots like this one, some of these frustrations could be mitigated.  He was kinda cute — maybe we could've gone for a coffee (decaf for him) and rapped about the BRA and dedicated bike lanes.

But as he stomped off, shaking his fist and cursing me at the top of his voice — "Sidewalk-murderer!  Rot forever in hell, son of spandex-wearing bicycle-fucking whore!" — I looked back, at first shocked, then bemused, and then, when his anger seemed not to be abating, in fear of him chasing after me on foot.  I've had four flats so far this year, so my escape was far from assured.

I'm a mellow ride.  Just ask around.  I'm not the type of guy who's going to shout you down, no matter how egregious your traffic violation.  I grumble and mumble under my breath, sure — I mean, you can't ride up Mass Ave. without dodging pedestrians and parked cars coming at you from every which way.  You'd have to be a Jedi Master not to get flustered sometimes.  You don't drive, cycle or walk through Central Square and come out the other end with a renewed love of humanity.  It's just not possible. 

But raging out never helps.  I mean, it's hard enough to ride a bike in Boston without trying to do it blinded by rage.