Picture this. You. Out in a forest, having the goddamn time of your life, loving nature, farting with the squirrels and pissing on logs like God created the heaven and earth for you and your little tallywhacker. Walking. Come across a road. Beep-beep- what's that? Why, it's a camper, all tricked out with doodads and whatchacallits, for camping, stoves and chairs and the like, marshmellers and them chocolate s'more dealies in a little baggie inside, and ain't that just a happy camper, ain't it just the sweetest goddamn camper you ever did see? You were having infinity plus twelve amounts of fun, and now it's infinity plus thirty, you're so fucking happy seeing that camper. Well guess what- that camper ain't Doug, not by a mile. Not by two.

Here comes the mailman. Goddamn mailman. Hey, mailman, what do you think, you're doing? The United States Government can go to hell, you blue-socks wearin' fool. What are you doin', tromping up to Doug's porch with your sack of letters and bills and victoria-secrets catalogs, where Doug is sittin' with a jelly jar half empty of sour apple cider and an expression on his face that would fix cats? You damn fool, what if Doug is so mad that he's gonna to do a little presto-chango on the postal service, didja ever think about that? Goddamn truck-with-the-steering-wheel-on-the-wrong-side fool, what if he decided to be disgruntled, eh? Y'ever notice how Doug looks kinda disgruntled all the time, like the ancient Greek or Hammarabis or whoever invented language and their word for disgruntled was "Doug," know what I mean? Oh my God, the mailman is putting mail in Doug's mailbox. Oh my God, he's turning around. "Nice day, Mr. Jones," he says. Oh my god.

"Yup," Doug comes really goddamn close to not saying at all. Really close. Here's how close. You're in a brown Ford pinto with a rebuilt Volkswagen engine in it that your cousin the eyetalian dropped in cause he owed you a favor cause you saved his kids from killer bees oncet. You're driving along, minding your own sweet motherfucking business having the time of your life sipping a Coors what's nestled 'tween your legs as you go from the honkey tonk to your home and your wife and your kids and your dog and your plates from Sears with the pretty little patterns on the sides. Green, looks like clovers. And all of the sudden out of nowhere some crack-head on heroin and about fifty-five joints comes screamin' out in front of you, and you can actually see your own goddamn fat-faced reflection on the hood of his car before he tears off and disappears in the night like a fart that shoulda been lit. That's how close Doug came to saying nothing to Mr. Postal Manguy Person.

Why?

It shoots, the question, like a meek rabbit, a tiny little rabbit out from under the front porch of your house and runs with its fastest careeningest speed towards the forest where it will be safe inside a little warren with some nuts and an old rancid carrot, because goddamn you, mostly you are more interested in that Doug is mad, and not the whatfor, but you are not a god, you're a human, you are a philosopher, there is a little Greek rabbit inside of you, scared but curious, a little bit of Greek in you that can't help but look at a thing and not just marvel but has to also question, a little pre-hellenistic Greek inside you that has to ask, "Why that boy be so damn mad?"

Because Doug is pissed. He's sitting on his porch in the middle of the day in the middle of the sun and he 's sweating and it's July and he is wearing shorts and a t-shirt like he owns Walmart or something, he's got his apple cider sour which is just about gone now, there's a taste of it on his lips and if you were Cindy Crawford and if you had beautiful hooters and a come-hither stare and the goddamn mole on your face and you walked up the three steps to Doug on his porch in his chair in July in the middle of the day and planted a slow burning wet one right on his lips you might taste it, just a little bit, lucky you, now go back to Hollywood and make s'more money, ya tramp. Doug, in a word, is em aye dee, and that spells angry. Why?

There's the rabbit again. Somebody shoot that sunofabitch.

It is Wednesday in the middle of July. On Wednesdays, there's a certain something in the air which really makes some folks angrier, makes 'em want to bust a gut, bust a nut, kick some butt, whatever. But that's not it for Dougie Wougie. And in July, there's temperatures that make men weep and women frown, but Doug's not men and he's certainly no women, so that's not it neither. What could it be? Lookit that rabbit go!

Bing bong, bing bong etc., there goes the town bell, saying it's such and such past the hour. God, how Doug hates that, sitting on his messed up chair on his porch with his empty jelly jar in his hand, kind of slack and resting on his thigh like a dead mosquito would if it happened to die will poking at Doug's flesh right at there. He hates the way you know what that bell means before its gets done, so why should it go on. But make a note of this, here, Doug's just hating that 'cause he's already mad, when he's happy that bell is the voice of angels, it is icecream and happiness, jellybeans, fuzzy ducks, Monday night football, a full glass of not-quite-as-sour apple cider. The bell goes bong for a while and a little kid on bike rides by and ignores Doug with the kind of intensity usually reserved by the youth of this country for third world nations and physics textbooks burned by Hitler. Doug ignores the boy right back and in spades, ignoring all of his parts- the flashy red of the dusty bike where the boy's sweat has cut through to catch the sun, the way the sinews and tendons and ligaments and other anatomical whatnot work to grind the pedals round and round in a fascinating union of human evolution and bicycle engineering, the color of the boy's shirt, his pants, his shoes, his liver- Doug does such an amazing job of ignoring the boy's liver that he doesn't even think about it at all, in the same way you wouldn't think about, say, the eighty-ninth brick from the right, five rows up, on the wall of a school building, or something like that.

Here comes that rabbit again and I think I'm gonna nail it right between the eyes- nope, got away. Goddamn. Anyway, Doug is mad mad mad and he hasn't moved an inch in hours even though the sun has and the mailman has and the boy on the bike has and his jelly jar has and the cider has and his lips and throat and stomach, called his tummy. His heart has not pumped one single drop of his pissed-off blood around his angry like a trapped-cat body in literally hours, so he seethes in his own ire. There's a word for it- ire. Doug's got ire.

Once upon a time in a land far away there was pretty girls and football teams and all manner of fried chicken at the weekend Sunday church fellowship gathering picnics, and a crew-cutted boy who would never have drunk out of no stinking jelly jar used to run around grinning in the sun in his shirt-sleeves and his creased pants and his God love him penny loafers. But the past has a way of becoming a fairy-tale in the hands of a protruding belly and a widening behind and a busted-down chair and jelly-jar growing sticky in the sun from having been empty for quite a while. Something about the way the past can turn into a song on the radio you got stuck in your head that sneaks up on your brain when your about to fall asleep in the middle of the night after a dinner of macaroni and cheese with hotdogs cut up into it, rides around between your ears when you'd rather be dreaming about Cindy Crawford or some other woman with ample bosoms and eyes that were just made for eyeshadow, sticks there and makes you go over it so it'll be satisfied and go away- but it never does, leaves some detail behind, like how Jenny the girl you had a crush on was walking around in bluejeans that day on the Sunday and she looked so Goddamn purty that Cindy Crawford herself would have committed suicide to look at her, and then you noticed how Jenny had her pants partially unzipped which meant nothing but that she had been a little hasty in the restroom but it kicked her out of heaven as shurly as Michael had Lucifer and she ceased to be the perfect woman who would bear your children and darn your socks and fix your macaroni and cheese with real ham cut up into it and turned into the town whore who gets pregnant nine times before she's thirty and drinks herself to death in someplace far away but not far enough, like Memphis. Memories are like that, Goddamn it, but I'll be honest with you, this little smidgen of buckshot missed the rabbit by so wide a margin the fucker's starting to get cocky.

Doin' a little rabbit dance across the lawn, now. Why? Why's Doug so mad? Ain't the heat, ain't the cider, the mailman, the wasted youth, the drugs, the nuns, the spy missions gone bad, wwiii or the commies or reaganomics or why did coke change or gangs or corrupt politicians or any of that stuff. What is it it, then? Goddamn rabbit, I think he's gonna take nap right there in the sun, right there in front of Doug, right there on the grass, nibblin' on a clover and basking. Basking, people, he is basking.

Mark your calenders folks, get this down, call the papers and the television stations, get Francis Ford Coppola on the phone to cast Sylvester Stallone in the movie about this moment right here- Doug just took a deep breath, and let it out slow. Puffed his cheeks, let the wind go easy, but wait for it, wait for it... he's still pretty mad. As mad? Maybe. As pissed-off? -Let's go to the judges. Judges? Yes, Doug is still just as mad as he was, it has not abated, that's six hours of constant anger, one glass of sour apple cider, a mailman, a boy on his bike, a sun that flits across the sky like a bumblebee, and nobody knows why.

Looky there, the rabbit just died of old age, Nobody cares anymore. Huh.

When he was seven, Doug had a favorite book he'd look at whenever he was in the school library. It had words in it, plenty of words, but mostly it had pictures of animals. Hippos, elephants, lions, giraffes- all them African animals. Doug would get that book and look at those animals and think to himself how you could go to Africa and the animals would just be there, in the grass, hanging around, smoking cigarettes and playing pool and acting like the earth was just a place made for folks who got nothing else better to do. Doug loved that book, would have stolen it if he had known what stealin' was, would have memorized it if he knew what memorizin' was, would have eaten the book if it had tasted like peanut butter. But then one day he turned eight and the book got some dust on it and then Jenny was the new girl in third grade and she went to his church, too, and that was that. But every now and again that crazy web of associations that makes up the crissedy-crossedy web in the brain web with its web of synapses and memories would flash from a to b to c to g to j and Doug would get a sense of being in that library again, the smell of polish on the tables and baby powder on the librarian, and he'd think hippo, or elephant, or lion or giraffe, or maybe even monkey if the association called for it. This was not one of those times- he was too mad- but he wished it was.

Mad mad mad, and watch out, the kind of mad that gets men killed, themselves and others. The kind of angry that starts wars, bakes cakes, makes people into idiots and heroes, all at the same time. Sylvester Stallone better do sequels, because here goes Doug with another deep breath- the sun is pretending to set and the clouds are pretending to turn a sort of orangier pink, and way off in the distance to the east where the sun is more serious about setting there is the sound of those bugs who's shells you always find on the sides of trees: whatdoyoucallems. Doug's been mad pretty much all day, angry, ireful, pissed; let's check the thesaurus, we got upset, that's putting it nicely, Once there was a little man who was upset, and so he prayed to God and was happy again. I don't think so. What else, there's aggravated- makes Doug sound like a boil or a corn or a bunion or something. Enraged, that's a good one, pretty damn close to it, actually, ummm. in England Doug would be cross, but then again he'd also be Nigel or some such dumbness like that. Furious is good, and if Doug was a character in one of this highfalutin' novels with morals and character development and all that he'd be incensed.

Ha ha! Got that rabbit right between the eyes! Nailed him good, boy, lookit him bleed! Lookit him squirm, there'll be rabbit stew tonight, ladies and gentleman, with Gramma's biscuits and a nice apple pie, yessir, nailed that rabbit, made him look stupid, knew we would, too, if we let him get overconfident.

Because Goddamn it the TV set is busted, again, and since Doug's got nothing to do all day, now he's got nothing to do all day. Goddamn technology. Fix the TV! Whatever disembodied intelligence resides in this realm, God or Buddha or whatever, fix Doug's Goddamn TV, do it right now, it's what you invented life for, you fuckin' prick, fix his TV so he has something to do. Then go back in time and make Jenny say yes when Doug asks her to junior prom, or we'll kick you in your balls and make you wish you were even more disembodied than you even are now for messing with the likes of us. We killed the rabbit, didn't we? Goddamn TV. Doug goes inside to get more cider.