Day 31- Hurricane Neddy

When I was young, I was told it was important to marry so you and a partner can keep one another balanced. People - especially men - who live solo become more and more like themselves, and their quirks become exaggerated to an excessive degree. I’ve tried to keep this in mind, not as marital advice, but to stay one side of the line between being eccentric and being an eccentric.

It’s like flanderization, a word for when TV characters become more caricatured with each season — horribly common in sitcoms. They start as humans with relatable, if silly, quirks, but a few seasons later they’re a bundle of catchphrases, their defining traits now turned up to eleven. You can see it in Scrubs, or with Creed in The Office, Pierce in Community, or Ron Swanson, or the trope namer Ned Flanders.

Ned Flanders starts as an exceedingly pleasant neighbour, a very normal but very kind man to contrast with, and be irrationally hated by, Homer Simpson. Within a few years, Ned is defined to the point of excess by his pious Christianity, his inability to speak without adding ‘diddly’ to his words, and so forth. Much like Lisa, he’s become far more 2D.

One of the episodes some might consider guilty of this in its early stages is season 8’s ‘Hurricane Neddy’, which is my favourite Simpson’s episode. In it, a hurricane passes through Springfield. Homer even resorts to prayer to save his home - and it is saved from destruction, but Ned Flanders, the most sincere of Christians, finds his whole house destroyed. He has a crisis of faith, and takes shelter in a church for the night. He turns to God for strength and support, but gets a paper-cut from the Bible.

In the morning, a seeming miracle! His house is back! It turns out the people of Springfield came together and rebuilt it for the well-loved Flanderses — but as it happens, none of them had construction knowledge, and the new house collapses entirely. At this, Flanders has a mental breakdown, yelling and condemning everyone who had come to try and help. But he knows he’s gone too far, and drives himself to a mental asylum, and has himself sectioned.

What transpires is a deep dive into his upbringing - where his hands-off parents had let him become a tearaway terror of a toddler, but experimental spanking therapy on the young Ned had left him unable to feel or express anger. He just forced it all down inside. The plot carries on from there, but that’s the part that’s always resonated with me, because I struggle with anger.

I don’t mean I have too much anger - but that I can’t express it. Probably very few of you have seen me actually angry in the past ten or fifteen years, other than with myself. I can panic, I can fret and fear, but when something stirs me to anger I drive it down, or I act against myself. At times, I think it’s good, because one of my greatest fears is to frighten or wound others, which feels like an inevitable outcome of anger. I think, ‘good, I can be like a capybara, without rage’. Capybaras are good, they don’t rock the boat, other than literally. But Jesus was not a capybara. He had anger, and did not conceal it. One of the things that troubles me about myself is that I can’t imagine myself standing up for anything. Always being gentle is nice, but it’s not necessarily good. It’s how bad things get done in the world while people remain polite, rather than ever raising a voice or saying ‘no’. On Monday I was writing a day of Ben-Them about a topic that made me angry, molten and trembling, and I shut it down. It was about transphobia and I feared I would show uncommon anger and come off like a Hitler rant. I tried rewriting it to take all the meaning and possible offence from it but that made it nothing, like salt without saltiness. One of my recurring nightmares is about meeting a former president - you know him - and the air contorted around him, as if he was a sub-bass speaker. Bad vibes. And in those dreams I have the chance to go up and say something to him, but I hold back and I don’t, first because I know nothing I can say could change his mind or his actions. At least in my imagination, he is immune to truth. But I also didn’t speak up because I fear saying anything in anger.

I don’t have a good solution, answer or resolution to that. I’m just very aware that anger is something with which I have a horrid relationship. At my worst of times, and especially when things are unjust I have turned angrily on myself, the only place to earth the frustration. It’s less bad now that I am far more open, and have sought aid with depression and so on. Flanders comes to terms with his anger, finds its root, and resolves to sometimes speak out rather than suffering. That’s his peace. I’m still looking around for the source of mine. Something to work on and to be more honest about. Hiding these things always makes them worse.