Remember, remember. November begins.  Your anger is the gunpowder beneath your daily Parliament, awaiting a Guy to set it off. A minefield floating beneath the surface of your thoughts: a mind-field. A string of lit firecrackers. A Bouncing Betty.

You pause to look up “Bouncing Betty.” The image comes to you from The Big Red One, but you aren’t certain exactly what it is. You would ask Dad. This is the sort of thing he would know. He’s no longer around to ask. If he was, you wouldn’t need to ask it. Turns out, the image you had in your mind of bomb, the size of a rubber ball, bouncing about until it bursts, is not quite what it is. What it is will still work: a shell that pops up to detonate.

You aren’t certain where these explosives lie. Trial and error has exposed the fuse to one or two, and you wish that you could warn people not to light them. Trial and error have  burned more than one.

Don’t, for instance, bring up the subject of eating. Perhaps the single up-side of these two months has been weight loss; but that is not the point. Eating, food, control, your parents, all of these things contain a particular combustible chemistry that is best avoided by anyone not professionally-trained in these matters. Worry more about the drinking, you want to say. You worry about the drinking, that’s for damn sure. (Not that you stop, you just create rules and a boozy character to play to hide the probability that you are a drunk.)

Don’t bring up, either, reviews of the other book, companion to your book. You look forward to reading that book, the parts that you have read are wonderful. You adore the author as a historian and personally. He’s a true mensch, a gentleman of the highest order. His book deserves prizes, awards, and positive reviews. His reviewers, who do give good reviews, are muthafuckas.

Men praising a second man for noticing the women in a third man’s life, and by implication praising themselves for noticing the same, then preening their knowledge of other books about the third man, fail to note that a book about the third man and women, written by a woman, was published last year. That book was not from an obscure press, it did win two awards, it was short-listed for a third, and it was reviewed by one of their peers in one of the major national newspapers. This sets you off. The cliqueishness, the boy’s club. You also hurt, knowing that your fifteen minutes of fame has ended, knowing that you are being ungrateful, unprofessional, petty, small, and yet still feeling as if you have some justification in your anger. The rockets red are glaring in your head and it may be the aura to a migraine.

You can’t even fathom the news rolling in from the election. The way that old male politicians receive praise as the coming saviors of one party while the women, with the same credential and same flaws, are told to shut up and sit down and go away for being so horrible and destructive we need new blood! The way that lies and slander and outright falsehood and corruption are hailed as signs of honesty and somehow representative of the Common Man and a change from the business-as-usual-Beltway-insiders. The clock turns back to 1950, to Jim Crow voter suppression without only a veneer of pretense that anything other than quashing democracy occurs. Your mind explodes at the hypocrisy, the cant, the sexism, and bullshit. “Muthafuckers!” you scream at any active screen. “Why are these muthafuckers still the Golden Boys?” You include the Left in this because all you see are white boys telling women to shut up, criticizing women who have been through far more shit than they have, backwards, in high heels, and having to anticipate the changes around them with a split second of warning. You love them for their passion and place in the world; but, goddammit, they are still muthafuckers.

You enjoy saying “muthafuckers.” F-bombs like the London Blitz blanket your vocabulary, but “muthafuckers” is really your favorite at the moment.

The troll lurks in the background, too. You love describing him as a “muthafucker.” He would be thrilled to know that he lights dynamite every day. He exploited your kindness, your friendship. Now he pisses on your work, calls you a racist, tries to align himself with women of color, although he is a white man, to get them to attack your work and to call attention to himself. He attacks kind scholars for failing to bow down to his one, thin, five-year old, publication from a print-on-demand press that had no context or his half-assed blog posts or his boast of his “scholarship” that more appropriately fall into the category of “antiquarianism” or his demands that everyone agree with him and follow his rules or be branded a “fraud.” He attacks as unscholarly for growing sick of his shit, his demands for accolades, and blocking him, as you did. You knew from the beginning of this phase that you would be happy to unload all of your anger on him, for yourself and for all of the people whom he attacks. Except you know that he is likely suffering from his own grief and this is his manifestation.

That doesn’t stop him from being a Muthafucker of the first order, as he probably always was. That doesn’t mean that you won’t strike back hard if provoked. That doesn’t keep you from hoping that you will be provoked because you want a muthafucker to hurt. Some muthafucker, any muthafucker, will do, so might as well be him as any other.

You almost call Thomas Jefferson a muthafucker in class. You think of Larry Wilmore saying, “Bill Cosby, I still haven’t forgotten about you, muthafucka.” You think the same of Jefferson. Then, you get to Andrew Jackson. He topped Jefferson in muthafuckerness. You bite the word off at the “f” in your lecture.  On stage, in class, this rage taken out on these white men who hated women, who hated African Americans, who hated Native Americans – all of whom comprise half of your class – focuses you, frees you, reshapes your lectures. Your evaluations will be dreadful and you don’t care. You see this part of history in a new light and it shines itself on this nation at the source of its myths.

You want a microphone and a spotlight. You want to turn your rage into a Lenny Bruce commentary — no, a Miriam Maisel commentary. This rage can feel powerful. It can feel like your car turning steeply on the edge of two wheels. It is the verge of losing control. It is knowing where the line of sanity lies, and choosing to cross it.

Except you aren’t always choosing to cross it. Then, it can feel like it will destroy you, explode you.

You can’t, after all, go around calling everyone “muthafuckers.”