You can’t hurry grief. Maybe you can, but I can’t. I’ve tried. I’m still fucked up from the last few years. I’ll feel okay for the better part of a day and then I’ll see a photo of me from 2018 and notice how happy I looked. And it’ll come back. Often as self-reproach, which I’m good at. Sometimes as anger, with which I’m less skillful. I have issues with anger, which I repress more easily than I express. I’ve been angry a lot. For a long time. It’s cramping my style. I could use some stronger medicine.

For my birthday in June, an observant and compassionate friend gave me a gift certificate that helped subsidize 20 minutes alone in a rage room. I’m not sure how much it helped, but it felt good. Really good. If you’re holding back a lot of anger, I recommend it.

A rage room is pretty much what it sounds like. You get a room full of stuff to destroy, some implements with which to do some damage, and permission to go buck wild. Rage rooms have been featured on reality shows and are very much part of the zeitgeist, since everyone’s pissed as hell right now and most of society doesn’t know what to do with that except numb it out and ignore it.

Some rooms are minimal. The more expensive ones allow you to destroy a car. For my own date with myself at Rage Ground in the Los Angeles Fashion District, which is adjacent to Skid Row and not as nice as it sounds, I chose “Keep It Glassy,” which seemed like a happy medium.

In order to get the most out of my rage room experience, I wanted to make sure to arrive in a lousy mood. So I took the bus from my home in Venice, which took about an hour. After that, I was, indeed, on edge. Curt. Snippy. I was self-conscious about being slightly rude toward the attendant, who didn’t seem to notice and was very polite as she helped me suit up in my helmet, gloves, and overalls.

Finally, I found myself alone in my room. It was full of large, dark wine bottles, along with smaller tumblers, shot glasses, ashtrays, and the like. I had two metal bars, two bats, and two hammers to choose from. Churning speed metal wafted from the PA. I had twenty minutes to do all the damage I could. I didn’t waste a second.

Part of my struggle with anger is that I tend to be very… “cerebrally led,” as I was described by the world’s best improv coach. I’m usually in my head, rarely in my body. And, indeed, although I got a righteous workout, the storytelling part of my brain was very much online throughout the experience. Fortunately, that was part of the fun.

The wine bottles, as the most eye-catching features of the room, became personified in my mind, representing some of the major characters I’ve encountered over the last four-or-so years of my life. Some clustered in groups. Some bottles hid behind others, or tried to. All were systematically, one by one, laid waste, their pathetic pleas for mercy unheeded. The ashtrays and shot glasses were particularly fun to smash as they represented all the “fun” I stopped having when I stopped drinking.

I screamed. I kept screaming. I couldn’t stop. Nor did I want to.

When I was done, I had five minutes to spare. So I found all the stray shards and pounded them into fine powder, because I love the satisfaction of a job well done.

There’s some debate as to whether or not catharsis “works.” But whether or not it helped me feel better in the long run, I certainly had a blast. I got to move around. I got to use my creativity for evil. And when I left, I was on my best behavior. If I came out of there and behaved like a dick, that would reflect poorly on Rage Ground, and the people who work there are way too nice to be burdened with that.

I’ll be back.

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