I promised this post so that the blog can become a proper hate site.
The Garden of Hate
Today I walk around with a frozen burst of anger, like a cold rock, in the pit of my stomach. This is one of the costs of civilization: that anger must sometimes be swallowed rather than acted on. It is not comfortable, though, and may even harm me in the long-run. So I turn to my garden for help. Anger is good fuel for wood chopping, digging or raking leaves; and all these chores use it up nicely. Unfortunately, the garden doesn't currently require any of these. It just sits there, being beautiful.
Beautiful gardens are therapeutic against many human ills, but not against anger or rage, unless destroying plants by stomping on them, sawing down all the trees and scrawling obscene graffiti on the stone paths would effect a cure (I haven't tried this yet).
Or perhaps gardens could be used for the alleviation of anger without wrecking them. All that is needed is to create a Garden of Hate, and to invite all your favorite enemies to visit it. (Only in your mind, of course!) There would be a place by the garden gate where they would leave their shoes. A sharp gravel path would then lead them past skunk cabbages and marigolds (for scent), stinging nettles and poison ivy (for touch) to a garden seat erected on a bed of quicksand.
While your enemies, seated uncomfortably on rough splintery wood, slowly sink into oblivion, their eyes can feast on all the menacing topiary one can coax out of tortured suburban yews, and their ears on the whine of hungry mosquitoes and the buzz of angry hornets. Perfect.
If I could create such a garden and rent it out a few weekends each year the proceeds would let me observe it the rest of the year in effortless leisure.