My father used to tell me that of all the human emotions, anger was the most dangerous. Not because it might lead to high blood pressure and arguments that could destroy a relationship, but because, when a person got really angry, their soul actually vacated the body. Sounds crazy, right? Just wait, there was more. According to ancient Jewish teachings, the danger in a soul leaving the body was that another soul—a lesser soul—could temporarily take over, and that was when the really bad shit happened.

Today marked the eighth anniversary of the murder of my family. As if channeling my father, my online therapist advised me to let go of my anger through forgiveness. Humoring him, I asked myself, if my child were starving, would I take another person’s life to feed my kid? My father, being a moral man, would not have taken another person’s life under any circumstance, nor would he have resisted sharing our food, especially if the lives of his family were threatened. Had one neighbor approached Dad, it would have been a different outcome. But the neighbors had formed a mob, and mobs thought collectively in primitive terms, as in, “the Jews are hoarding food” or “Juden Raus!” (see Hitler’s Germany), or “the Jews poisoned the wells,” (see Black Plague). I could go on, but it wouldn’t change a thing. Dad was dead, so were Mom, Diane, and Debby … and so were a lot of other innocent people.

I still had anger issues. In fact, I was having one right now, sitting here in my first-class berth on a solar-powered train en route from Orlando to Washington, DC. The bellows fanning the fire in my veins was the vanilla sway spewing from the mouth of the peroxide copper-blonde sitting across from me. “Vanilla sway” was Dad’s pet term for contrived lunacy reported as fact to sway public opinion, specifically climate change “science” funded by oil companies and repeated ad nauseam on certain cable news networks and blogs until the contrived fiction became accepted as debatable evidence. My father, a progressive thinker sickened by corporate corruption, warned me that even the most outlandish lie, repeated enough times to enough people could eventually turn horseshit into vanilla, thus the term “vanilla sway.” “Don’t get sucked into a debate with these types, Robbie, they’ll drain you like a thousand-dollar whore.”

“Shall I repeat the question, Mr. Eisenbraun?”