Okay, well, to be fair (to be faiiiir), this one ended up more like a monologue.
Regardless, let me explain what’s going on here. I’ve been feeling fictionally creative lately and had been thinking in the back of my brain about finding me some writing prompts for inspiration.
Yeah, I have ideas of my own… but the ones that get me going are huge projects. My brain doesn’t want anything that big right now. It wants to focus on, like, short bursts of character – quick bites of fiction. So it needed outside inspo – because if I try to come up with prompts AND then write, it will get caught up in the idea and never do the writing.
I know how my brain works.
While I was silently turning this over in my brain, not speaking a single word aloud, Mickey unearthed some old pads of tiny paper and started leaving me notes when he left for work in the morning.
Things that are as weird and foreign for him to say as they are for me to hear. Things like, “I’m proud of you.”
Why is it embarrassing to need to hear that every now and then? Ugh, trauma.
Then, I did an awkward thing myself and told him about how much I appreciated the notes and we had a lil sweet moment.
Then he randomly asked me if I’d like some writing prompts, to which I promptly (see what I did there?) said, “yes!”
I’ve done work on a couple of prompts now. I sent one to Dee (my screenwriter kid) for editing because I think there is something there. Something that I could shop around for publication, or expand on, or something.
So that one is spending some time under her wise guidance for now.
Another is being fine-tuned in my brain at the moment, not ready to be put on the page.
Then, one morning, I awoke to this prompt:
“Dolby was at college in the lab working on a cure. He gets partnered with Chaa. Chaa is a TechBro CryptoDouche.
Years later, Chaa is at a party describing how he came up with the cure.”
And I immediately knew who Chaa was. And I immediately hated him.
Now you get to meet him. Let me know how he makes you feel!
Meet Chaa
Rooftop cocktail party. The lighting is warm, the drinks are cold, and the crowd is full of people who wish they were as successful as Chaa. He stands at the center, whiskey in hand, flashing the kind of grin that makes people want to impress him. The air hums with expectation. He takes a slow sip, lets the moment stretch, then dives in.
People always ask me: Chaa, how did you do it? How did you solve one of humanity’s oldest problems? How did you discover the cure for anger? And I tell them, it was always there… waiting for someone with the right kind of mind to find it.
Now, back in college, there was this guy, Dolby. Poor bastard. He was obsessed with anger. Couldn’t stop thinking about it, talking about it, practically living in his own personal case study. His dad had it bad. His granddad before him. A whole lineage of men ruled by their tempers.
Dolby had watched rage wreck relationships, ruin holidays, define his childhood. And now? His wife was pregnant. The idea of passing that curse down? It haunted him. It consumed him. So he buried himself in research, convinced that if he just studied enough, if he just understood anger on a molecular level, he could stop it. He could break the cycle.
And then? I walked through the door.
Look, I’m not saying Dolby wouldn’t have gotten there eventually. But the guy was on a hamster wheel, sprinting full speed and getting nowhere. And then one day, the universe dropped me in his lap—the best thing that ever happened to him. He got paired with me as his lab partner, and suddenly, he had something he’d never had before: Vision.
See, Dolby wanted to study anger. Examine it. Dissect it. I wanted to solve it.
I walked into that lab, took one look at his notes (absolute garbage, by the way) and I said, “Dolby, buddy, you’re thinking about this all wrong.”
People like to act like anger is some deep, unknowable thing. Some philosophical crisis. It’s not. It’s just chemistry. A bad line of code in the brain.
And what do we do with bad code? We rewrite it.
Now, Dolby was a workhorse. I’ll give him that. Guy could grind like nobody’s business. But you don’t grind your way to genius. You don’t find history-changing discoveries by staring at the same problem over and over again.
You find them by stepping back.
Letting your mind breathe.
So while Dolby was hunched over a microscope, running the same tests for the hundredth time, where was I? On the pickleball court. Letting my subconscious do the heavy lifting. Big ideas don’t happen when you’re buried in data. They happen when you’re mid-serve, seeing the angles.
And wouldn’t you know it? Right as I’m in the zone, Dolby texts me… frantic, barely able to type out a full sentence. The guy had finally done it. Found the neural pathway responsible for anger.
Dolby had spent years trying to map the brain, to pinpoint exactly where anger lived. And now? He had it. A literal switch in the brain. Something that could be turned off.
So I down my post-game smoothie, head back to the lab, and boom: clarity. Dolby saw the pathway and thought, Now we can study how to regulate it. And I told him, “Why regulate it? Why not just turn it off?”
See, that’s the difference between Dolby and me. He wanted to control the fire. I wanted to snuff it out.
The problem wasn’t managing anger. It wasn’t suppressing it. It wasn’t about therapy or breathing techniques or whatever nonsense the psych department was peddling. It was eliminating it. Not through discipline. Not through willpower. Through pure biological intervention.
And from there? History wrote itself. We weren’t developing a method. We weren’t crafting a coping strategy. We had made a discovery. A whole new biological pathway, hidden in plain sight, just waiting for someone with the right kind of mind to find it. To see it.
And once we saw it? We flipped the switch.
Of course, people had their doubts. They always do. But Chaa, they said, isn’t anger a necessary emotion? Isn’t it tied to survival?
And I told them, “Tell me the last time you needed to fistfight a tiger, Dr. Harrison.”
Because here’s the thing… people love to romanticize their emotions. They think we need anger. They think it makes us strong. But I looked around, and I saw the truth. Anger is obsolete. It’s nothing but a glitch in the system.
And what do we do with glitches? We patch them.
The rest? Well, you know the rest. The world is different now. Better. No more screaming matches at Starbucks. No more road rage. No more fistfights in grocery store parking lots. Twitter? A digital wasteland. You ever see what happens when no one gets pissed off anymore? Efficiency.
And sure, some people miss it. The fire, the passion. But I say, look at the results. Wars? Declining. Crime? At an all-time low. Divorce rates? Never been better. Board meetings? Productive. You remove anger from the equation, and people get a whole lot more done.
And every time someone asks me how I did it, I just smile and say, “Dolby was lucky the day I walked into that lab.”
He grins, taking a slow sip of his whiskey, soaking in the admiration. Some people clap, some shift uncomfortably. Chaa doesn’t notice. Or maybe he does, and he just doesn’t care.
This is Jacki now. I can hear this in my head and would love to see it performed sometime. kthxbai.
