All The Rage

~ Bitchy After 60

One of the hottest trends for anger management and stress release these days is rage rooms. A rage room is a place where you get to physically vent all your anger and frustration. A place where you go to smash the shit out of things like computers, printers, small kitchen appliances and tacky ceramics, just to name a few. Somewhere to get the anger out of your system. What a wonderful idea. What a great release. I only wish I had thought of it.

According to Wikipedia: a rage room, also known as a smash room or anger room, is a business where people can vent their rage by destroying objects within a room. Wikipedia also states that the first rage rooms to open were likely in Japan in 2008 or earlier. The concept has now spread to other countries around the world. It goes on to say that: Safety is paramount in a rage room. While rage rooms provide a safe space for destroying items, there are obvious risks involved with sessions, including slipping and falling, flying debris from items being smashed, and emotional injury. Because of this, all rage room establishments have required participants to wear safety gear, and sign a liability waiver.

I checked on line and sure enough, Halifax, Nova Scotia has a rage room. Here are some of the points from their web site: 

Rage Room is as unique alternative stress relief technique. – I’d say!

Smash to your heart’s delight with any of our approved weapons. – I am curious about these approved weapons. Too bad the site didn’t include photos.

Play your own tunes with our bluetooth speakers! – This has potential.

Rage out to our all-local heavy playlists! – Additional potential.

You can bring one of your own boxes. $10/additional box. – This could be worth it.

Between 1 and 4 ragers can rage out at a time. ­– No! No! No! This is something I would need to do all by myself.

After smashing you can leave the clean up to us. – I really like this one… leaving the clean up to someone else.

I could have used a Rage room when I was younger. Especially during those times when I felt I was out of control as discussed in my last blog. I can imagine smashing things like the heads of clowns and vacuum cleaners with a sledge hammer. My protection goggles steaming up with fury. My hair frizzing with perspiration .

I can imagine The Rolling Stones playing top volume in the background, probably because I am currently reading Keith Richard’s biography. I wasn’t really a Stones listener back them. I’m not really one now. I am more an instrumental jazz listener now and was a singer songwriter listener back then whenever I had time to listen. Anyway it is the Stones that are currently playing the background music in my head. I keep Googling the songs Keith refers to in the book. Surprisingly, I am familiar with most of them. How could I not be? To me, many would suit my mood in a rage room.

I did come up with my own rage release technique when I was younger. I went to a Toys R Us store and purchased a Bozo the clown punching bag. It was one that popped back up after you hit it. It really didn’t help with my buried rage because I would end up in fits of giggles, which wasn’t too bad but didn’t have long-term benefits. Then I drew a moustache on Bozo and couldn’t hit him any more because this was after I had started dating The Doc, and he was sporting a moustache at the time. The bald head and moustache combo created a resemblance that was just a little too similar.

Actually there are still times that I could use a rage room, like the end of last week when I spend two days straight cleaning, after a relaxed summer of having JT home, and no one offered to help. Or when I think about the fact that I thought retirement meant doing things together and having fun as a couple when increasingly I have to search for more ways to try to enjoy life on my own. I guess I am not alone. I guess that’s the way a lot of long-term marriages go, but I really didn’t think mine would. But hey, I’m a big girl, I can deal with it. However, there are times when I fluctuate between angry and sad. These things are constantly-recurring burning issues, and I need to manage those feelings. So I may make it to a rage room sometime in the future; but in the meantime, I will just write a blog.

Thank you for reading.

Photos:  Daniel Becerra, Unsplash

Recent Posts:

32 thoughts on “All The Rage”

    1. Well at least you tried it. I think our anger comes and goes and when we have to wait to vent it, it wouldn’t be as effective. Maybe we need at home rage rooms, but then again we would probably smash something we shouldn’t.

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

  3. Superb post and a superb idea. I’m exceedingly quick-tempered and only once ever tried to keep my temper (I generally try to release it when no-one is around but haven’t always managed). The time I kept my temper, I ended up bursting a blood vessel and my nose bled for hours! That taught me that, if you’re feeling really angry, it’s far better to let it out than stew on it (bit like the safety valve on a pressure cooker)…

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  7. Of course I thought this was a swell idea, so naturally I checked The Net to see if there were any rage rooms around me. And I discovered that there were quite a few of them. (I guess there’s a lot of pent-up anger in Dallas, which I suppose is no surprise, really. Texans are always angry about something.) Then I stumbled across this eye-opening news story:

    https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/national-international/anger-room-creator-believed-to-be-murdered-by-live-in-boyfriend-says-police/266051/

    Hmm. Maybe I’ll wait and let YOU go first, and then we can compare notes afterwards before I make a decision… 😉

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Holy crap. She didn’t bring the base at home with her. Makes my little relationship problems appear negligible. I think I would like to try a rage room, but once I write it down of have a little rant or slam a few doors, the anger is out of my system. So unless the rage room is in my shed or right next door, going might be futile. But you never know.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  8. I’d never heard of rage room until I read your post, but it’s funny because the first thing I thought of was liability issues. I can just see someone seeing getting hit with a flying object or inadvertently hitting themselves. The business obviously addressed that. “Our approved weapons” leaves a lot to the imagination.

    My second thought was thinking of environments where people frequently get angry. I’m not much of a golfer, but I’ve seen a bunch of guys lose it on the golf course. One person began flinging golf clubs into the water hazard because he was so mad. He stopped out of embarrassment when he saw that I was watching.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. My experience like that was watching hockey parents. My stepsons played hockey but I didn’t go often because of the bad behaviour of hockey parents. Everyone can get angry at some thing or another but getting angry over a game that a kid is playing is ridiculous. Or even a game that an adult is playing like golf.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. It rings true with what I’ve seen from parents at children’s games. Not only is it a pure embarrassment, but it’s a horrible example for kids to see.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  10. Maybe it’s time to bring Bozo back. Mustache and all. Somehow, I don’t think that a rage room would be the right way to go to release anger. Learning how to manage it and deal with emotions is a much better solution. This comes from an experienced, long time recovering rager.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.