Why I Write From Petty Rage

Humor, bureaucracy, and the banana tree that tried to kill my foot

This week, a woman decided to choose violence by bringing a dying banana tree — or at least what I thought was a banana tree — onto my express train and dropping the planter on my foot.

Not a plant.
A banana tree.

The leaves were cigarette-tar yellow, the soil was half-contained in a reusable PVC grocery tote bag, and while I would have understood transplanting a small potted plant, this was not that.

It was, I shit you not, a full failing botanical emergency in a container heavy enough to qualify as a personal attack.

There are moments in life when the universe pauses, looks you dead in the face, and says: You wanted material, didn’t you?

Because this is the problem with being a writer. Nothing is allowed to just happen. Every petty inconvenience begins auditioning for a paragraph.

A normal person might have thought, wow, this commute is terrible.

I, unfortunately, work under the mental condition of constant narrative extraction, so my first thought was: this is either a metaphor for adulthood, rock bottom, a cry for help, or the opening hook of a chapter.

I ended up turning it into a line in something else I was writing: “The whole thing had the same cursed energy as trying to drag a dying pineapple tree onto a crowded subway at peak hour.” Real life gives you the banana tree. Fiction, apparently, asks for revision before somebody starts pissing in your oatmeal.

By day, I work in a medical office, which means I spend my time in a world of schedules, systems, polite chaos, controlled urgency, and the kind of fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look like they are being questioned by the government. It is respectable work. It is necessary work. It is also one of the richest possible environments for anyone interested in human behavior and the strange little theater of trying to function while alive.

People are never more themselves than when they are stressed, inconvenienced, waiting, uncomfortable, or trying very hard to appear normal in a situation that is clearly defeating them.

That is true in a medical office.
That is true on public transit.
That is true in fiction.

Especially fiction.

I think people sometimes assume writing with humor means not taking life seriously. I would argue the opposite. Humor is often what happens when you take life seriously enough to notice how ridiculous it is. Not fake ridiculous. Not sitcom ridiculous. Real ridiculous. The humiliating, bureaucratic, petty, highly specific kind.

Like a stranger deciding that an express train at rush hour is the ideal final resting place for a banana tree that looks like it has already made peace with death.

Or the daily reality of working a job where everyone is trying their best, no one has enough time, the systems were designed by enemies, and professionalism is just a nicer word for emotional triage with a login password.

That kind of life teaches you things as a writer.

It teaches you rhythm.
It teaches you dialogue.
It teaches you how people really talk when they are tired, scared, annoyed, defensive, embarrassed, or trying to sound more in control than they are.
It teaches you that dignity is fragile, patience is a performance, and every person in the room thinks their current problem is the axis on which reality turns.

That is not cynicism. That is observation.

And observation is where my writing starts.

How the chaos becomes pages

My writing tools are not especially glamorous, but they are loyal. I use Scrivener across my 2019 iMac, iPad, and iPhone, mostly because I like being able to move between devices without my draft acting like it has never met me before. It is one of the few systems in my life that rewards chaos with organization.

For quick notes, half-formed lines, and the kind of observations that arrive at inconvenient times, I use the basic Notes app, because sometimes the difference between keeping a sentence and losing it forever is whether I can open it before the train doors close.

Most of the time, if I am writing at my computer or balancing my iPad on a tray table like a man one inconvenience away from literature, I have coffee or some tea-adjacent beverage nearby. In the background, I usually put on ambient electronica: Orbital, Aphex Twin, Brian Eno — the kind of music that makes the brain feel less like a cluttered office and more like a docking station for bad decisions and better sentences.

I do not write from a mountaintop of artistic purity. I write from the accumulation of tiny absurdities: a look, a sentence, a rude tone, a weirdly specific complaint, a delayed train, a malfunctioning printer, a person acting like the rules of shared public life are merely suggestions for other people. Petty fodder, basically. The kind of nonsense that would be unbearable if it were not also, with enough time and distance, excellent material.

That is one reason I write with humor. Because humor lets me tell the truth without embalming it.

Life is rarely one clean emotion. It is almost never pure tragedy, pure beauty, or pure suffering. Usually it is something worse and better: grief with paperwork, tenderness with bad timing, exhaustion with a joke so badly placed it becomes perfect, rage on an express train while a tropical plant commits manslaughter by planter.

Humor does not cheapen that. It reveals it.

A joke in fiction can do more than make someone laugh. It can expose power, longing, fear, class, intimacy, resentment, and denial in one line. It can show who has control, who is pretending to, and who is one inconvenience away from becoming the villain in someone else’s story.

Working in a medical office has made me better at seeing that.

It has also made me better at writing people with compassion. Because the truth is, most people are not monsters. They are just overwhelmed, underslept, badly timed, poorly organized, emotionally cornered, or dragging around some invisible version of a dying banana tree and hoping it does not crush somebody else on the way down.

And then there are the people who actually do crush your foot.

Those people also make it into the draft.

I work in a medical office because rent, groceries, and other deeply unmagical realities continue to insist on payment. I write because the world keeps handing me scenes I would be irresponsible not to use. I write with humor because life has never once occurred to me in a single register. It is absurd and brutal. Tender and humiliating. Petty and profound. Sometimes all before lunch.

So yes, I will probably keep stealing from real life. I will keep collecting the petty fodder. I will keep turning public irritation into narrative texture. And somewhere, perhaps even now, a stranger is hauling a half-dead plant onto mass transit and building my next paragraph for me.

For that, I thank her.
Not with warmth.
But with craft.

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If public transit, survival jobs, and petty rage have ever handed you material, subscribe. Leave a comment—or, if that was you with the banana plant, identify yourself so I can curse you out properly.

Until next time,
Alex Eos 🧋