Things To Hate, Vol. I

Everyone needs hate. It's healthy. It helps release anger through microscopic "hate holes" that pepper your dermal layer. It also gives you somewhere to put that anger. No, not up your butt, Mister Hateypants! Hate is the place anger goes when it grows up, like finishing school for negativity. It’s collegiate in its emotional learnedness. Seriously, I once heard a guy with glasses and a beard refer to hate as the “smartest emotion”. It makes you grow inside AND out. I’ve seen people grow up to two full inches and put on 10-20 lbs. of rock-solid muscle from a steady regimen of country-fried hate. Hate makes you look better, too. It outperformed the leading teeth whitening gel in laboratory tests. It tastes better than candy corn but has negative fat and no calories. It flattens your abs. It clears your pock-marked skin. It's proven to give your hair a rich, flaxen sheen. You'll look like a Pantene commercial, I swear.

So now that we agree on the “weight-in-gold” worth and gem-like beauty of hate, what’s worth hating? You can’t go around town flinging your hate towards just anything like some slut. Of hate. You need to find those items, objects, talismans, amulets, celebrities and foodstuffs that practically BEG to be hated. They need to want it more than you want to want them to want it.

In the coming days, I will populate this page with some things I hate. Mind these are only thought-starters. You have to own your own hate. Or I’ll hate you for it.

Disproving The Theory Of A Friend, Vol. I...

“People go to Walmart just to beat their kids”

Simply untrue. While a kernel of truth exists in the supposition that child beating does take place in the aisles of this much-maligned corporate wildebeest, people go to Walmart, it seems, to shop. Now, while shopping, we (consciously or not) peel back layers to reveal our habits and routines in all their sometimes unpleasant glory. We are distracted by value.

If a psoriasis-sufferer scratches their head incessantly, they will continue to do so while shopping for lunchmeat, socks, scented candles, etc. It’s not necessarily a byproduct of the occupied mind, but rather runs a separate (if parallel) path; the scratching has everything to do with reflex and the belief, however brief, that one is alone. It’s what happens when the wormhole of value vacuity hijacks our synapses.

This is not to single out Walmart; almost all forms of shopping involve a degree of attentiveness rarely seen in other spheres of everyday “maintenance” existence. Shopping involves any number of the following focused activities: evaluating, comparing, remembering, choosing and navigating. Simultaneously, one with child(ren) needs to safeguard their well-being, monitor their behavior and inventively provide them with a cavalcade of diversions. As illustrated by child-beating, injury or pain certainly constitutes a diversion.

So the child-beater, like our head-scratcher, will continue to beat on a near-subconscious level. People don’t go to Walmart simply to beat, though it appears Walmart is an almost-perfect, acoustically-prohibitive, emphatically-public and intrinsically-agitated platform upon which to do so.

Now people DO go to Walmart to swear at their children. That’s just common sense.