Hopes fails, dreams shatter. Sadness emerges, and, with it, fear. Concern for one’s own future sharpens, fear blossoming into anger. And then anger mutates into self-righteous indignation at anything perceived to be the root cause of one’s problems. Even if the people or choices targeted actually have nothing to do with one’s problems, they become the focus of one’s hatred.
Within the morally vacuous, cacophonous self-pity factories that social media sites and other internet message boards often are, one’s indignation grows while at the same time, however, the size and origin of one’s problems stay the same. Soon, anger spills over into aggression, hot and sour words hurled unnecessarily at others in one’s web of contacts. The hurt doesn’t go away, prompting one to pile on the grief in an effort to smother it. Still, it lingers, now a sucking and festering wound wrapped tightly around the once-soothing tendrils of ever-loving heartspace.
Gradually, one’s web of social contacts shrinks, its individual strands broken, severed, neglected. More and more isolated does one then become, so isolated and lonely in fact that fear and anger appear more and more real. Suddenly, it’s all one can seem to think about, how stupid and foolish and misguided everyone else is, how simple the solutions to this nation’s and this city’s and this block’s problems are. ‘If only people would just listen to me,’ one thinks, an angry, lonely voice screaming into the yawning void. Pitiable, the soul struggling to withstand twin onslaughts of negativity and self-loathing, the world suddenly an evil and unwelcoming place, the last strands give out.
Yet there within the charred and blackened ruins of one’s real and online lives glimmer, diamond-like, the compressed jewels of love, hope, and compassion. And rebirth beckons.
americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan
Showing posts with label loathing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label loathing. Show all posts
21 August 2017
03 August 2012
right of way
Recently, NPR aired a show which included mention of efforts undertaken during the first decades of the Twentieth Century to teach the American public to cowtow to the automobile, explaining that Americans had to be trained to think that roads were the domain of cars, the rightful place of automobiles, and that citizens not driving cars had no right to be on them. As a velocipedist – an avid and regular bicyclist – I suffer daily of the affects of this mis-education of my fellow upstanding Yankee, who now sees the car as an almost sacred thing, whereas persons not trapped within the stifling confines of these glass-and-metal prisons are seen as bothersome interlopers upon our tens of thousands of miles of commonly-owned bituminous track.
A car is nothing more than a hunk of steel and glass and plastic with a person or persons sitting on its plush seats and being moved around through space-time by the internal combustion of gasoline, a byproduct of oil, for which our brave brothers and sister pour out their blood and tears in distant and dusty places; oil is a poisonous thing that must be pulled from deep below the earth and refined before it can be used, whereas a bicycle is a few pounds of metal and rubber that allows a person to move himself around through space-time using little more than the muscles rippling beneath his taut and ruddy skin. And yet – daily – I am confronted by at least one person who considers his souped up, gasoline-guzzling shitbox, and his business, to be far more important than the car, conveyance, or business of anyone else.
Just two days ago, in fact, as I was approaching a blind intersection on my way to the local public library, I heard a motor behind me rev up, as if the vehicle's owner intended to pass me in the scant thirty feet that separated us from the stop sign. Putting myself squarely in the lane, I balanced for a moment, waiting for a gap in the approaching vehicles before shooting down a narrow side alley. Riding squarely in the center of the alley, the impatient driver approached to within a few feet of my bicycle's rear wheel, revving his engine and making as if to pass me where there was no room to pass. Flying into the next, two-landed road (the alley ends in a yield, not a stop, sign) and barely making it in front of an approaching car, I had moved to the far right side of the lane and was approaching my next right-hand turn when I heard that same engine rev up behind me. Turning around to see what was the matter, I made eye-contact with the impatient driver, whose vehicle – a black SUV – was so close to the silver Volvo behind me that I could see neither grill nor bumper. Passing the car in front of it, the truck screeched to a halt directly next to me, restricting all north-south traffic by completely Blocking The Box, the man within it staring at me menacingly.
Turning after having made the appropriate hand-signal (I signal all turns, and am loathe to ride at night without running-lights fore and aft), I glanced back again, laughing at the impatient man and giving him a little fare-thee-well hand flick. These egregious actions caused the man to reverse his vehicle very quickly (on a one-way street, into oncoming traffic), whereupon he, with squealing tires, raced down the road toward me, screeching to a halt next to me on the sidewalk where I had taken refuge near a tall brick building. “You're a real tough-guy, eh?” the man said, pushing his finger against some sort of box on his throat. Scrambling to keep moving, I bounced down the sidewalk and started to pedal onward, glancing back and noticing the black car had a Harley-Davidson front plate. The man pulled into a gravel lane, threw open his door, jumped out, and began to stalk toward me, chest puffed up and face fixed in the tortured rictus of a man whose heart is calcified with fearful hatred. Seeing that I had bruised his ego, and knowing the human ego to be one of the most terrifying and murderous of foul things ever to grace the planes of our fair Universe, I kept moving. “You're a real tough guy, eh?” the man said again, to which I responded with a shouted, “Slow down!” The man, of course, shouted back, “You slow down!”, touching a finger to his tracheal collar before speaking, each time.
A number of things became clear to me during yesterday's altercation. First, the man's business was so inconsequential (even though he seemed in a terrible hurry) that he could take time out of his schedule to run down and harass a bicyclist who had dared to retain right of way. Second, the man considered himself more important than anyone else on the road, riding everyone's ass and generally being a poor sport about things. Third, seeing that his belly resembled a beer keg and that his throat was perforated with a plastic speaking-collar, the man had ruined his health and body by eating too much, smoking too much, and drinking too much, which had obviously filled his heart with such frustration and self-loathing as to make him a Danger To Others. And, finally, he had allowed himself to be brainwashed into thinking that roads were made for cars (or, at least, for vehicles with gasoline-combustible engines), and that roads were the domain of nothing else, causing him to menace persons who happened to have left their own homes a few moments before he did, putting them, unwittingly, in his hateful path, riding, of all fucking things, bicycles.
To persons who insist on driving cars everywhere they go (even though, of course, buying gasoline puts cash in the pockets of Saudi Arabians, who use our money to fund terrorist groups such as al-Qaida), please remember that bicyclists are simply persons who have freed themselves from the prison-like confines of internally-combustible vehicles, flinging off the foul fat-folds of sloth and moving their bodies around using only muscle power. So, dear friends, please give other persons the right of way, even if they are not burning as much oil as you are burning while out-and-about; and, of course, please share generously of our common roadways, byways, highways, paths, alleys, lanes, and streets; but, most importantly, keep a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and your head on a fucking swivel. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit
A car is nothing more than a hunk of steel and glass and plastic with a person or persons sitting on its plush seats and being moved around through space-time by the internal combustion of gasoline, a byproduct of oil, for which our brave brothers and sister pour out their blood and tears in distant and dusty places; oil is a poisonous thing that must be pulled from deep below the earth and refined before it can be used, whereas a bicycle is a few pounds of metal and rubber that allows a person to move himself around through space-time using little more than the muscles rippling beneath his taut and ruddy skin. And yet – daily – I am confronted by at least one person who considers his souped up, gasoline-guzzling shitbox, and his business, to be far more important than the car, conveyance, or business of anyone else.
Just two days ago, in fact, as I was approaching a blind intersection on my way to the local public library, I heard a motor behind me rev up, as if the vehicle's owner intended to pass me in the scant thirty feet that separated us from the stop sign. Putting myself squarely in the lane, I balanced for a moment, waiting for a gap in the approaching vehicles before shooting down a narrow side alley. Riding squarely in the center of the alley, the impatient driver approached to within a few feet of my bicycle's rear wheel, revving his engine and making as if to pass me where there was no room to pass. Flying into the next, two-landed road (the alley ends in a yield, not a stop, sign) and barely making it in front of an approaching car, I had moved to the far right side of the lane and was approaching my next right-hand turn when I heard that same engine rev up behind me. Turning around to see what was the matter, I made eye-contact with the impatient driver, whose vehicle – a black SUV – was so close to the silver Volvo behind me that I could see neither grill nor bumper. Passing the car in front of it, the truck screeched to a halt directly next to me, restricting all north-south traffic by completely Blocking The Box, the man within it staring at me menacingly.
Turning after having made the appropriate hand-signal (I signal all turns, and am loathe to ride at night without running-lights fore and aft), I glanced back again, laughing at the impatient man and giving him a little fare-thee-well hand flick. These egregious actions caused the man to reverse his vehicle very quickly (on a one-way street, into oncoming traffic), whereupon he, with squealing tires, raced down the road toward me, screeching to a halt next to me on the sidewalk where I had taken refuge near a tall brick building. “You're a real tough-guy, eh?” the man said, pushing his finger against some sort of box on his throat. Scrambling to keep moving, I bounced down the sidewalk and started to pedal onward, glancing back and noticing the black car had a Harley-Davidson front plate. The man pulled into a gravel lane, threw open his door, jumped out, and began to stalk toward me, chest puffed up and face fixed in the tortured rictus of a man whose heart is calcified with fearful hatred. Seeing that I had bruised his ego, and knowing the human ego to be one of the most terrifying and murderous of foul things ever to grace the planes of our fair Universe, I kept moving. “You're a real tough guy, eh?” the man said again, to which I responded with a shouted, “Slow down!” The man, of course, shouted back, “You slow down!”, touching a finger to his tracheal collar before speaking, each time.
A number of things became clear to me during yesterday's altercation. First, the man's business was so inconsequential (even though he seemed in a terrible hurry) that he could take time out of his schedule to run down and harass a bicyclist who had dared to retain right of way. Second, the man considered himself more important than anyone else on the road, riding everyone's ass and generally being a poor sport about things. Third, seeing that his belly resembled a beer keg and that his throat was perforated with a plastic speaking-collar, the man had ruined his health and body by eating too much, smoking too much, and drinking too much, which had obviously filled his heart with such frustration and self-loathing as to make him a Danger To Others. And, finally, he had allowed himself to be brainwashed into thinking that roads were made for cars (or, at least, for vehicles with gasoline-combustible engines), and that roads were the domain of nothing else, causing him to menace persons who happened to have left their own homes a few moments before he did, putting them, unwittingly, in his hateful path, riding, of all fucking things, bicycles.
To persons who insist on driving cars everywhere they go (even though, of course, buying gasoline puts cash in the pockets of Saudi Arabians, who use our money to fund terrorist groups such as al-Qaida), please remember that bicyclists are simply persons who have freed themselves from the prison-like confines of internally-combustible vehicles, flinging off the foul fat-folds of sloth and moving their bodies around using only muscle power. So, dear friends, please give other persons the right of way, even if they are not burning as much oil as you are burning while out-and-about; and, of course, please share generously of our common roadways, byways, highways, paths, alleys, lanes, and streets; but, most importantly, keep a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and your head on a fucking swivel. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit
16 July 2012
on holding grudges
Since moving to this small, blue-collar town and making friends with such few open-minded people as here live, I have had the good fortune of making the acquaintance of someone who holds grudges. I say Making The Acquaintance Of instead of Befriend because, just yesterday, this individual chose to respond to my pointing out, in jest, a typo he had made on a popular social-networking-site by compounding this slight jab on top of all of the other confrontations we have had in the last six months and letting the cauldron of hatred that seems to burn within his chest boil over.
It all started about six months ago, when he and I and a few others would go out for friendly disc-golf matches and he began to curse out any other person who made a good throw while also being verbally self-abusive every time he threw poorly, which accounted perhaps for 85% of his attempts. After a couple of afternoons of getting told to go fuck myself and that I was a bastard and a fucking asshole for having thrown a circular piece of plastic through the air in such a was as to have it land close to an upright, basket-equipped metal pole, I told this man – let us call him Wilson – that his negativity was poisoning the group's fun, leading to an overall dampening of of the collective mood, and would he not please keep his anger and resentment to himself and not keep cursing at everybody all the time? Wilson, who claims to be a follower of the One Love mentality espoused by such musicians as Bob Marley, instantly went on the defensive, causing everyone so much grief for the next few days that the others in our disc-golfing group and I decided it best not to invite him to our friendly matches anymore, given his proclivity to whine, moan, and belly-ache every time someone did well or he did not.
The second major confrontation between this worthless whorphan and Mr. Wilson came about two months ago, when, after he had been telling a story to me and a number of other people during a weekend bout of drinking, I cautioned him to wear sunblock if he should happen to be out in the sun for the amount of time he had claimed to be in his story. Being from Western Africa and having relatively dark skin, Wilson became once again defensive, immediately and with great passion calling into doubt my knowledge of What It Means To Be Black (whatever that means), even asking me if I, in my life, had ever been black, or if I had ever seen the masses of his fellow Africans all out perambulating in the sun lacking hats or long-sleeved shirts, in far more words telling me that I did not know what the fuck it was I was talking about. Never backing down from my position, I pointed out to Wilson that, since he is a human being and since all human skin can suffer skin cancer if exposed too long to solar radiation, he would do well to protect his skin from the sun so as to lead a long and healthy life, whereupon he began to curse me and to call me many bad names, puffing up his chest and treating me with much disdain for a number of weeks after that.
Having pondered my actions and deciding it best for me to keep my dumb fucking mouth shut, I have done just that, staying quiet and not seeking fault with the man, letting him espouse whatever strange and nonsensical views he, a grown adult, should wish to espouse. Sensing that Wilson seemed to be doing the same – generally ignoring me and not spending too much time in my presence – and seeing that we had sat together amiably during a get-together on the 4th of July, I figured that, just as I had done, he had laid aside any past grievances and gotten over any latent animosity toward this corn-fed white boy. In response, however, to a jab, a pointing out of a word he had misspelled on-line, that word being “the,” he launched into a litany of hatred against me, saying to an intermediary that I would get what I deserved for being so know-it-all and smarmy toward him, and that this my latest latest slight was simply too much, one of too many twigs thrown atop the teetering stack of hate-sticks he seems to have been carrying around with him since that one fateful day of disc-golfing.
While I do not fear the man physically, I have come to fear the human ego in general, and to keep a sharp eye out for a bruised ego, which is prone to extraordinary violence, to stabbing persons in the back and letting the air out of their bicycle tires. In the wake of Wilson un-friending of me on Facebook over the weekend, I could perhaps try to arrange a sit-down with him, a having-it-out session during which he might be able to call me all the names he wants to and, perhaps by letting go of his hatred and allowing it to flow from himself mightily, to dislodge some of the sand that has become trapped in his vagina; I might as well do nothing, however, since I cannot in any way control how Wilson reacts to my words or presence. He is a big boy, and he has the power to decide for himself when to be angry and when to be contented, when to fill his being with hatred, and when to let One Love infect every ounce of his soul. Three cheers for keeping quiet! Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit
It all started about six months ago, when he and I and a few others would go out for friendly disc-golf matches and he began to curse out any other person who made a good throw while also being verbally self-abusive every time he threw poorly, which accounted perhaps for 85% of his attempts. After a couple of afternoons of getting told to go fuck myself and that I was a bastard and a fucking asshole for having thrown a circular piece of plastic through the air in such a was as to have it land close to an upright, basket-equipped metal pole, I told this man – let us call him Wilson – that his negativity was poisoning the group's fun, leading to an overall dampening of of the collective mood, and would he not please keep his anger and resentment to himself and not keep cursing at everybody all the time? Wilson, who claims to be a follower of the One Love mentality espoused by such musicians as Bob Marley, instantly went on the defensive, causing everyone so much grief for the next few days that the others in our disc-golfing group and I decided it best not to invite him to our friendly matches anymore, given his proclivity to whine, moan, and belly-ache every time someone did well or he did not.
The second major confrontation between this worthless whorphan and Mr. Wilson came about two months ago, when, after he had been telling a story to me and a number of other people during a weekend bout of drinking, I cautioned him to wear sunblock if he should happen to be out in the sun for the amount of time he had claimed to be in his story. Being from Western Africa and having relatively dark skin, Wilson became once again defensive, immediately and with great passion calling into doubt my knowledge of What It Means To Be Black (whatever that means), even asking me if I, in my life, had ever been black, or if I had ever seen the masses of his fellow Africans all out perambulating in the sun lacking hats or long-sleeved shirts, in far more words telling me that I did not know what the fuck it was I was talking about. Never backing down from my position, I pointed out to Wilson that, since he is a human being and since all human skin can suffer skin cancer if exposed too long to solar radiation, he would do well to protect his skin from the sun so as to lead a long and healthy life, whereupon he began to curse me and to call me many bad names, puffing up his chest and treating me with much disdain for a number of weeks after that.
Having pondered my actions and deciding it best for me to keep my dumb fucking mouth shut, I have done just that, staying quiet and not seeking fault with the man, letting him espouse whatever strange and nonsensical views he, a grown adult, should wish to espouse. Sensing that Wilson seemed to be doing the same – generally ignoring me and not spending too much time in my presence – and seeing that we had sat together amiably during a get-together on the 4th of July, I figured that, just as I had done, he had laid aside any past grievances and gotten over any latent animosity toward this corn-fed white boy. In response, however, to a jab, a pointing out of a word he had misspelled on-line, that word being “the,” he launched into a litany of hatred against me, saying to an intermediary that I would get what I deserved for being so know-it-all and smarmy toward him, and that this my latest latest slight was simply too much, one of too many twigs thrown atop the teetering stack of hate-sticks he seems to have been carrying around with him since that one fateful day of disc-golfing.
While I do not fear the man physically, I have come to fear the human ego in general, and to keep a sharp eye out for a bruised ego, which is prone to extraordinary violence, to stabbing persons in the back and letting the air out of their bicycle tires. In the wake of Wilson un-friending of me on Facebook over the weekend, I could perhaps try to arrange a sit-down with him, a having-it-out session during which he might be able to call me all the names he wants to and, perhaps by letting go of his hatred and allowing it to flow from himself mightily, to dislodge some of the sand that has become trapped in his vagina; I might as well do nothing, however, since I cannot in any way control how Wilson reacts to my words or presence. He is a big boy, and he has the power to decide for himself when to be angry and when to be contented, when to fill his being with hatred, and when to let One Love infect every ounce of his soul. Three cheers for keeping quiet! Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit
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