Everything about it revolts me. Every warm sunny day fills me with disgust.
The heat. The humidity. The smiling happy people and their nauseating tots having fun and ((((shudder)))) enjoying the weather!
And oh, lord save me, the relentless sunshine!
It is, for me, a three-month hell hole.
One thing and one thing only makes the entire sickening season bearable.
Roadside Daylillies.
Driving down a country road, air-conditioner on full blast, sunglasses, sunscreen. Karen Carpenter’s “Sleigh Ride” blaring on the radio…
And there at the side of the road is the thing that saves me from insanity every year.
It’s as if Nature has taken pity on me and my suffering and has given me this one tiny solace… as if to help stop me from driving a spike into the neck of the next oaf who says, “Hot enough for ya?”
So the next time you hear some sweaty nitwit say, “It’s not the heat… it’s the humidity!” and he DOESN’T get hit with a shovel hard enough to drive his head into his chest…
My dearly departed dad’s grave was desecrated years ago by some teenage hammerheads who probably had too much to drink and thought it would be cool to knock the statue of the Virgin Mary off the top of a tombstone.
That’s my guess, anyway. No one ever found out who did it.
In my mind, there is a very special seat in Hell for those who desecrate graves. [1]
Words simply cannot express the feelings of revulsion and impotent rage I experience when I see images of vandalized cemeteries.
It is an attack on all right-thinking members of society. It is an attack on common decency.
It is the ultimate act of cowardice.
I hate you. I detest you. I despise you. I loathe you.
As Queen Elizabeth the First of England once said, “G-d may forgive you… but I never can!”
[1] As an observant Jew, I do not believe in Hell in the Christian or Muslim sense of Eternal Damnation with no hope of repentance after death. The Jewish concept of punishment for sinners in the afterlife is more like the Catholic concept of ‘Purgatory.’ BUT… if there is a Hell, I am sure there are special seats reserved for guys who beat up prostitutes, men who rape children…Â Â and cemetery desecrators.
I recently posted a blog article about some young teenage girls and their unfortunate habit of dressing for a body type other than their own.
Today I get to take a swing at the guys.
I’d like to set my sights on an equally repellent aspect that some men have, namely decking themselves out in a way that causes right-thinking members of society to want to claw their eyes out.
(Friends don’t let friends wear mullets!)
Young or old, middle class or poor, there is something about a guy who seems to be completely oblivious as to what he really looks like.
They can’t possibly leave the house knowing that they look the way they do!
(John Daly’s golf pants make me want to scream)
And no normal self-respecting woman I know would ever let their guy leave the house looking like that!
And yet… there they are, infesting the aisles of the local Walmarts!
Each and every one of these clowns left the house thinking they look gooood!
They soooo don’t!
(Oh, COME ON!!)
So guys… for the love of all that’s good and decent in the world…
While technically, ‘marathons’ would normally not be included in a list of people I hate, I am going to have to make an exception in this case.
Running marathons, bike marathons and all the other stupid thingathons would not occur if it wasn’t for those people out there who are eager to participate in marathons, curse their sweaty, spandex-encased little hearts.
(GET AWAY FROM MY NEIGHBOURHOOD, DAMMIT!!)
It is common (albeit not publicly expressed) knowledge that any kind of marathon that disrupts or interferes with traffic or even one’s ability to cross an intersection without having to wait for a hundred well-meaning yet horribly annoying people, bothers right-thinking members of society.
Today was an excellent example. There I was, minding my own business and deliberately taking a country drive in order to avoid traffic and crowds. No sooner did I arrive in town than I (and a dozen other drivers, including a couple of motorcyclists with whom I would not want to mess) were held at bay by a local regional police officer (no doubt cursing under his breath). It was in the one of the warmest days of the year so far.
What was the hold-up? It could have been an accident. It could have been some other emergency that legitimately and understandably kept us stranded at that intersection.
(I’ve been waiting 10 minutes to cross the street. GO AWAY!!)
But noooooo!! It was hundreds of stupid bike marathoners!!
One even had the nerve to smile and wave at me. Wave at me? You think I’m happy that I’m sitting here in the heat while you glide on by, you twerp? If there wasn’t an armed member of the local constabulary standing nearby, you’d be a hood-ornament on my car!
Listen. If people want to run around for miles and miles, bless them. If people want to peddle around for miles and miles, let them.
Just get them away from people who have things to do!!
(Now THAT’S more like it! Text me if you make it, ok?)
Stop the madness!
Or at least move the entire shindig out to where it can’t be an inconvenience to pedestrians and traffic.
Maybe because it is so rare these days. It seems that when I was a mere tot I was left to run amok completely unattended. Entire weekends were spent with adults having only the vaguest idea where I was.
I somehow made it home for lunch. Â I learned to come home when the street lights came on. Â Other than that, my friends and I roamed around town like feral cats and dogs.
It wasn’t really all that unusual ‘way back when.’
Now? A whole different playground, folks.
We seem to have been lured into this mindset that the world is programmed to hurt, maim and kill children if they are not supervised every single minute of the day.
No one seemed to worry when yours truly played with mercury or lawn darts… a toy that appeared to be specially designed for killing children.
Amazingly enough, the Lawn Darts packages actually contains this warning:
WARNING: Lawn Darts can be dangerous and may cause serious of fatal injury. Read instructions carefully. Keep away from children
Often times, this sense of being bothered by unattended children quickly turns into annoyance.
Maybe it’s a feeling of “if the parents don’t worry about their offspring, why the heck should I?”
I’ve begun to notice signs in commercial establishments that echo this feeling of mine.
I admire the tactic. Threaten to make the insufferable little beasts even more of a nightmare than they are already!
I don’t know if it works but I have to tell you, I admire the effort.
I’m kind of an ‘early to bed, early to rise’ type of person.
As a general rule, I’m pretty much conking out by 11:00 pm unless there is a really good reason for me to be up (e.g. downloading and watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones)!
Sadly, I also tend to get up fairly early… and by fairly early, I mean before 6:00 a.m. The alarm on my clock radio is set for 6:00 am and it is pretty rare that it wakes me up.
It would be nice for me to sleep in now and again. I just don’t get a chance to do so. Either I have to be up because I’ve got to be somewhere, or I just naturally get up because, well… that’s when I wake up.
So you can imagine that on those mornings when I can sleep in, it is a ‘few and far between’ treat for me.
This morning was one such occasion. It is Victoria Day (aka Firecracker Day) in my particular corner of The Great White North. No work. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Up fairly late last night enjoying the latest episode of Game of Thrones.
In my nice huge (king size) bed, sawing wood, blowing some big league Zs, all is right with the world.
And the world, being what it is… there are seasonal changes in sunrise times. At this particular time of year, the sun rises at about 5:50 am or thereabouts and will continue to do so, progressively earlier each morning, until mid-June. No problem. Shades are drawn, door is closed. Hoping to wake up maybe around 8:00 or even 8:30 if I am really lucky.
Nature had other plans for me this morning.
I’m sure it hit my subconscious before I opened my eyes, so it was probably the second blast that woke me up.
I just lay there for a moment, puzzled. ‘That sounded just like a rooster,’ I thought to myself.
Well, they say that three’s a charm. I needed no further confirmation after that one.
There’s a rooster in my neighbourhood somewhere.
Judge my chagrin.
While I may not have a lot of hard empirical evidence at my fingertips to support me, I am fairly certain that just about everyone who’s ever moved to a city has done so in order to avoid being woken up by a rooster.
I looked at my clock radio. 5:25 a.m.
The pre-dawn concerto was in full swing about half an hour later. That was when I got out of bed.
Curse you, Rooster. Curse your cold black cock-a-doodle-doo heart!
Of all the things a close friend or loved one can do to you, betrayal is one of the worst.
It is the element of breach of trust that cuts deeper than the knife in the back. As the saying goes, “Backstabbers are only powerful when your back is turned.” Why was your back turned? Because you trusted the traitor.
(Brutus about to slay Julius Caesar… the quintessential backstabber)
On a national level, treason is perhaps the worst crime there is. The traitor is betraying the entire country and putting it at risk.
On a personal level, a traitorous friend can destroy your faith in people… or at least in that person. You can become mistrustful of others and be tempted to close yourself off from friends and family.
In addition to whatever actual damage the betrayal costs you physically, psychologically, emotionally, financially, etc. the blow to your spirit can be devastating.
Traitors and backstabbers don’t just affect the people whom they betray… they bring down society as a whole. We want to be truthful, honest and open. We want to be able to trust others. And when a betrayal becomes known, it’s almost as if, even temporarily, a tiny crack forms in what we feel society should be.
We hate them, and rightfully so, because traitors and backstabbers are loathsome creatures whose actions not only hurt the victim or victims of their betrayal… but make our world a bit worse off.
Special thanks to author and screenwriter Michael Plumides. Some of his experiences as a ‘backstabee’ during his years in college radio provided the inspiration for this piece. Thanks, Mike!
I like to think of myself as a rational, even-minded person, I really do.
However, every once in a while (and far more often than necessary), I run into certain types of people who drive me to distraction… to the point where I hate them and, as a result, almost everyone.
The ‘jerks du jour’ I’d like to discuss are the humourless.
People with NO sense of humour. They don’t laugh. They don’t smile. They take everything seriously. Nothing is funny to them. Even when they know something is meant as a joke, they take an almost perverse pleasure in pretending it was said seriously. They meet every punchline with a blank stare, every rim-shot with a derisive sneer.
(Professor Severus Snape – Patron Saint of the Humourless)
When presented with the type of person who wears frivolity like an impenetrable shield, they shake their heads mournfully.
They sap the fun and pleasure out of life.
Not content with being humourless themselves, their mission is to drain the cheerfulness from everyone around them. When they walk into a room, you can almost feel the energy waning. People hang their heads and sigh or groan.
I have no idea why humourless people are the way they are and, frankly, I could not care less.
Someone near and dear to me married a humourless person. When I met the spouse-to-be, I was immediately struck by the fact that the person never smiled, let alone laughed. What kind of person never cracks a smile? The marriage did not last. No one was the least bit surprised.
Humourlessness is, to my way of thinking, a sign of an unhealthy mind and a sick spirit.
Deep inside, I know that this type of person is more to be pitied than censured… but I can’t help it.
I do not feel compassion for them. I do not sympathize with their predicament. My heart does not bleed for them. I do not say to myself, “There, but for the grace of G-d, go I.”
_________________________________________________
(I’ve been waiting 10 minutes to cross the street. GO AWAY!!)
Vampyre Fangs 