Odium

I hate it when I try burglarizing a house that winds up belonging to a dyslexic woman who shoots me and then fires a warning shot.

I hate it when I buy a book entitled How to Not Get Swindled — for “only $99.99.”

I hate it when I get a really good idea when I’m sitting on the toilet — because, although I have plenty of paper, the only thing I have to write with is a big brown crayon.

I hate it when people call me a “freaky, diabolical, schizoid iconoclast” whose whole cache of writings is nothing more than a “pellmell slapdash claptrap mishmash.”

I hate parasitic politicians who perpetually pander to popular prejudices.

I hate it when schoolchildren can’t remember the words to the pledge of allegiance and instead say, “I pledge allegiance to this rag of the United States of America and to the plutocracy for which it stands, one nation, under greed, with arrogance and hypocrisy for all.”

I hate it when I’m in my car at a stoplight, trying to twist the cap off the bottle of Jägermeister between my legs, while I’m ogling some zaftig young woman in a bikini who’s crossing the street, and I accidentally twist the head off my penis.

I hate it when I think I’m dating a mermaid but find out later that she’s just some chick with a dolphin jammed up her ass.

I hate it when a Hindu guy from India moves into the apartment next to mine, and he truly believes that his cow is the current incarnation of his wife who died six years ago, and — well, you know what husbands and wives do. . . .

I hate religious nuts, because they’re always too busy praying to produce any sperm.

I hate it when I date a girl named Chlamydia Cockburn, and after having sex with her a few times, I’m somehow surprised when I feel a burning sensation in my urethra every time I urinate.

I hate it when a friend of mine hooks me up with a girl who has “an infectious smile” only to find that that was merely his euphemistic way of saying she has oral herpes.

I hate it when some schmuck at work keeps stealing my sack lunch out of the breakroom refrigerator, leaving me no alternative but to find the guilty party by tainting the sandwich meat with rat poison and waiting to see who doesn’t show up for work the next day.

I hate it when I wake up on a New Year’s Day with a really nasty katzenjammer, and in my haste to make a pot of coffee, instead of grabbing the coffee can, I unthinkingly grab the urn that contains my grandmother’s ashes.

I hate it when I go to a family-owned grocery store and buy what I think is a bottle of olives only to find out — after plopping one into my mouth — that they’re actually cat testicles soaking in rancid piss.

I hate it when I get lost while wandering the streets of Chicago in a drunken stupor and asphyxiate after falling into a pool of raw sewage, but “luckily” I’m resuscitated by a smelly old mutant woman who has three eyes, two mouths, and 23,672 pus-filled sores all over her naked and deformed body.

I hate it when I send off for a new DNA-altering drug that, as the ad claims, “will cause your penis to grow up to four feet in less than a month,” which turns out to be true, but more than a little misleading, because after taking the drug religiously for twenty-three days, my penis sprouts four feet, scampers off, and goes on a shopping spree at the mall in downtown Cassandra, charging more than five thousand dollars to my Mastercard.

I hate it when I dream that some insane woman with a big bushy brown beard is chomping on my penis as though it were a stick of beef jerky — only to find, upon waking, that my pet tarantula has somehow escaped from her terrarium and mistaken my schlong for a scrumptious snake.

I hate it when red-assed baboons give nihilistic poetry readings on open-mic night at the Café Dada — the underground coffeehouse-cum-brothel in downtown Cassandra — and then, about halfway through the reading, start nonchalantly pelting the audience with pennies, nickels, and shurikens, as they blithely cast aspersions on the character of all the fine, upstanding citizens who attend the First Baptist Church of Second-Rate Minds.

I hate it when I go to Spanky’s Saloon, after a truly exasperating day at work, to have a few drinks and relax, but two guys at the corner table start arguing about something, and pretty soon, they’re shouting at each other — and then I realize they’re arguing about whether Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophical work (his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, for example) was more compelling than the latter Wittgenstein (e.g., his Philosophical Investigations) . . . and, of course, when everyone else in the bar hears what the dispute is about, they all get involved, and before too long, it escalates into a barroom brawl.

I hate it when some multi-millionaire experimental psychologist who’s “conducting a survey” asks me if I’d take a dick in the ass for a million dollars, to which I reply, “Hell no!” and the psychologist says, “But what difference does it make if no one else knows?  And just think of what you could do with all that money,” but I’m still saying, “No way, man!” and then the psychologist opens his briefcase, which contains one million dollars in small bills, and after staring at all that cash for a few seconds, I’m like, “Fuck it, I got bills to pay” — but then, right after the psychologist shoots his “space probe” into my “wormhole,” Peter Funt bursts into the room and impishly points to a sculpture of a dirty old man holding a video camera, which I’d never noticed before (and which I then realize really is a dirty old man holding a video camera) and says, “Smile, you’re on ‘Candid Camera’!”  God, I hate cameras.