Things I Hate: Lightning Round!

Because if you say "lightning" it sounds exciting! Rather than, say, a tedious list of minor annoyances! Excitement, dammit!

Jeans pockets: Man, I hate jeans pockets. See, I'm an adult. That means I have to put more in my pockets than, say, a single paper clip. Ergo, I need more room in my pockets than the amount required for a single paper clip. And a need to access those paper-clip-plus materials through an opening large enough to accommodate a human-sized hand.

I understand that jeans pockets are supposed to be tiny, with a miniscule opening, because your typical jeans-wearer undergoes innumerable rough-and-tumble activities daily, such as riding buckin' broncos, fightin' gators, revisin' spreadsheets, and so forth. Facing such a square-jawed, two-fisted, penis-pumpin' existence, you need your goods tightly ensconsed in hard, unpliable fabric with no access except via extremely long and nimble fingernails, which of course all self-respectin' cowboys own. I know that whenever I wear jeans, I'm in my preposterously gigantic American truck hauling large blocks of something in slow motion as Bob Seger yells in the background. Then later I sit around a campfire with my closest entirely male compadres drinkin' some flavorless American beer and laughing deep, throaty guffaws. Then the gay sex. AmericCUHH!!! Eatin' from a SINgle BOWL!

But between you and me and that disgusting thing on the wall, there are times (shudder) when I wear jeans (shudder, shudder) and am not doing anything remotely physical (Shame! Dishonor! Hari-kari right now! I'm dead!). I would survive, believe it or don't, if my jeans pockets could hold objects large enough to conform to the principles of Newtonian mechanics. And I would prefer to be able to access them without taking the jaws of life to my crotch.

Pockets inside pockets: A related issue, obviously. Especially in right-side front pockets in jeans, you often get a pocket within a pocket, pressed against the skin, which is designed to help you lose spare change and then launder it. The idea, I suppose, is that without these, you would have a chaotic, sloshing soup of objects flying around your capacious jeans pockets, and only by collecting the change in the even-smaller pockets within pockets can you ensure that each attempt to reach for your wallet doesn't explode into a dangerous buckshot of small coins that then impales passersby.

I honestly don't know why they stop there. They need pockets within pockets within pockets, so that the few spare molecules that naturally shear off of coins as part of the immutable process of entropy can be neatly inserted into pockets^-2 and then lost and laundered.

You know, maybe this is all a conspiracy by foreign governments, to keep our loose change lost and unspent, thereby pulling cash from the money supply and dragging down the American economy. I think that this insane theory I just made up is absolutely, uncontrovertibly true, and it is now clear that pockets within pockets are a socialist conspiracy enacted by President Obama to make Glenn Beck cry. Where's my blackboard?

White things: Why do we have things that are white? What are we trying to prove? That we have so much money that we can waste it on things that can easily get dirty and ruined? That we enjoy spending half our lives cleaning? Anything white attracts dirt and stains within a few seconds and then immediately looks awful. Everything white should be banned, from clothing, to walls, to people.

Food noise: This one's not so rational, I admit. My sister can attest to the terror of living with someone with this particular affliction. I can't stand the sound of people eating. Even the smallest smack will drive me into a rage. It's not a good trait.

As for why I am this way, it's probably because of a deep and torturous resentment of my father, who ate like a pig on speed. Or maybe it's sexual. Both, maybe. Whatever. Regardless, there's no very good explanation of the unholy sickness I feel upon hearing people eat. But there is no doubt in my mind that my irrational and out-of-proportion emotional reactions are entirely someone else's fault, and that I am in no way responsible. That's just how it works.

It's at the point where I'm wondering why exactly human beings need to eat amongst each other. I should probably add that one to this list.

Eating with other people: I know, eating with people is supposed to be awesome. We get to listen to each other chew, and uh ... I suppose we can talk, when we get the chance. But think about it: When else in life is your mouth less conducive to conversation than when you're eating? In our day-to-day lives, it's the only time our mouths are fully occupied, and yet we expect to be able to launch a chatting bonanza during dinner. It makes as much sense as having a party at the dentist's office.

I'm all for spending time with people and talking. But I would prefer each dinner party to consist of people coming over and having drinks (which do require occupation of the mouth, but for shorter durations, with just a few inoffensive swallows instead of a chew-chew-chew-smack-gulp ... ooh, I feel sick), and then each person can move into a different room and silently consume food with the lights off and Leonard Cohen playing mournfully in the background. Then everyone can reconvene in a bright and cheerful living room, compare notes on the dinner, drink some more, and play Wii Rock Band (that's how all my dinner parties end nowadays).

Gum chewing: Gum chewing was specifically designed to make me kill myself. It's a socialist conspiracy to make me cry. It's chewing that never, ever stops, just keeps chomping and smacking and chomping and smacking like a brain-dead cow until I grab the person's face, reach in to his smelly, gaping maw, take the gum out, shove it in his eyes, and then rip out his tongue for good measure and eat it. Noisily, with lots of smacking.

Snorts, but not farts, sneezes or burps: Again, I recognize that this is completely irrational, but I can't stand it when people snort in public. It just makes me thing of festering yellow-green mucous yearning to be released from the body and be thrown away and burned and stomped on, but instead being cordially and noisily invited to return to the body and fester, converting the viscera into an inchoate swamp of bubbling, putrid sickness.

But farts don't bother me. Farts are funny. Seriously! This one time? I was at this party? And this dude farted, like, real loud? It was awesome!

It's true, you know, farts are actually very funny. I actually took a course in American Indian literature that confirmed that farts are universally and verifiably funny, and that was in college, where knowledge is true, so there. The first story we read in the class, in fact, was a story meant to be passed down through the oral tradition, so writing it down was stupid, but whatever: It involved the trickster coyote, and he was farting a lot, and it was supposed to cause the kids in the crowd to giggle, so there.

Burps are the same thing. The louder the funnier. And they release the sickness into the atmosphere instead of allowing them to collect inside and poison the bodily humors into an imbalance of phlegmatic disposition. And the same for sneezes, which is why I hate ...

Sneeze stiflers: These are the people who try to do a cute little "pfft!" and hold their sneezes in. They think it's cute and dainty, but to me it says "I don't want to let these poisonous allergens go! I love them lots and lots! I actually want them to grow inside me and sprout little boughs of diseased, dripping coagulations of germs, which will then turn my viscera into an inchoate swamp of putrid sickness! Word!"

Instead, you must let your sneezes out with a powerful and manly KACHOOOO! That proves that the toxins have been forcibly expelled! You have thus rid them from your chest, discharging them with the force of Thor's mighty hammer cleaving the skulls of the unworthy! Now you must go on to drive trucks full of large heavy things in slow motion whil Bob Seger screams about America! RARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR(etc.)!!!!!!

People who laugh loudly at their own jokes: Granted, you can laugh a wee bit at your own jokes. I don't, but many do, and that's fine. It's the people that explode into uproarious laughter immediately after telling their own jokes that bother me. It's pushy and forceful; it's like saying "premise premise premise punchline and now LAUGH DAMMIT!!!!!!" You pretty much have to laugh when people do that because it's too awkward to leave that person going into hysterics by themselves. So you give a polite ho ho ho and get on with life, but you leave feeling a bit manipulated.

Words on walls: Because I'm a married man and I'm whipped like a dead donkey, I end up watching more than a few interior design shows on TV. In a lot of them, they write things on the walls in ostensibly pleasing light purple fonts, things like "peace" and "live life out loud" and "fuck y'all bitches" and stuff like that.

It's extremely tacky, in my book. If you want to create a mood with a room's decor, it might be a wee bit obvious to plaster the sentiment you're going for on the wall in big block letters. If that were how it worked, you could just create an art installation that was a piece of paper tacked on a wall that said "HOLY COW THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT PIECE OF ART RIGHT HERE. MAN OH MAN, IT'S DEEP IN A WAY THAT ORDINARY PEOPLE CAN'T COMPREHEND. BUT YOU, AS PART OF THE SOPHISTICATED URBAN ELITE, CAN FULLY APPRECIATE IT AS BEING A NEW STEP FORWARD IN ARTISTIC EXPRESSION AND SHIT LIKE THAT. NOW THAT YOU'VE SPENT A RESPECTABLE AMOUNT OF TIME STARING AT THIS WITH A SERIOUS LOOK ON YOUR FACE, YOU CAN GO TALK TO THAT ARTSY CHICK AND TRY TO GET LAID."

Musical guests on "Saturday Night Live": I just finished watching "Saturday Night Live," something I haven't done for years, and you know what? It was pretty funny. Except for the part where it all fell flat for 15 minutes because of the stupid musical guest. Wow, a guy yelling into a mic and playing a guitar. Never seen that before.

It wasn't fun when I was young and actually sort of kind of hip (not really). I would watch "Saturday Night Live" every Saturday night (alone, always, but that's a different and much more boring and sad story), and it those days it would even be musicians I had heard of. And even then, the musical guest's appearance was the time to flip over to "Star Search" and hope that it was time for the spokesmodel competition.

You know what? It's not that much fun to watch people play music. In person, it can be fun, because it's loud and there are girls there. At home, on TV, it's really not that great.

Listening to music while doing something else: Whoo, that's fun. Playing music, especially in Wii Rock Band: oodles upon shitloads upon metric tons of fun. But watching other people play music on TV? There's a reason MTV doesn't actually play videos, and hasn't for about 15 years now. They quickly realized that watching people play music isn't that great. If you get a Lady Gaga, who lards her mediocre synth-pop with buckets of weirdo conteporary-art bullshit, that can be OK. Or a rap video in which the music serves as a forgettable backdrop for watching asses shake -- that again can serve some purpose. But a bunch of white guys, on a stage in New York, screaming songs that sound much better on studio versions that I can get on demand from iTunes for $.99 ... yeah, you know what, I have 200 channels. I'm betting that somewhere in there there's something more engaging than that.

That now completes the list of all of the things that I hate. All my future posts will be glowing explorations of things that are great, like cute kitties and pie and the love of a good woman. The end.