hate

I'm beginning to think that I hate most everyone. I've heard a friend tell me and others, "The thing you should know about me is that I don't like people." When David says this, I'm first taken by the facetious nature of the statement, until I realize that he's simply being honest. A native New Yorker, David can pull this off and in fact still be a likable person himself in his own way. But me, a wide eyed suburbanite who grew up with the naivete that he could fly if he just believed hard enough ... that person can't pull off even a most basic cynicism, not to mention outright loathing for his fellow man.

But that's where I think I've arrived. And maybe I should just begin to embrace it: I hate people. Maybe not all people, but maybe I'm just starting down the slippery slope towards a world that I'm either above or betrayed by continually. More likely, perhaps I'll just come to believe that the world is flooded with idiocy that somehow finds a way to reproduce its genetic message before it has wandered in front of a city bus.

How has all this vitriol* seeped into my bloodstream and psyche? A visit from my parents (now at church, hopefully praying for me)? A new office left in a state similar to how I left behind my first rented apartment, not worrying about the retrieval of my down payment? My current office's state of utter confusion and mess, such that even my department chair has commented that it has finally sunk to a lower state than his own? Or just a mental state effected by a change of season, family busyness and work projects? Maybe ... or maybe it's my neighbor and his Fucking Sprinkler.

Out my window and across the street I can see the whirling flow of water, click-click-clicking to and fro, over and over again as it perpetually waters the lawn. Not just now, but last night. All night, even as I listened to the rain fall. And all day today, I'm sure, it will continue. On the 7th day God rests, but the oscillating sprinkler connected to the green hose connected to the unmetered secondary water system will continue, and with each pass of the sprinkles of water my vitriol rises like mercury in a thermometer. The sprinkler across the street, in spite of City citations and warnings, is a perpetually dependable sign of warming spring turning to summer, like tulips, perhaps. Or, more likely, like the box elder bugs that descend upon us each spring: red and black and completely inert. But they arrive and propagate and crawl up the outside of our home's walls and eventually find themselves in through the screens of our windows and somehow into our home. And then they begin to attach themselves to one another, and I find myself wondering if I should be more offended by the fact that they are engaging in a sex act right in front of me (and my children!) or the fact that they are blatantly reproducing, much like the human idiocy I loathe. It could be that my springtime hatefulness is caused directly and specifically by these red and black, harmless and pointless six-legged creatures.

But I still blame it on my neighbor and his sprinkler. Because the sprinkler is a waste of water on a waste of a lawn. Presumably, we water our lawns so that we can enjoy them; yet when does one get to enjoy the lawn that is perpetually being flooded with water? I'm confident that the rationale for the continual click-click-clicking of the oscillator is actually a non-rationality, a result of laziness and lack of creativity and sloth and inability to motivate a real solution to one's problems. Or perhaps an inability to consider real problems and real solutions to them. This is the same neighbor who lives in what should be the nicest, most historic looking home on the street, but allows it to fall into disrepair, roofing materials literally falling off with each burst of wind filtering through the canyon; the same neighbor who parks his oil-dripping vehicles in front of other people's homes when they're out of town; the same neighbor who, in spite of his own job as a vehicle maintainer for a federal agency known for reliably being able to make deliveries regardless of "snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night," his own oil-leaking beaten-down eyesore of a truck recently lost its brakes, in front of our elementary school. It hopped the curb, plunged towards the front doors of the school only to be stopped by the flagpole, toppled over onto the first grade classroom that the multi-ton vehicle was routed towards.

So, maybe it's more than the perpetual click-click-clicking. Maybe it's the fact that my mother just walked in, sat down, started talking, asking if I have much work to do this summer and has continued to talk about gardening and tomato varieties and laundry (front loading versus top loading) and her cats. She has a washcloth with ice in it to place on her eyes, swollen apparently from allergies. My own scientific analysis is that the wide open window of her room, next to the monstrous pollenating maple tree, with the fan blowing all night long, may have had something to do with this. But, like most things, I still blame my mother, personally, for her own shortcomings. I'm just that petty, and hateful.

But this is about my neighbor. Or maybe, really, this is about me. Still out my window the sprinkler turns and the rain falls. My hate boils up, and I wonder if Anakin Skywalker started out like this as he was following his destined path towards the dark side of the force. Just as we begin to take out frustrations on pests by stepping on the box elder bugs, I'm waiting for the day that God steps across the landscape and lets the corner lot across the street bear the weight of His Foot. A quick and relatively gentle end to the click-click-cli ...

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* I think this is the first time I've actually used this word.