October 3, 2002

Today is the day to join a cult of personality.

I'm all better now. Well, not really. But all better enough to get to work. And thanks to those of you who thought I was faking it yesterday. That was very touching. You'll feel bad the next time you're sick and I rush over with the proverbial bowl of soup and bouquet of flowers. Ha ha, vengeance will be mine.

Okay, so, like a few days ago I wrote about this girl, who, unbeknownst to her, is the bane of my existence. Now, I feel I should clarify what this means. This does not mean that I burn with a hatred for her, day in and day out. It doesn't mean that I wish she would die. It just means that whenever I see her, I wish she weren't there. Know what I mean?

So anyway, nice people wrote in, after my cajoling, and gave me their tales of their own banes. Read on. Thanks, kids.

From Andy Knight:
The bane of my existence, a woman we shall call Stess (because her real nameis Tess), drives me crazy at the local coffeehouse. She comes up every dayand slips into her offensive-to-everyone Blaccent (you know, when pasty white kids from the 'burbs try to speak as if they're from the hood) and begins to brag about her Spades "skillz". You know, the card game. On and
on she goes, reciting hands she's been dealt in the past. If anyone actually engages her in this, she goes into a form of one-upmanship you normally find confined to playgrounds. If pressed hard enough, I'm sure she
would claim that she has successfully gone blind nil on a hand where she was dealt all of the spades.

So the other day I went ahead and watched her play. I sat right behind her so I could watch her every move. First off, she demands to have everybastardization of the game in place. The 2 of hearts and the 2 of diamonds are removed in favor of the "big" and "little" jokers, odd mis-deal circumstances, rules on when you can and cannot go blind, the 2 of spades is now the third highest spade, the first hand bids itself, and on and on. She deals the cards in odd patterns, not content to simply deal clockwise, she gives one person four cards, deals six cards between two people, comes back to the first person with one card, gives herself two, proceeds clockwisethen reverses counterclockwise... it's nauseating to watch.

Starting with the second hand (because the first one "bids itself," no real playing takes place. The cards are dealt and played without any real purpose and the score starts with Stess's team down by 30 points) she picks up her cards, fans them out half way in her stubby little hands, moves one card, collapses her hand and taps it on the table before fanning them out again, moving another card and collapsing them again. After she is halfway through with her neurotic reorganizing, she begins trash-talking her opponents and tabletalking to her partner. "I can go nil as long as you
take care of this big heart for me," she says, "oh, and this club." She finishes reorganizing her cards and declares, "I can't go nil, but I can definitely cover you." Then she focuses all her energy on trash talking her opponents, and, between every half-assed barb, she collapses her hand, taps
it on the table, sets it down, picks it up and fans it out again. The first card is played and I follow the action as if she's holding my cards while counting how many times she collapses and re-fans her hand. 73 times. In one full hand she has collapsed and re-fanned her hand 73 times. Her partner failed nil in the second hand because Stess decided to lead with a two of clubs. "I was trying to set her!" she proclaims, pointing at one of her opponents, who had also gone nil. It was the only attempt she made at trying to bust her nil. Her inept playing costs her 3 tricks that should have easily been hers and winds up getting set on top of the busted nil. The second hand ends with her being 330 points behind her opponents. She says, "Well, you guys have four bags now. Just wait till we toss more bags your way." (at ten bags you get a 100 point penalty) The third hand brings a blind nil attempt from Stess and she finishes the game, -270 to 330.
Throughout the night, she switches partners and opponents but continues to lose.

The next day, she comes in and brags about having "whooped sum dat ass" the night before. I'm tempted to break her hands.

From Jamie Paquette:
He waits for me around the corner. His actual presence on any given day is a crapshoot with variables apparently more complex than simply what time I leave the apartment or what the weather is like. So that on some days my walk to the subway is blissfully ignorant - the biggest challenge being mapping my route and timing my gait so as not to have to pause at any crosswalks. But then just when I've achieved complacency, wham! there he is as my field of vision opens beyond the hedges that decorate the perimeter of his building.

At first it was no sweat to just breeze by him, head down, focused on the destination. But then came the inadvertent eye contact, and I knew (as he probably did too) that we could never go back. Contact had been established, and existence had been acknowledged. So unnerving was this change in our status that for a time, my reaction upon turning the corner and seeing him there was to snap my head violently to the left where the teens milling about in their crisp school uniforms constituted a safe place upon which my gaze could fall. But self-consciousness can be an irrational taskmaster as often as a useful social tool, and I projected onto him a painful awareness of my avoidance. The only recourse was an about-face of tactics - I would stare unease in the face and hope for the best.

I am leaving out key details. His building, on the corner of my block, is an assisted-living facility. And he is confined to a wheelchair. Always, he sits on the same 10 square feet of concrete, facing west, with same hat pulled low over the same world-weary, vaguely sad expression. I interpret it to be the look of a man without much in the way of friends or family. Whose days follow much the same basic pattern. Who conceivably eats the same foods at the same time every day. Who watches Jeopardy! joylessly along with the other residents. Perhaps he has been ill his whole life, or at least a significant portion of it. Or maybe he's a veteran (Or not. Aren't most veterans crazy and paranoid? Wouldn't he be talking to himself?). Once, he was eating an ice cream cone. It's the only thing I've ever seen him do.

So I set out to escalate our tête-à-tête. From the beachhead of eye contact, we advanced to the brief nod, then to the nod-with-a-smile, then to the audible "good morning". But all the while my resentment has grown, and I find myself secretly wishing that he won't be there and feeling noticeably relieved when he isn't. I've become thankful of the fact that he always faces away from me in the afternoons as I return home, so I can walk by in silence as he stares into the middle distance.

It is odd that someone who occupies such a small portion of my day has come to be the bane of my existence, but that is exactly it. In the span of 10 seconds, this man conjures up the faults and shortcomings I've tried so hard to ignore, makes me question my own worthiness as a person. How hard would it be for me to stop and say "hi"? To chat for a minute or two? To ask how he's feeling, make him feel like someone cares? And wouldn't I feel good about myself if I did that? What is stopping me from doing so? Am I scared? Apathetic? A selfish asshole? Is that the way I want to live my life? Is that going to be me someday?

Who needs that when you're still wiping the sleep out of your eyes and wondering how on earth you will ever make it through the day? Sometimes, it makes me wish he would just disappear. Which of course makes me feel even worse. Damn him.

From Chad Stevens:
This is a tough one for me, because I've always prided myself on being able to get along with all kinds of people. Being afflicted with Nice Guy Disease, I find it almost impossible to just trash a person completely. I have to throw in the obligatory disclaimer that "she's actually a very caring person," or, "if he knew how he came across to others, I'm sure he would be different," or, "yeah well, with her childhood you really can't blame her for being a vicious life sucking bitch with the ethics of an outlaw Ferengi."
But you want ethical meltdown? What do you do when you work with someone, you depend on their good graces to get your job duties taken care of, and to top it off, she just adores you and dotes on you and invites you to lunch all the time and offers to pay and, oh, did I mention that she makes my skin crawl and irritates me to the point that I would take perverse but immense pleasure in skinning baby kittens and throwing them at her?

The litany of her atrocities is as follows.

She resides on the other side of a regrettably thin and non-soundproof cubicle wall.

She is loud. She carries on all her personal phone calls on speakerphone with the loudest damn speaker I have ever heard. I think she has a Bose Wave sound system hooked up to her freaking phone. She uses her computer CD ROM to play her favorite CDs. These include Kylie Minogue, Creed and a lovely rendition of Kung Foo Fighting, by Alvin and the Chipmunks.

She sings. She sings along with her favorite CDs. She sings solo. As my inherent niceness/fear of confrontation is not contagious, she has been bluntly told by various other cube farm residents to please refrain from singing so loudly. The phrase "Shut the fuck up" has been uttered on several occasions to no apparent avail.

She has enormous boobs. Normally, this is not a trait to which I object, but the problem arises because they are attached to the rest of her enormous body which never seems to have enough room to remain within the bounds of what normal social mores have decreed to be its own personal space. Now just wait a minute before you start calling me a fattist, or a discriminator against those who are volume enhanced. The problem is not her size. It is the fact that no matter how wide the corridor, she will find a way to brush her boobs against me or any other person, male or female in the general vicinity.

She carries on numerous personal conversations, loudly, on her Bose speakerphone on the other side of my regrettably thin and non-soundproofed cubicle wall. Most of these conversations outline the marriages, divorces, arrests, medical diagnoses and recent trailer home purchases of the demented and oft-embattled collection of losers, born again reprobates and miscreants she refers to as her family. The majority of these conversations seem to consist of her informing people of what she would do if her husband had an illicit tryst with the babysitter's foster mom and how she would not stand for that if it if it was her and who do they think they are dealing with here. There are threats and curses and clichéd pronouncements of dire consequences that I believe to have been lifted verbatim from the WWE, courtesy of The Rock, or Stone Cold Steve Austin, or maybe The Undertaker.

She has cutesy names for every person in the office, including me. I would tell you what my office nickname is, except that if someone who reads this or posts it on her lovely website were to call me that in a misguided attempt at humor (humour, for our Canadian friends), I would be forced to hate you too, on general principle.

She calls manila folders "French vanilla folders" and laughs every time, as if it were funny or cute, which, as I'm sure you could have predicted, it is not. She has a small treasury of pithy sayings, most of which seem to be passive aggressive threats, which have been drained of any once existing pithiness by incredibly prolific repetitions.

I hate her. I hate her, I hate her. She thinks I am wonderful, apparently because I don't call her a retarded white trash Anna Nicole Smith wannabe, or possibly because I smile a bemused smile when she tells me some humorous anecdote disguised as a long and irritating story, instead of say, vomiting or walking away silently.

Pray for me.

From Stevie Kuenn:
I know this guy named Oscar. Although he can be very sweet on occasion, I don't really care for him. But my fiancée thinks the world of him, so Oscar stays in my life.

But he drives me fucking crazy. He's always at our apartment - every day. He never cleans up after himself. He vomits on the floor and walks away from it. Sometimes he misses when he pees and he will, on occasion, play with his feces.

If he thinks we're not paying enough attention to him, he starts breaking stuff - vases, glasses, coffee mugs, picture frames, action figures, et cetera. If it can be broken, he'll throw it to the ground. Oh, and if we have dinner, he'll stick his face in our plates, even trying to steal the food from our plates - so rude!

If we have other friends over, he becomes very aggressive and attacks them. Sometimes he attacks me - he bites me, even. I've got scars. Or he'll be way too friendly, sticking his butt in people's faces and demanding attention.

He pushes his way into the bathroom whenever he wants, whether someone is in there or not and sits in the bathtub, refusing to leave. He has absolutely no respect for privacy, and I've caught him sleeping with my underwear. The worst is when he shows up at the door in the middle of the night and bangs on it until I get up and make him something to eat. I'm not kidding!

It should be noted, at this point, that Oscar is a cat. An evil bastard cat.

From Leonard Pierce:
My secret archenemies have been numerous and sundry, ranging from the mundane (the pretty-boy bartender who macked on my date once) to the inexplicable (the kid in sixth grade who enraged me because the movement of his mouth
didn't synch up with what he was saying, as if he were a refugee from a bad wushu flick) to the arbitrarily fabulous (Mojo Nixon).

But the longest and fiercest grudge I have ever held was against HENRY OLSEN.

When I was 10, our grade school got an invite to go on the Wallace & Ladmo show. This show is a massive cultural touchstone for anyone who grew up in Arizona from the 1950s to the 1990s -- the southwestern equivalent of
Bozo the Clown and an h-bomb of gargantuan kiddie megatonnage. Getting the invite was to me what getting a job on the Krusty the Klown show was to Bart Simpson, only without having to stand outside Sideshow Mel's toilet
while he puked up cheese.

On the show, they gave away these things called "Ladmo Bags" to a random member of the studio audience. "I've got the seating chart," said the rotund, bowler-wearing Wallace, a sort of suburban kid's Oliver Hardy; "Ladmo's got the Ladmo Bag," he would continue, indicating his gangly, Gilliganian partner, the feckless Lad Kwiatkowski. When they called out the seat number, one lucky preadolescent boy or girl would be sent into paroxysms of sugar-fueled
joy as they were vouchsafed a plain brown paper bag with "LADMO BAG" written on it in fumey black Magic Marker. Inside, it was Youngster Nirvana: Hostess snack cakes, candy of all sorts, comic books, discount tickets to local
attractions (minigolf, amusement parks, etc.), free passes to the movies, toys, and so on. Winning a Ladmo Bag had been one of my goals since childhood. Which says more about how pathetic I am than it does about how cool the
Ladmo Bags were, but that's a subject for Zulkey's "Tell Me Why You Suck" column.

Anyway, Henry Olsen (his real name, "You Bastard"), who was in my class, was a tall, rail-thin kid, taller even than I was and I was the Luca Brasi of Grace Lutheran School. So, when he asked if he could switch seats with me before the show, I thought nothing of it; I assumed he wanted to sit
farther back so as to not get in the way of anyone sitting behind me. I thought it was a gesture of kindness. Oh, naive, foolish lad! All my delusions of Henry Olsen's magnanimity shattered, like my childhood innocence, into a million jagged pieces when they called out the seat that HE WAS SITTING
IN. THE SEAT THAT WAS ONCE MINE. And they walked up the aisle. Right past me, and my burnt-out, gutted dreams. And handed MY LADMO BAG TO HENRY
OLSON, YOU SON OF A BITCH.

I haven't forgotten. Ever. Someday, I will find you, Henry Olsen. Someday I will track you down, and knock on the door of your suburban home, and I will ask your 2.3 children if daddy is around. And then I will brandish a baseball bat, and I will ask you to produce a plain brown paper bag containing two-decade-old snack treats. And if you are unable to give me what is mine, Henry Olsen?

Then it will be a dark day for you. As dark as the day you crushed my soul, and didn't even say thank you.

P.S. This year, my roommate (who knows of my terrible despair at the destruction of my youth) gave me a "LEONARD BAG" stuffed with treats, some that you
wouldn't get on a kiddie show, in compensation for my great loss. It was one of the nicest, kindest, most thoughtful gestures I have ever seen.

But that still won't stop me from beating the crap out of you, Henry Olsen.