There’s this guy, he threw me out of university because I didn’t worship Jacques Derrida.

And another guy, he hated me because I told the truth that we’re all part Neanderthal. “Go have sex with Neanderthals,” he said. “We already did,” I said.

One guy I hate because he wrote me a nice polite letter about how my food stamps were going to be canceled because I had no money and no way to support myself.

I hate this guy who founded a cult, or tried to, up in San Francisco. I guess it’s funny that he failed, but he really did want to. He had the scariest eyes.

There’s this guy I hate who punched me in the face. And later I punched someone in the face because of him. He was a Scientologist; the guy who punched me, not the guy I punched.

One guy I hate threw a snowball directly in my mouth in a snowball fight, at close range. He said he did this because he was raised on the south side of Chicago, and that “it was the only orifice accessible.”

And there’s this guy (who was friends with that snowball guy) who claimed that he tried to pick up girls by standing next to hot girls in bars, and then waiting for the hot girl to shoot some other guy down, so he could start a conversation with a line like “does that ever work?” This guy also liked to brag about a time when a girl had tried to force herself into his apartment to have sex with him after they’d gone on a date, but he shut the door in her face. His name was Byron.

I hate one guy, a college professor who loved the word “deliquescence.” He worshipped that word. In seminars, which are classes where you’re supposed to have discussions, he would read badly written essays, handwritten in ballpoint on legal paper. You can guess what he said the best thing about the book Madame Bovary was.

There’s this guy, and I’m not going to mention his name because he’s actually a girl, who really loved me but never told me that the reason she loved me was because I made her work life seem bearable. I was just the comic relief.

There’s another guy, he threw me to the ground where I worked and tried to strangle me. Later he said I was a pussy for not still wanting to be friends with him. I was walking away from him, and he called out: “pussy!”

There’s another guy, I only saw him one time. He couldn’t have been more than 19, who veered over into my lane on a curving suburban street in a cheap souped up white convertible, badly maintained, with a look on his face that said, “I’m going to cut off your head and shit down the hole.”

One guy, I hate him because he died. He was a good guy.

I hate this other guy, she just wanted to sleep with me. And I let her. That happened another time too.

One of the guys I hate doesn’t know I exist, and I only hate him because of the way he rode his bike. That sounds mean, I know, but he rode it in a real holier-than-thou kind of way.

I hate this guy who flipped me off from his SUV when he almost killed me on my bicycle. I fucking hate that guy.

There’s this other guy I hate, he’s a university president. He looks like an idiot. He wears a huge gold medallion around his neck like it was the Middle Ages.

Another guy, a university administrator, he robbed money from the Texas university, and then was given a bigger job, in the University of California system, three months later.

One guy I hate was only a boy when I hated him. He was one of my best friends when I was six. I used to jump on top of his chest until phlegm came out of him, and he would laugh and laugh. Boys do actually have fun this way.

One guy I hate, I punched him in the face. I had no idea who he was. He was just talking on the phone, like an idiot. And then I hit him. He was surprised. Then he succeeded in knocking me down and breaking my glasses, which I did deserve.

One guy I hate is a police officer. He cuffed me for no reason except that I was in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time of night and I looked like some guy they wanted to arrest. The guy didn’t even apologize.

One guy, in England, believed that he knew the secret to the universe. I never even talked to him, I just told him to shut the fuck up because I was trying to get some sleep next to my girlfriend, but he and his cronies just glared at me. They were clustered near the hall phone, whispering.

I hate this one guy, she said to me and my girlfriend when we were kissing at the airport, “Can’t you wait??” She had a big sneer on her face.

One of the people I hate is my father. He believes that the universe runs the way he thinks it runs. And he won’t believe anything different.

One guy I hate, this New Yorker, he’d serve me coffee and he’d ask me: “White or black?” That’s just what they ask you in New York when you order coffee.

One guy I hate, she’s a real character. Loves drugs a lot, and sees them as a sign of passage. And she always looks angry.

One guy I hate, he has this way of talking, like it was decided, only recently mind you, that he’s right. Like, “I’m sorry, I just had to inform you, I’m right about this.” He says everything this way.

Another guy, this friend of his, he laughs at everything. I fucking hate him.

One guy I hate, he was a homeless man, and he stood very tall and straight, and he was a tall guy, maybe 6’6, and he’d stand right against the wall, like he was gonna be shot, looking out at us people passing him, and he’d say in this big deep voice: “Yeeeeeees?”

One guy I hate, he was in the cell next to me one time. And he liked talking, even though he knew the conversation was pointless, because we were just going to be moved to different cells in a bit. Talking can hurt in jail, it hurts just to concentrate. But he wanted to talk anyway.

One guy I do hate is my old barber. It took him forty-five minutes to cut my hair. And I could sense him putting his tongue between his teeth to get the line just right on the back of my neck.

More recently, I realized I hate the librarian. He acts so important.

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Photo by Yuliya S. (panoramio) (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AGib_neanderthals.jpg) via Wikimedia Commons.