ALL YOU NEED IS HATE

Neva Chonin

Sunday, April 3, 2005

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;

Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

-- Lord Byron, "Don Juan"

Last week's column about people who troll the online journals of killers and pedophiles, hoping to bask in the dubious glory of posting in a Notorious! Blog, predictably drew some irate responses. Most of these came from the trolls themselves, who, in an act of psychoanalytic transference, abandoned their criminal targets and refocused their bile in my direction.

Mmmm. Projectile vomit via e-mail. It keeps me young. The gist of the trolls' complaints was that I lack a sense of irony, since any fool can see that posting gratuitous commentary on, for instance, a dead teenager's Live Journal is all about irony. Viz: "OMG DUN U GET TEH SARCASAM???!!!!!11111????"

Dudes, I get sarcasm fine. I get stupidity, too, and I know how to tell the difference. Taking potshots at big, dumb and, in the case of school shooter Jeff Weise, dead targets is too lame to qualify as irony or sarcasm or even snark. It's lazy attention-whoring. And lazy attention-whoring is TEH
STOOPID.

So listen up. Here's how to mock and do it well. First, don't hitch your little Bush-era internets cart to the engine of controversy. Second, look to the world around you for inspiration. Choose your objectives carefully, and savage those who most deserve it -- the common miscreants who make our daily lives miserable and get away with it. Call them out. Crumple them like parking tickets and bunt them into the fire.

Use the Black Box Stew on Jeff Kay's West Virginia Surf Report (www.thewvsr.com/TheWVSRstew.htm) as a guideline. Kay, "an Ugly American living on the cusp of a midlife crisis near Scranton, PA," catalogs the fools we'd most like to see go down in flames. Everyone has a recipe for the perfect disaster, and Kay wants 'em all. A few from his list that made me cry "Amen!" out loud:

-- People who use the term "closure"

-- People who yell when they yawn

-- People who think that if they add "mon" to the end of any sentence, they are delivering an authentic Jamaican accent.

-- People who get off escalators and immediately stop, as if they've just been transported to a strange, exotic world.

These are universal thorns in all our sides; yet they are allowed to flourish sans censure because there's no cachet in combating the mundane. After all, it's so much easier to join the frothing masses in spewing vitriol at the Big Bads like Osama bin Laden and neo-Nazis and Paris Hilton. This is tragic. Let us reverse the trend, and seek inspiration from another hater par excellence, San Francisco scribe Camper English, whose Hate Blog at cramper. com includes these gems:

-- People who forward cutesy Web animations and start off the e-mail with "I don't usually forward these things, but this was too good to resist!"

-- People who need a seat on the bus because they're carrying a baby

-- People who eat nuts on the bus and drop the shells on the floor

-- People who micromanage the burrito process

-- Bloggers who blog about blogging

Beautiful, no? And now I'll help get the ball rolling on this new! improved! paradigm of hate by offering ...

NEVA'S TRUNCATED HATE LIST:

-- Bicyclists who pedal at 10 mph in the left lane, oblivious to the mass of congestion forming behind them

-- People who think they're invisible and pick their noses while driving

-- Women who cackle when they laugh

-- Day workers who spend their days on the corner harassing chicks (beats working!)

-- People who spray the toilet seat

-- Men who occupy two seats on the bus by spreading their legs wide enough to (allegedly) accommodate their elephantine manhood

-- People who vomit on the bus

-- Vegetarians in leather

-- Late-night smokers who gather on apartment balconies to talk loudly, thus ensuring neighborhood insomnia while keeping their homes carcinogen-free

-- Mothers who use their strollers as battering rams

-- Mothers who think the public finds their screeching offspring "cute" and "lively"

-- Mothers

-- Men

-- Women

-- Adam Sandler

-- College boys who become rock critics to avoid finishing their dissertations

-- White boys who try to talk like black men

-- People who remove the mufflers from their motorcycles

-- Taxi drivers who pick up fares on the way to answering your call

-- Homeless guys who hoard and sell parking spaces around nightclubs

-- Couples who insist on strolling two abreast on narrow sidewalks, even if it means forming an ambulatory human wall

There. I don't know about you, but I feel better. And methinks I'll keep the rest of my plebian rage in lockdown for a while to let it age and deepen, and trot it out for some special occasion ... like, say, the next election. Because good hate is a terrible thing to waste.

Send your hate list to Neva at nchonin@sfchronicle.com.

MMM. BRAINS.

Neva Chonin

Sunday, March 13, 2005


As a teenager, I was mistaken for a drag queen. The guitar player for Soundgarden once said I acted more like a guy than most of the guys he knew. Last month, a queer friend of mine affectionately dubbed me a "crypto- fag." What can I say? I've always felt like a gay man in a girl suit.

Hence, I was prepared for an ambivalent result when I took a BBC online "Sex ID"* test, "a groundbreaking experiment designed by a team of top psychologists" to determine one's "brain sex." In sum, whether one thinks like a woman or a man. After 20 minutes of spatial puzzles, word associations and facial-cue quizzes, I received my result: I think like an average woman.

Oh, the crushing disappointment. Others got more intriguing results. "I scored exactly the same as the average woman, yet somehow I am a very masculine, straight man who prefers feminine faces," lamented one poster on the metafilter.com blog. "I think I'm going to cry."

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