PEOPLE I HATE - Pt. 2

George Carlin knew

I had a friend call me the other day. I know...right? He didn't text me, email me or FB instant message me! It's like a miracle when someone actually tries to communicate by SPEAKING to me! It almost never happens any more. So I did what anyone would do under the circumstances. I stared at my cell phone until it stopped ringing then texted him back. "What do you want?"

It turned out one of my good friends had been reading this blog. He wanted to know when I'd be doing People I Hate pt. 2. I called him and we spoke for a few minutes. "I don't hate anyone really and I am trying to have a positive attitude." I said. He couldn't relate. "Everyone knows you have a crappy attitude. Just write it down. Trust me you'll feel better."

Maybe he has a point. This time of year always pisses me off. New England fall always lasts around ten minutes then it's cold and we are getting beaten over the head with the holidays. Halloween isn't done for two seconds and I have to start buying people presents? I just had my long johns on for the first time yesterday. 11/9/2014. That's early. That's not cool. So yes I am pretty sick of everyone. The weather only makes it worse. People seems to get worse this time of year too. The entitled, rude, ignorant sheer stupidness seems to come out full force.

I'm not as cynical as I come off. I want to like everybody and actually I do like many people. I used to think everyone deep down is good and can be reasoned with. All you really need are good communicative skills, a sense of humor and a bright disarming smile. That is all you really need to make friends and allies wherever you go.

Then you can ride your unicorn off into the sunset and pick daisies in the land of Oz while naked bodybuilders make love to you next to an ocean of melted chocolate.....

Yup. That is what I USED to think. I don't really believe that any more. Some people are completely unreasonable. Some are entitled fools who believe the world is actually revolving around them and some people are just batshit crazy.

You can not reason with those types. You will never be able to trust them. Obviously you can't depend on them or consider them friends but actually they might be enemies.

Today's edition of People I Hate is going to be focused on crazy people. Let me explain. I am not writing about the mentally ill padded cell types although some of these people in today's post could easily benefit from years of therapy. More or less I want to touch upon the kind of person who can not be reasoned with. Maybe you can relate.
Maybe you're one of them...Hopefully not.

I. The Narcissist

There's selfish and then there's SELFISH. Everyone knows a Narcissist. You may not realize it so let me lay it all out for you.

1. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder in which a person is excessively preoccupied with personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity, mentally unable to see the destructive damage they are causing to themselves and to others in the process.

Now that sounds pretty cut and dry but it isn't as easy to spot one as you might think. So ask your self these questions:

• Do you know someone who has no problem whatsoever blowing you off?
• Does that person constantly break their word and then somehow make is seem as if it's your fault that they screwed you over?
• Is everything always about them? Is their Ego so big that any time they get insulted they hold a grudge for like FOREVER?
• Are they in and out of romantic relationships because the other person is always somehow crazy or too demanding?
• Do they more or less suck but still make you laugh and can be charming when they want to be or more likely want something from you?

If you answered yes to these questions there is really only one thing to do.   RUN!!!

I heard Judge Judy say once that you can't fix stupid. It's the same with a Narcissist. You're never going to fix that person. They will always be that way. It's better to cut and run. Get far away and move on and if you are stuck working for a person like this well......good luck. 

II. The OCD Person

I used to have a friend who would love to go out to dinner. He was always raving about the newest place or some dish he heard about. He would get a group of us together and we would all go out. The thing that would drive me crazy was that he could never just order off the menu. 

Do you know anyone like that? I've known this person for over twenty years and have to this day never seen him just pick an item on the menu and order it. He always has to ask for changes. Can the chef make him a special side dish? Can they cook it differently just for him? Is it possible to put it on an extra large plate? (seriously) It's embarrassing and incredibly annoying. I came to realize that he just couldn't help it. I just couldn't help getting pissed off. I always say the same thing to him. "No matter what they do for you man it's always going to come back tasting like spit." But at least he'll have his saliva HIS way right?

I know this other guy who hates to be driven around. He needs to be the driver wherever he goes. Great. I love to be driven around but here's the thing. He has this ritual that he needs to do before we can leave. 

He checks the rear view mirror.

He fixes his seat belt

He turns on the heat or AC.

He checks the side mirrors.

He fixes the rear view mirror

He unbuckles his seat belt and puts it back on again.

He checks the side mirrors

He lowers the heat or AC

He checks all the mirrors.     (am I annoying you yet?)

Yes it can go on for ten minutes or more. He's normal as far as I can tell in every single other circumstance. But if I attempt to get him not to do this long insane ritual then we can't leave. It would be funny if it wasn't me that has to wait for this. One time I forced him to just start the car and go. We had to pull over ten minutes later because he said the mirror was messed up. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" I would ask. He didn't really have an answer. I wondered what he would do if he came across a car with no mirrors, just a steering wheel and that was it. His head would explode.

You guys must have people in your life that do completely irrational things that drive you nuts. It isn't clinical enough to get them help. It's just bad enough to be annoying. We all know people who hoard. But are they hoarders? Maybe not. Maybe they are just doing it on purpose just to piss you off! Naah. You should just learn to be more patient like me.
(yeah right)

  

III. Mr. or Mrs. Instant Best Friend:


There is this acquaintance of mine who always has to hug me when she sees me. She LOVES me. She speaks to me as if we have been best friends for life. She asks about my family, my wife, my health. This is not a big deal if not for the act that we are complete strangers more or less. We hung out twice at a big event. That was it. Now she and I are best friends apparently. Nothing makes me more uncomfortable than when a person who is sort of a friend says "Bye! I LOVE you!" Come on. You don't love me. It took me years to say that to the woman I married. Now I'm supposed to say it back to a girl I know from a Blogger party? " I passionately love you too! I'm totally comfortable with this! BYE!!!"  ugh ugh ugh.

Some people are like that. I am pretty friendly and I like to make new friends but there's a little imaginary line that once crossed makes you a fruitcake. Some people touch a little too much. I have this imaginary box around me. YOU don't get to enter that box unless I invite you in. Okay? Some people just barge right into that imaginary box.  They move in with luggage. Then they are too close. They are breathing on you. They are touching you. Once they leave you can still smell them and they better smell good because now you smell like them. Thy have left pieces of themselves in your PRIVATE BOX! WTF!  They are all over you. God, I hate that!

Not cool. Not Cool at all.

I know a guy like this who is always asking for favors. "Can you do me a quick favor?" 

"Cappy, can I get your friends number that (Insert job here) so he can hook me up with some free service?"

"Would you mind helping me move?"  

 HAHAHAHAHA! That's always a good one. If some "acquaintance" ever asks you to help them move that's where you spell it out for them like I did for this guy.

He needed an intervention so I gave him one.

"Look bud." I said calmly. "You and I aren't brothers are we?"  

"No" He said, "Why do you ask?"

"Because my brother wouldn't ask me to help him move because he knows I'd say no."

I then went on to explain that manual labor is expensive and that if someone was going to do an expensive, time consuming task for someone else for FREE then it could be considered a "FAVOR" and that favors of this magnitude should be reserved for people who you have known for a LONG time or who you are extremely close or intimate with.

"Are we close and intimate?" I asked him. 

"NO"  he said.

"So do you think I am going to take an entire day off from work and from being with my family to help you do some back breaking work for free?" I said.

"NO" he said.

and he was 100% right. We don't really talk much any more.

Cynical Face

SO. these are a few more types who just crawl up my keister and give me Agita.

The list really is endless.  Next time when we do People I Hate pt. 3 we can do a whole post on the passive aggressive people who deserve special recognition for things like Yelp reviews and asking questions with no answers. Venting like this really does help keep me positive though.

Positive I am not leaving the house today.

Sometimes I Remember Things Other People Would Probably Try to Forget

Is Boston EVER Quiet?

Boston can be a loud place. It’s not as loud as New York but there are times, during the day if you are right in the middle of it all in Boston Proper, it can be a cacophony of noise. The mixture of people on cell phones, ambulances, homeless people asking for spare change and a barrage of white noise that is indecipherable,  can induce a hell of a headache nonetheless.

That’s why when you are in some of these normally noisy places and you find it to be completely quiet it can be quite unnerving and spooky as well. After the Marathon bombing when the authorities were closing in on the bombers, the entire city was put on lock down. People were told to “shelter in place” and not to come into Boston if you could help it. I had to come to get some work done. Well, if the truth be told I came in because the TV kept telling me not to come in but we had work to do as well. Below you can see some of the pictures I took that day. It was about as close to a horror movie as one could get. I was almost expecting the walking dead to appear from the Granary Burial ground or from beneath the MBTA. But luckily Mother Goose and Sam Adams stayed in their boxes. It was a stark contrast to the mayhem of a few days earlier when no one knew what might blow up next. I walked the streets taking pictures of the emptiness thinking how peaceful it was. I contemplated taking a selfie in the middle of Tremont Street with no clothes on at all but decided that joking around on a somber day like this was probably a bad idea. And it was chilly outside and you know what that can do a guy’s package.

As I stood at the corner of Park Street and Tremont it got me thinking about another time almost twenty years earlier when it was just as empty, desolate and spooky. I was almost in that exact spot.

Some of you may know about the business I've been in for many years. One of the main parts of it is a somewhat unconventional retail business. We sell many things from pushcarts or kiosks. Most of them are outdoors throughout Boston. We do other things now as well but twenty years ago we were relatively new at working for ourselves and I, in particular wasn't anywhere near the street smart maniac that I am now. I had recently left a job where I was in a suit all day. Flash forward to me on the day in question a few months later and I was sitting at a pushcart selling baseball caps.

Two things that day made me an idiot.  The first was that it was the middle of winter, there was a foot of snow on the ground and not one single vendor or even person...or even pigeon or squirrel were outside that day. In retrospect I should never have opened but those were the days BK (before kids) when I was planning on taking another vacation. I hoped it would be a  long one and needed every dime to make it last. The second thing was that I was selling baseball caps. To this day I don’t know why we weren’t selling winter gear like gloves, scarves etc. But it was more than likely because it was a freak snowstorm and the cold New England winter had not completely arrived to bite us on the bottom.

I was all alone. It was a Sunday. No one at all came in to Boston. Occasionally someone would come out of the Green Line station and run down Winter Street but mostly I just sat there on a wooden bar stool next to a beautiful display of caps. Those were the days around the baseball strike so I also carried minor league teams like the Toledo Mudhens, Portland Seadogs and the Durham Bulls. On a good day people ate that stuff up. We were all pissed at the Red Sox for going on strike. This was many years from the 2004 World Series and every Sox fan knew defeat the same way I knew I wasn’t going to be selling a thing on that day. I even had Yankee hats back then. What was I thinking?

In my boredom I began to stare out into the park. The Boston Common is beautiful when it’s covered in a fresh snowfall. I could make out the Frog Pond through the trees and there weren't any skaters on it. The capitol dome gleamed despite the dreary, grey skies above it.

As I stared at the trees something appeared to move on the ground, in the snow. I was firmly entrenched in a daydream and didn't really focus on it at first but when the powdery white snow began to move and form a little cloud I took notice. Something alive was buried under the dusting of snow and it was moving! My first thought was that it must be a dog but it was way too big. It was definitely a human. Apparently someone had laid down on the ground and fallen asleep before the snow fell!  It was hard to tell whether it was a man or woman. They had a blanket over themselves when they sat up so it looked like a green and white ghost but as the snow fell away I could see that it was an extremely dirty person. When he stood up literally a puff of dirt came off him. He had a long beard that was brown, grey and yellow. He had on a hat that looked like it had been on his head for 100 years. It was black but it didn't start out that way.

He dusted the snow off himself and straightened his coat. It was a dark green trench coat that he wore over what looked like a garbage bag stuffed with burlap. He was wearing it like a shirt. There was a hole for his head and the other holes had dirty burlap poking through. He coughed for a while and I looked away having gotten bored. When I looked back he was staring at me.

At that point I took him all in. He was what I call the hard core homeless. It didn’t look like he had ever taken a bath and there was no way he spent a night in one of Boston’s many shelters. He lived outside and probably knew how to sleep in the snow or anywhere else. He was so dirty looking that ten bars of ivory and a sand blaster wouldn’t have helped. His boots had holes in them but he had stapled cardboard over the holes and wrapped newspaper around his legs over his trousers which were of course black but didn’t start out that way.

He stopped staring at me and began walking towards me. I was thinking to myself that there was no way he was coming over here. Why would he? I turned around and pretended that I was busy. I began arranging baseball hats and straightening things out. I was peripherally keeping a close watch on him and as he got closer it became apparent that he wasn't coming to me but to the wall behind me. At Park Street there is a brick wall where everyone sits. He headed to the far area of the wall and began walking down it towards me. Every few feet he would sit and then get back up as if that spot wasn’t going to work for him. He tried another. Now the wind began to blow and the aroma of this guy wafted over to my nostrils. A loud and forceful gag tried to leap out of my mouth. I put my arm across my mouth quickly and stifled it. As he got closer to me I tried to breathe out of my mouth only. If you could bottle the smell of rotting flesh and mix it with the stench of a million septic tanks you still wouldn’t approach the actuality of what I smelled that day.

He had stopped directly behind me and from what I could see without looking directly at him, he had found the perfect spot. Now it appeared as if he was reaching for something in his coat. No, that wasn’t it. He reached towards the front of his coat and unbuttoned it. Then he was fiddling with his pants. I took a few steps away so I could see what the heck he was up to. The pushcart itself was between he and I but now I could see what he was doing. He had pulled his pants down but his coat was covering him. He then placed one butt cheek on the wall and one off the wall in a weird sort of half sitting half balancing position. It occurred to me what he was doing just as he started doing it.

Have you ever heard the expression “The World is Your Oyster.” well the world was this guys toilet. He was using the wall as a sort of lean to/toilet area and I had a front seat to watching him poop. He let loose a very firm, very large steaming pile of excrement. I didn’t think he had any digestive issues because his stool sample looked quite healthy.

(not actual photo from that day)

To say I was flabbergasted would be somewhat of an understatement. Today's Cappy never would have let the guy even get near him. But yesterdays Cappy had not yet been spoiled by the horrors and cold reality of the lives that some people live.

So I pretended not to notice. The smell instantly got way way worse. He finished up and hiked his pants back up and sat there looking relieved. A few minutes later he stood up.

Now I hoped he would leave. Go back to the tree he lived under and re-bury himself in the snow.

But alas this was not to be. He still craved human interaction apparently because after a five minute coughing and hacking fit he decided to walk around the cart and see what I was up to.

At that moment I was trying to picture what it would be like to poop daily and never wipe.

He sauntered over directly in front of me and watched as I held my breath. He appeared to be looking at the hats. His long yellowish beard had food particles stuck in it. I was noticing crackers or bread crumbs.  He had one greenish tooth and long ropey snot was hanging from his nose. The Tull song Aqualung was playing in my head. I was just wondering how long I could hold my breath. He came closer. I finally said, HEY man! What do you WANT?”

He leaned in and quicker than I would have guessed he was capable of snatched a Harvard hat off the shelf.

“THATS TWELVE BUCKS BUDDY.” “DON’T GET IT DIRTY!” I said.

He began unbuttoning his coat again and I was frantically looking around for someone to help me. Not one soul was there.

He reached into the filth and came out with what looked like a pouch of some kind. He pulled a HUGE wad of bills out of it. I noticed at this point that every single bill in his hand was a HUNDRED. This guy had thousands of dollars on him. He peeled one off and gave it to me.

I gave him back 88 dollars careful not to touch him.  “Do you want me to put it in a bag?” I asked

He ignored me and after putting his money back into the mess from whence it came pulled off the black, soiled hat he was wearing.  He tossed it into the trash. He propped the new, clean Harvard hat on top of the grayish, yellowish, brownish hair and left the area. He walked back off into the trees and promptly disappeared.

I realized that day that there was a lot of assumptions I  was making about people and about life and that I was mostly wrong in my conclusions. I have no idea what his story was nor did I ever see him again but I had a nice big pile of human poop behind me as a visual aid for when I told his story to others.

It’s amazing how the quietest of times can bring on the loudest of lessons. I never looked at the homeless the same again after that day. I realized that until someone proves themselves a bad person I would give them the benefit of the doubt.

I also leave a roll of toilet paper in the park once in a while just to do my part to help.

Spare some Chaaaaange?