CHAPTER 2: AN ESSAY ON LOVE AND THE HATEFUL MAN'S HANDYBOOK BY AN ESTABLISHED WRITING PERSONALITY WHO SHALL REMAIN ANONYMOUS

I believe I was but a lad of fourteen when I first felt the delectable pangs of hatefulness. It was early April, 1994. Spring had finally come to our little Hamlet and my heart was aflutter with that strange mix of puppy love and filthy, masturbatory lust that only an introverted fourteen year old boy can feel for a girl who has barely ever acknowledged his existence.

Her name was Sandra. I recognized her from the yearbook. She took a different bus, didn't have any of the same classes I did, and actually participated in extracurricular activities that did not involve Mortal Kombat II or hitting the TV until the Playboy Channel came in. She sent my ginger plot into a hormonal frenzy after I briefly made eye contact with her across the cafeteria.

Needless to say, three days and four boxes of tissues later, I found out that Sandra was a fucking idiot. She was part of a weird Christian fundamentalist sect that sold Christmas cacti by the roadside in order to fund missionaries who sought to convert people on the Lower East Side and believed that we were all wrong about dinosaur bones. I talked to her for thirty seconds in the hallway between classes and in that time she had told me that we were living in the end days, that there is a silent abortion holocaust, that her uterus was primed to do the work of god and that she felt sorry for my ancestors for having such a sinful heir. It was in those thirty seconds that I became an atheist.

I also realized that day that Sandra had a lazy eye and voice like a gagging ostrich being violated by Fran Drescher, neither of which I could have detected across the cafeteria or in the year book.

My world changed forever on that day. Whereas my walks home before this day had been idyllic romps down happy-go-lucky lane interspersed with occasional white washings and wedgies at the hands larger classmates, they had now become endless trudges through Moronville interspersed with occasional white washings and wedgies at the hands of stupid assholes. An infectious plague of stupid was all around me. There was something seriously wrong with every person I came in contact with. Worst of all, I was too polite to say anything about it.

I had been attending regular counseling appointments for my Attention Deficit Disorder for a number of years. When I related my experience with Sandra and subsequent misanthropy to my therapist, he called me a little prick. Fair Enough, I thought. The man provided me with the Ritalin, so he was probably right.

It was as I was leaving the therapist's office that day that I found a copy of the Hateful Man's Handy Book that another patient had either subversively left on the table for other like-minded sub-geniuses to read... or he just plain forgot it. Yes, dear reader, you hold in your hand now the latest edition of the same book I found that day – a book that changed my life.

As I perused the books mix of essays on human stupidity, step-by-step instructions on driving other human beings away with subtly abhorrent behavior and taxonomy guides to the wide variety of cretins and knuckle-draggers an enlightened individual may encounter in their day-to-day interactions with humanity, I felt an uncanny sense of relief and new-found perspective. One could argue that the uncanny sense of relief came as much from the realization that I was not alone in my contempt for mankind as it did from pissing on Sandra's bicycle. I prefer to think of it as a mix of the two.

Enjoy this book, my fellow hateful men!