Yo. For one of my classes at the Nonfiction program in Iowa, I had to write a list of hateful things, in the style of 10th century Japanese ancient sensation Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. She is counted as one of the first essayists, divulging all the courtly gossip on the ruling class, in a progressive form at the time, one we might want to associate as a strictly 21st century Internet phenomenon, the list.
One of my favorite items on Shonagon’s list of hateful things :: “Sometimes one greatly dislikes a person for no particular reason–and then that person goes and does something hateful.” Lol! Anyway, mine is below.
//// a list of hateful things ////
Lost keys
At dinner with a friend, she talks too loudly and interrupts your eavesdropping of a nearby table
On the night of a sportsball game that the entire city is all lit up and crazy over, in the din of black and gold hued excitement, you drop your cellphone into the Deadwood toilet, the screen blips vacant, you rush home to dry it in a bag of rice, noticing the depressed lull of living without technology for even an hour, and finding no rice, shove the phone into a box of quinoa, twelve hours later the screen is black, and you turn to subtitled Russian YouTube tutorials to aid in the DIY disassembly of the phone by twisting left-loosey with a kitchen knife on the little screws, but no cleansing waterfall pours out before you, the innards look oddly ship-shape and there is a spark of hope that the phone could turn back on, until you realize you cannot figure out how to put the parts and screws back together, thereby annulling any chance there might have been of it self-resurrecting with time
Namedroppers
The tail of a rat disappearing through a cracked wall
Supreme Court extending rights of personhood to corporations
The amount of hate speech Donald Trump is allowed to spew on the airwaves. And the many parties complicit with this—the advertisers, the sponsors, the hosts who have him on their shows, the viewers, every person who does not pull the plug out of the wall the moment he spits into a microphone
Going on a weeklong trip and forgetting to take out the garbage, fruitflies proliferating their species atop rotting bananas, the apartment vibrating with the pungent odor of entropy, feeling as if you are competing against the fruitflies as you spread jam on toast, assailed by diving wings
Deniers of climate change
The War on Drugs
The War on Fun
The War on Christmas
The War on Terrorism
The War on TV
A hateful thing we all share— the complete, gaping unknowing about what happens after we die