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I don't like it when people don't like me. I know that no one likes it when people don't like them, but what I mean is
that I really really don't like it. I hate it, in fact.
Say I'm friends with Joe and Bob and Cindy, and everything's
great and we're having a good old time. And then say one day Cindy brings along her other friend Jenny, and Jenny likes Joe
and Bob just fine but she can't stand me for whatever reason like, I don't know, make one up.
So then Jenny starts
telling Joe and Bob and Cindy horrible things about me, even true things like that I don't wash between my toes, which, ok,
I don't always, but let's not get off track here.
Or she could tell them that I like to sneeze, and when she says it
she makes it sound all weird and freaky, which even though it's true does sound weirder than it really is, when you just say
it like that. It's not a fetish or a weird sex thing; it's just that when you sneeze it's like your whole body tenses up for
like .002 seconds and then you relax and your head is clear and everything is cool. It's kind of like how you feel after you
work out, or anyway that's what people who work out tell me. But anyway it's not like I walk around with a pair of tweezers
plucking stray hairs out of my nose, or snorting black pepper, just to make myself sneeze. It wouldn't surprise me, though,
if that's something that super-models and high school kids starting doing, and then you'd see celebrities start doing scary
public service announcements about it and then a show like 7th Heaven would have a Very Special Episode where one
of the kids has a best friend who makes himself sneeze all the time and has a brain anyeurism and dies, and then one of the
other characters quotes statistics about how harmful FSS (Forced Sneezing Syndrome) is to your body. No: I don't like sneezing
that much, but I do enjoy the sneezes I get when they happen.
OK, so, whatever it is, say she tells them all and now
none of them like me, either. It may just be as simple to solve as going out and getting new friends, but first of all making
new friends is really really hard when you can barely stand being around people at all, and second of all, I'm totally convinced
that Cindy and Jenny and Joe and Bob would start following me around and making sure that no one liked me. They would say
whatever they could, or even just make things up, and hide behind bushes and trees, accost my neighbors and co-workers, hand
out flyers and put them on windshields, take out ads in the paper, and even start an I Hate John J. Doolittle Society.
Or
maybe it would even be more organized and militant and high-tech than that, like those militia groups that live in Idaho and
stockpile weapons and freeze-dried food and live in underground compounds, only instead of hating the government they would
all just hate me personally. Maybe they would tap my phones and use sophisticated stealth technology to find out all they
could about me so that they could turn the world against me. Maybe they control the government and the news agencies and the
entertainment media and even the churches so that everywhere I looked, everywhere I turned, from network news to movies and
books, random street corners and even church pulpits, everyone would be condemning me and accusing me and just generally screwing
with my head.
Now that would really really suck, although I suppose it is extremely irrational to believe that just
because this one person didn't like me that no one in the whole entire world would ever like me again or that this mysterious
Jenny person would even have the time and resources to bring to bear against me in so organized a manner. And I also suppose
that it would be doubly irrational to be experiencing anxiety about it right this very second, when I know for a fact that
none of these people even actually exists because I just now made them all up.
And if I was that irrational, or crippled
by mental illness, you might also suppose that it was because of a guilty conscience or a deep self-loathing. Lucky for me
this isn't true. Or at least I don't think it is, although I suppose it is always possible that I've done something so terrible
and horrific and just plain wrong that I've totally blocked it out and repressed it from my conscious mind.
I've read
about repressed memories but didn't much believe in them until they happened to me....
It was in a dream that the
images came to me, hazy images of small children playing in the sunshine on a hillside, unbidden, innocent, until....she....she
falls! She's falling, and she's hurting, and I imagine her plummeting hellward, and there's no one there to help her or hear
her plaintive cries, and, and....
It's then I realize that I've just repressed the end credits of Little House
On The Prairie.
But it is kind of freaky to think that there could be something about you that even you don't
know or remember, like that you were once a Nazi or a killer or a Barry Manilow fan. It's not like there isn't enough real
crap to worry about, and it's kind of like those kids who have no pain receptors in their brains and so they have to stay
inside all the time because they could lop off a body part and not even feel it: What I mean is that, when I'm feeling sick
I can always imagine that its cancer or a heart attack, but now there's this new disease that makes you feel ok, so that now
I can never be sure that I'm not seconds away from just dropping dead. And so just when you think you've dealt with all the
weird crap in your head, now you can never be sure that there's not something you don't even know about.
So, please,
everyone like me. At least try.
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