In 1984, I Was Hospitalized for Approaching Perfection

There are certain rules of etiquette when it comes to dealing with persons in public. Urinal rules. People are generally to be treated as cars; give them their proper space and respect. If I were a hippy I would lament that we should all get in one big pile and love and see the beauty of all things. But I’m not, so I don’t.

Urinal rules state choose the farthest urinal away. Keep your eyes on your own dick. Do not talk. These are etched in stone, brought down from Sinai with veiled, glorious face.

Public rules of interaction can be broken, obviously, upon a social bond in which an understanding has been reached by both parties that normal societal rules need not be observed.

What amazes me is how certain persons feel no need to honor these rules, as if they were exempt. My job requires that I interact with a lot of people. I like these people, generally, and am friendly and as loquacious as I can be within a corporate environment.

Rules state that if someone is reading, do not bother them. They are engaged in art, and a breach from the outside is a terrible act of violence on the part of the intruder.

I have had to resort to complete assholery at my job. I enter work with my headphones in to bypass the gauntlets of “Hello”s I must endure, a bullshit societal observance that makes me feel, at the end of my fifth greeting, as if I’d been politely gang-raped. These are usually accompanied by queries if I have just woken up, or worse, if I am “alright.” Two years of entrance into work in the same state has not produced in these people any sense of pattern. What joy it must be to enter the world as if a baby, each day unpredictable and new!

Once I have made my drink, a putrid concoction simply intended to insert caffeine into my system, I go outside. At which point, I not only have my headphones, but I read at the same time. My goal is to turn myself into a veal: blindfolded, deaf, suspended above the ground so my muscles don’t become chewy. Without fail, however, person upon person insists on interrupting me to chat mindless bullshit.

It’s not that I am excessively misanthropic, I don’t think. Or that I am attempting to appear above people, as I was once accused of. It’s just that I hate people, and think that I am better than them.