The other day I was out for a walk in Laurelhurst Park and it was cold and rainy and windy and so on, and I walked by this man and woman deep in conversation, and the twenty-something man (whose poor gesturing had already turned me against him) was wearing a big padded winter jacket but had on shorts and flip flops, a ridiculous schizoid ensemble that suggested mental slowness more than charming eccentricity to me, and he was abominably tall and had that stooping, neck-vanishing posture that some extremely tall men have, and furthermore he had this truly awful full beard, a really bushy unkempt beard like some foul facial excrescence, and I don't know, I was simply filled with revulsion at this man's appearance, not really his natural endowment of ridiculous height and insectoid lankiness but by his grooming and clothing choices and laughable comportment, and by extension overcome with revulsion at the very core of his personality, and after I'd gotten a few yards past them I turned my head a little in his direction and muttered "I can't stand you!" through gritted teeth, my little fists of rage balled in the snugly-lined pockets of my weather-appropriate outerwear.
"I can't stand you!" What kind of thing to say is that? I have never done that before, that is really embarrassing behavior. It's one thing to think such things but to verbalize them in such a childish way, well it's just shameful. The only thing remotely like that I ever did was on a similar walk one day last year. It stopped raining after ten minutes, so I pushed back the hood of my rain slicker. I eschew umbrellas whenever possible as I am very clumsy with them (there have been incidents). Just a few seconds later I was walking under a tree and a great big water droplet hit the top of my head with a rude splat (I have very short hair so I can really feel these bombardments), I mean a truly obnoxious amount of water for one droplet, and do you know what I did? I turned to look up at where the droplet came from, the branch or wire or whatever, and I said, out loud, "Oh fuck YOU!" I think a woman in a poncho saw me do this because she immediately crossed to the other side of the street, but, you know, fuck her for wearing a poncho anyway.
What was I doing? Who was I speaking to? Well, I was mortified about this for a few months and then I realized it doesn't matter. The important thing is to assign blame, any competent therapist will tell you so. It doesn't matter if the culprit is completely innocent, inanimate, or even nonexistent. An accumulation of such contemptuous feelings, left unexpressed due to some misguided adherence to principles of "reasonableness" and "sanity," can only have dire consequences, including but not limited to acid reflux disease and hyperthyroidism.