4 Minutes’ Hate #1: Human Plaque

Welcome to the first edition of 4 Minutes’ Hate.

This is the inaugural post in a series of brief (for me) rants on the things that keep me in a constant low-level displaced rage.  The difference between 4 Minutes’ Hate and other, more run-of-the-mill rants is that I use humor to mask the disturbing depth of my unreasonable fury.  You read this stuff and think, boy Spiro’s really piling it on this time, what a talent for exaggeration.  No, sadly, this is my best stab at understatement.

Why “4 Minutes’ Hate?”  Well, hopefully you have already heard of the 2 Minutes’ Hate, from the immortal novel 1984, by George Orwell–a work of “fiction” that our dear president seems to have misinterpreted as a how-to manual.  If not, you don’t need to know it for the purposes of this blog.  But, for the love of all that’s holy, read the book.  Seriously.

So, yeah, I’m twice as hateful, twice as unreasonable.  Got it?  Good.

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Anyway, on to today’s target: Human Plaque.  What is human plaque?  Human plaque is the clump of idiots standing in the middle of the sidewalk or hallway, as if it were their personal social lounge.  Like the deadly plaque that gathers in your arteries, they clog up the pathways you walk.  Human plaque is oblivious to the remote and insignificant possibility that anyone else exists in the surrounding area.  Far from their “minds” is the ludicrous idea that they might be creating any kind of inconvenience to other sidewalk-users.  Say, by forcing them to walk in the mud and/or traffic.

Human plaque clogs up the hallways while you’re hurrying to your next class.  Why, what could possibly be the trouble with getting together with three random fellow idiots to join hands like paper dolls and completely block the stairs?  Why would anyone need to use stairs?  And if they did, well,  surely even such unworthy deluded creatures can sense the far more important use of the human plaque-members: discussing how drunk they plan to get in a few days.

Human plaque is not content to simply get in the way and stay in the way.  Human plaque is created with a sense of entitlement, and will cast a look of exquisite disgust at you as you dare to pretend you have a valid reason to disrupt their gathering.  The truly amazing thing is that this look of disgust is visible even though their faces remain as slack-jawed as ever, and their eyes as vacant as Bush’s bookshelf.

Human plaque have no purpose to their existence but to annoy me.  They gather in a room and practice getting in each other’s way, the better to infuriate me with new techniques of subnormal blockage behavior.  They devise plays, draw them up on whiteboards like basketball diagrams–The Pick and Stall, The Wedge, The Roving Clot.  I think they meet on Wednesdays, actually.  They are like a flash mob with the collective brain of a single cow.  They give each other awards, based on the level of frustration they can induce in me as I try to hurry along (thanks, I’m late again!).  They maintain a Blockage Hall of Fame.  Its hallways are gloriously narrow.

I daydream about having a cow-catcher mounted on two poles to push out in front of me as I go.  Just take off on a dead run and plow the bastards to both sides, like snow to the side of the road.  Lying there in a pile, mourning their failure to block my progress.  Ha, fuckers!  You never expected the cow-catcher!

Don’t tell them, but imagining that, and knowing it will never happen, just makes me more frustrated.  Feh.

My four minutes is up.