This Stuff Really Bugs Me...and I Know It Shouldn't

You'd think at my age, I'd be able to tune most of life's little annoyances out. Wrong! As I get older, I truly believe that I am noticing more and more things that I cannot stand to see, hear, or be around. There are actually things that can drive me to distraction causing me to focus on nothing else. Maybe it's a wee bit OCD, perhaps peppered with a touch of misophonia (read Do Not Smack Your Food Anywhere Near Me), and possibly a touch of holier-than-thou. Regardless of the source, I have become almost completely intolerant of certain traits that most of you don't even notice. So, while you are happily going about the business of your day, I am gritting my teeth and trying not to stab half the people in my proximity. Even Zoloft isn't enough to stop the stabby feelings that course through my veins on any given day.

Let's start with toe thumbs. Oh, you know exactly what I am talking about. Don't pretend that you don't. Those horrific-looking fucking appendages that do not, under any circumstances, belong on a hand. Our baseball season tickets have me sitting right next to a perfectly lovely woman and her husband. Perfectly lovely until I look down and to my right and see those things...those bulbous, freak-like, blobs at the end of her thumbs. My skin begins to crawl and I get physically ill looking at them. I have a hard time the rest of the game NOT looking at them. Why? Because I am human and will poke at the sore tooth until I feel soothed by the action. Because everyone loves a train wreck. Because I am an asshole. I will keep looking over, getting progressively more paralyzed by her defect. Something over which she has no control. Sure, that makes me a terrible person. I never told you I was Mother Teresa.

Moving forward to bottom teeth talkers. Not necessarily the chin-jutting, wealthy snob bottom teeth talkers. Just those people who refuse to lift their upper lip enough for us to see that they even have top teeth. Why does this bother me? No fucking clue. But, Christ on a crutch, it does. These bipedal bulldogs drive me insane. Where the hell did they learn how to speak, an animal shelter? While I am perfectly aware that the bottom jaw does all the movement for speech, there's no reason whatsoever to only showcase the bottom row of teeth. They are generally your uglier teeth. Don't believe me? Go look in the mirror. Look first at just your top teeth. Okay. Now cover them with your upper lip and look at just those lower choppers. Scared the shit out of yourself, didn't you? They are friggin uglier than a bag of assholes, and I'm being kind. All I'm asking you to do is work on it. Sit in front of a mirror and practice, see a speech therapist, don't talk to me...do something. It grates on me like fingernails on a blackboard and I will walk away from you if you try to engage me. Give it a try, see what happens.

People who breathe like they are dying when they drink kill me. This is usually more prevalent in the bottled water drinkers. For some reason, those folks like to drink like they just crawled across the desert in a parka and are thoroughly dehydrated. Glug, glug, glug...that I get, if you are really thirsty. But that sound, the sound babies make when they drink because they actually can breathe while they suck, where it sounds like something like a cross between a loud exhale and a grunt...yeah, on an adult sounds more like an animal in the wild. Slow the fuck down. Most people drink bottled water at their place of work, in the supermarket, in public. If you are at the gym and do this, I have a much higher threshold for the sound provided it isn't extended for an eternity. All other times, it becomes unacceptable and is just as bad as those of you who haven't the manners nor good sense to to chew with your mouths closed. Nobody wants to hear you eat or drink. Ever. Drink in sips. Even large ones are fine. Nobody is chasing you...except maybe me with a baseball bat, ready to plow the head off of your shoulders when you drink like that.

Up talk. Never heard of it? Guess you don't live on the Left Coast. There's been a lot of research and discussion about the spread of this manner of speech. If you haven't heard it, consider yourself lucky. Let me demonstrate for you? It's the kind of speech? Where you end every sentence with a question? Mostly done by women? But some men are guilty as well? Are you irritated yet? Looks completely fucktarded in the typed form, in the spoken form it makes you sound like a fucking idiot. I often ask when spoken to this way, "Are you asking or telling?" If you are telling me something, I want to hear the period. How can you be constantly unsure of yourself? Can you be that dumb? Is it possible? Speak with confidence or shut the fuck up. Why bother having a conversation if you haven't a clue if anything out of your mouth is true? If you doubt it, why should I believe it? Get a grip, grow a pair, and speak like you mean it.

These are just a few things that drive me out of my fucking mind. There are so many more and I simply don't have the time today to share them with you. If you are one of these people, if you see yourself in any of these descriptions and you can fix the problem, do it. Do it soon, do it now, do it long before you come into contact with me. I may not comment on your physical abnormality but the moronic behavior is completely subject to my barbed tongue. Doubt me? Don't think I'll say anything? Are you friggin kidding me right now???