Patio conversation fragment one night last week when Pogo strode up like he owned the place:

“I hate possums. Ugly hissing things.”

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“But they’re one of God’s creatures too.”

“Yeah, sometimes I wonder what He was thinking.”

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Then next day I see the news item that a grotesque loping critter about the size of a possum was the common ancestor to all the great dinosaurs, and I remember that all the forms are momentary and transitory. Ours included. I expect I’ll hate sharing Heaven with australopithecines and supermen.

Got me thinking about other stuff I hate, and you know what happens when a compulsive list-maker has a thought like that.

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I hate paper cuts.

I hate exercise. Just another way one’s body has of imposing on one.

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I hate it when cows are sent up to bunt.

I hate thinking Galileo would find our century more hostile to scientific thinking than his own.

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I hate having to fall back on formulaic structuring, as you can tell.

I hate the toxic incarnadining of the once Beautiful Blue Danube.

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I hate the very idea of a breakfast burrito.

I hate the very idea of killing time.

I hate thinking what the assembled baboons must be thinking when we gather at the fair to chortle with anthropoid amusement at their antics.

I hate it when bad officiating decides the outcome of ball games. Happens all the time.

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I hate to see evil feeding off of dumb. This fall it has gorged.

I hate thinking I slithered up out of the same gene pool as Tim Griffin. And concomitantly I hate giving myself the creeps.

I hate our journalism has gone extinct. I like to think it’s merely endangered, and can make a comeback, like the eagle and the wolf. But hope fades daily, as with the ivorybill.

I hate the indignities of geezery.

I hate plagiarism and I’ll hate it till the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening etc.

I hate it when they start drawing down on one another in Sunday school class.

I hate the simplistic, which is about all we have now.

I hate to see all the oak trees dying, and wonder what the cause is.

I hate that the author of “Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork” has gone back to digging his grave with his knife and fork. My guess, the knife mostly used to slice Velveeta.

I hate the idea that smart phones really are smarter than we are. But the evidence is conclusive. A phone never voluntarily got addicted to tobacco. A phone never dug its grave with a knife and fork. A phone never invaded Iraq.

I hate the local TV anchors’ crowing about their “in-depth” news coverage. Like, how deep can you probe in 15 seconds?

I hate it when I’m reduced to seeking tech support from 4-year-old children. And not otherwise precocious 4-year-olds either.

I hate the annual autumnal task of updating the tally of unlikely creatures and inanimate objects bagged by hunters who swore afterward that they were dead solid certain before they pulled the trigger that those innocent bystanders and passersby were legally harvestable deer. The Trailways bus. The road grader. The Medivac helicopter. The bagswing.

With Barry Manilow I hate to see another October go.

I hate it when some goob job beats me in calling dibs on the gizzard.

I hate to see a child, a spouse, an old-timer, an animal, a privilege, or a book abused. Self-abuse, though, NOMB.

I hate this thought from the blowhard, “Some people were just born to be slaves.”  Pardon is hereby granted to slaves, former slaves, and those with loved ones who are or were held in slavery, to take pleasure in imagining this dope-fiend whoremonger eventually roasting in Hell.

I hate crotch-sweat lather. On race horses, I mean. You know I meant that, right?

I hate all the dressing up and panhandling you have to do on Halloween just to get your candy sack halfway full.

I hate it when the coyotes and the neighborhood dogs get a serenade going and the werewolves have to horn in and try to take over. Has to be a full moon, of course.

I hate when it’s so dry you can’t go out to the mailbox without your lips start to crack and bleed. Tell me again about climate change being a hoax. Tell metropolitan Leola, which had a hundred inches of rain last year, and about six so far this year. Keep them Al Gore jokes a-coming.

I hate the obligatory vomiting scene.

I hate power outages. The dark sucks and winter nights are so long. Get your honey to hold a lit match over your shoulder while you try to read Proust – what kind of a deal is that? What’s that skittering across the floor?

I hate dog-peter gnats. Other kinds of gnats too – the kind, for instance, that keep splattering against your teeth and clotting up your smile at high speeds on your Harley – but the dog-peter gnats especially.

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