What to do when you hate me

I love hate. I love it more than almost anything in the world. Ice cream, adorable puppies, telephones that look like bananas, hardcore German pornography. I love hate more than all of these things combined. Hate is a fun hobby, a great way to blow off steam, a tool for bonding with other dickbags, and a delightful way to pass the time when you’re bored.

Why do you think celebrity gossip blogs are so popular? Because people love to hate. Hating on others who are more successful than us is practically a national pastime. But people love to hate dirtbags, too. What do Honey Boo Boo, the Westboro Baptist Church, and this column have in common? They only continue to thrive because people hate them. The people who hate me the most are my most faithful readers. They read every week just to discover new things to hate about me. My douchebaggery thrives because our culture’s passion for hate knows no bounds. Hate has gone mainstream. God bless our toilet society!

Hate can also be used for horrible things like genocide, but that’s a different kind of hate. I’m talking about the fun, harmless kind of hate, like urinating on a famous stone in Ireland that tourists like to kiss for luck, or inventing a special kind of fat-free potato chip that also gives people life-altering diarrhea.

Over the years, I’ve received a mountain of hate mail for my columns. I’ve also received a lot of “fan mail” from mentally disturbed people who draw penises on my column picture, photograph it, and then mail it to me. Regardless of the sender’s mental stability, this hate mail keeps me warm at night. To ensure that I continue receiving it, I’m publishing a list of rules to follow, so that every piece of hate mail is as great as it can be.

Step One: Timing
If you think you hate me, the first thing you need to do is start writing while you’re still irrationally angry. If you wait a few hours and let yourself cool off, your letter won’t be nearly as incoherent, and the spelling will be at a seventh grade level instead of a first grade level. But if you strike while the iron is hot, who knows what could come out of your painfully uninteresting brain. One person took a photo of their dog pooping on a picture of my face. It was... interesting.

Step Two: Anger Quantity
Make sure your level of anger fits properly into the grand scheme of life. Please compare your amount of rage with the list below, to make sure you’re not underreacting:

Mildly annoying: Modern pop music
Bad: Men with goatees
Awful: Jennifer Love Hewitt TV shows
Horrendous: 9/11
Unspeakable: The Holocaust
Worse Than the Holocaust: Ramblings columns

Step Three: Anger Quality
Be selective about which of my columns you hate. Save your hate for one that truly deserves it. For instance, getting mad because I imply that the Minnesota Twins suck is somewhat pointless, since THEY ARE A TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE BASEBALL TEAM. On the other hand, complaining because I wrote a joke about God making us poop so much because “he likes to eat it” is probably somewhat justified.

I’m just kidding. None of your complaints are in any way justified. You’re just uptight. Go play in the back of a garbage truck.

Step Four: Delivery
It’s important that you deliver your hate mail in a way that will be noticed. Emails are useless. The editor of this rag gets hundreds of them a day, and there’s no hateful letter in the world that can compete with all the disgusting personals ads that come in daily from old people looking for someone to blow them.

Try a hand-written letter instead. Maybe decorate the letter with a drawing. Maybe stop taking your bipolar medication for a few days before creating the drawing. A phone message also works great, because it really allows your batshit craziness to take center stage. Anyone can fake a scary hate letter. It takes a special kind of demented person to leave a phone message describing how you’d like me to die.

Step Five: Giving Up
When your attempt to get me removed from this newspaper fails—and it will, because nobody fires people who work for free—you’ll have no choice but to give up. Make sure to sigh loudly, cross your arms, and say something boring and cliché like “Well! Today’s society has no respect!” Then write me one final piece of hate mail telling me what a sad person I am and how I’ll always be miserable. Try not to think about the fact that receiving hate mail is the very thing that makes me happy. Well, that and hardcore German pornography. Fortunately for me, both are plentiful in today’s world.