Intravenous Haterade

Warning: Below you will find a whole lot of Jungian shadow shit.

It's the job of the seeker of Eternal Cosmic Oneness to ensure that he treats people with respect and kindness, but it's not his job to ensure that people's egos aren't offended by his accomplishments.

My wife and I have lived in our neighborhood for close to twelve years. It's a decent neighborhood—quiet even on a Saturday night, yet brimming with enough free fireworks from zealous neighbors on the Fourth of July and New Year's Day to make for a sense of community. People walk there dogs during summer sunsets. Occasional jumping houses pop up on weekends to battle it out with rubberized pest control tents to see which look more like circus tops.

Last Saturday, the parents of one of my daughter's fifth-grade school buddies invited us over for a kids’ pool party. Sweet.

Well, the dad, a dude I've had cordial conversations with but always picked up a grudging vibe from, fed us a deep-dish pie of titanic douchebaggery.

Sure, he initially sprinkled a dash of interest on us, asking me about an upcoming UFC bout. But then something strange happened. He suddenly went to great lengths to make my wife and me feel unwelcome, or at least unworthy of his attention, while our daughter frolicked in their pool. He retreated into his phone as he sat next to me, nervously hopping on Instagram and opening a chess app, while his wife did a fine job offering us nachos, pizza, and drinks.

My wife and I couldn't figure out what we had ever done to this guy to bring this upon ourselves. Misperceived slights? We couldn't think of any. Was he having marital issues? Possibly. But why would that be our fault? We traveled back in time and remembered him snubbing our greeting at a school play two months ago and at our respective kids’ graduation a month later. A possible reason was our befriending of a neighbor whom he may have had marginal beef with. Another possible reason, and one I'm continually leaning toward, is that we had on our hands a classic dyed-in-the-wool Hater.

Over a year ago, I offered to help him swap out his pool motor to help save him money. With some trouble and a lot of elbow grease, I had swapped out my own. I was just a blue-collar guy trying to save as much cash as possible in this hyperinflationary apocalypse. He may have seen my offer to help him as an assault on his manhood. Maybe he perceived me as a know-it-all. Word had been seeping out that he was not only not handy around the house, but was a total klutz. Worse—and this is huge—he had previously been fired from a job where he and I had run into each other on occasion.

He knew that I knew that he had been fired. Us knowing that he didn't take me up on my offer to save him money had resulted in him dumping over two grand into a new pool pump by an incompetent pool guy who didn't install it properly, resulting in more financial loss, may have sent his blood to boiling point whenever he thought of those assholes five houses down, the one with the guy who thinks he's all that because he jogs around the neighborhood three times a week, trains jiu-jitsu in his garage, cuts his own grass like a schmuck, tries to fix shit, and—bastard—keeps his job like an asshole.

I do have to admit I have an incurable case of resting-bitch face (RBF). Having been apprised of this years ago, I've since made extensive efforts to combat it with an ear-to-ear rictus that emits something between blissed-out hippie and goddamn creepy. I admit, too, that I may unintentionally give off a vibe or two of superiority when certain endeavors I engage in as practices of self-enrichment come to the surface, since I don't outwardly come out and boast about them, but their emergence may in fact paint me as a world-class prick.

Forever fed up myself by one-uppers, blowhards, know-it-alls, pedants, and hearts-on-sleevers, I do my damn best to damp down whatever solar flares of superiority that shoot off in the form of novel-writing, running, grappling, and concerted efforts to bring down Aztiluth to my material plane.

Were I a better person than I am, I would have let the Hater's ire slide like water off a duck's ass. But since I can't fly like a duck, swim way worse than one, but do waddle around in life similarly, I use this as primal scream therapy. Once published, I will relegate this article and the memories of the iniquities that prompted its writing to the dustbin of oblivion, and move on with my life.

For now, shadow work. Right? Right.

I can't let it go because it's a genuine mind-boggler, a mystery, a quasi-conundrum. Until it isn't. And once it isn't, that's when I will let it go like a helium balloon wafting into the cloudless blue sky.

(Above: Haterade comes in three popular blends. Blue Raspberry Envy, Orange Creme Jealousy, and Watermelon Disdain.)

I hate the idea of writing about a Hater because it assumes I'm someone worthy of such targeted hate. It's a delicate undertaking to presuppose a level of self-awareness that may already automatically paint me as an asshole.

With seven billion people on earth, there are seven billion facets from which to throw off negative light to the right—or wrong—eyes. You can't please everyone. Damn it, you can't be immune to everyone's disdain. And that's the part that stings.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote:

You go above and beyond them. And the higher you climb the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. And he who flies is hated most of all

The vibe the Hater gives off is obvious. You need not even be great, or even middling; just your effort alone holds up a mirror to the Hater's indolence. And that's the crime you commit without often even knowing it. The irony is that you have enough self-esteem issues to keep on pushing; and the more you push, the more you're hated, which nourishes the low self-esteem. Mayhaps that is the Hater's tool—to undermine, to discredit, to throw a wrench of jealousy into your spinning spokes.

But as I started out saying—it is not our job to keep our efforts from bruising the egos of those with so scarce a self-esteem armor as to be offended by us lacing up our running shoes. I suggest these people slap on, minimally, a thin chain-mail of trying.

I surmise that the Hater simply got tired of pretending to like me. Better to evince superiority by way of arrogance not backed up by any discernible qualities than engage in any of that outmoded stuff called effort. Fair enough. But why invite us over? Well, maybe he didn't invite us over. It was his wife, after all, who filled out the pool party reminder cards.

My wife, bless her heart, saw my discomfort and suggested I see if the Peruvian ladies who cut my hair were available for a chop job. With our daughter deep in bliss mode in their pool, we couldn't make a group exodus of indignation. I jumped at the chance and made myself scarce. I didn't bother to say my proper farewell. And get this:

When I left the backyard, their Yorkie got out. I grabbed the dog and brought it back to deposit behind the side gate. I caught the Hater complaining to his wife that I hadn’t bothered to thank them for the hospitality. This led me to believe that this wasn't the first time my name was hot on his lips like venom. No, I didn't want to thank them for what would never pass for anything close to hospitality. Such comportment doesn't warrant a proper sayonara when vacating your premises. When the Hater burns the boats of courtesy, he waives the right to cry when I don't wave goodbye from my dinghy lacing through his flames.

Having weaned myself off Haterade, having drunk it myself at one point in time, I can safely say that I function better with electrolytes coursing through my veins rather than that noxious cocktail of two parts envy-three parts loathing. My joints feel better, I recover quicker, and the efforts and accomplishments of others spur me on to my own forward marches. Homeboy just signed a book deal? Where's my rucksack? Homegirl upgraded her home to a better neighborhood? Pass me the peptides.

The only thing worse than a faux-Mozart is a vrai-Salieri. Many of us can pick up on the hater vibes because we used to be haters ourselves. Who hasn't envied the better-looking, more articulate counterpart who got the girl or got the job? I have. I know when I'm being doused with the Haterade because I used to sip it from a flask throughout high school and most of my twenties. And then you figure life out and you have enough marginal success to go, yeah that's a good-looking dude over there, and she's a way better writer than I. Which becomes okay.

Most though not all human interactions have subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—dynamics of power and positioning. Just because this shouldn't be true doesn't mean it isn't. No matter how hard we may try to temper that fact. Our Hater's cold-shouldering was a power move—a sad one, butone regardless.

Undergoing this treatment is akin to the freeway situation where you let two people into your lane, but when you yourself go to change, the car to your left just isn't having it. Karma, we learn, is not only not instantaneous, but it's often not even congruous. Doing the right thing doesn't always get the right results. The problem with doing the wrong thing is, it doesn't either. You could adopt the Golden Shower Rule, which states, “Do unto others—then split.” But the stakes run out soon. You end up with an ankle monitor or bad credit.

But since we seekers are told by the ones who went before us that nothing is inimical to man, we shake it off and allow it to be a cautionary tale: how not to act. Once we are convinced that we cannot please everyone, we can now freely go about our business with the surety of all pressure being off; we no longer need keep running our people-pleasing machines on premium fuel.

One of the few great things about haters is that the dearth of initiative that has landed them where they are is the very same thing that keeps them back. It tempers any smear campaigns launched to sully your name or reputation. Most haters wouldn't be caught dead even stretching. This isn't always the case, but the numbers bear out the likelihood that their workloads aren't commensurate with their desires. Sure, there are Lex Luthers with secret missile silos and offshore bank accounts, but most people familiar with grindstones know that they're better served in fulfilling one's own dreams than hijacking the dreams of others.

It sucks to suck. And such sucking is its own punishment. An eight-ounce serving of Haterade has no electrolytes, but it does contain enough caffeine to dupe you into thinking that you're replenishing yourself while you send your endocrine system, along with your soul, into survival mode. Good luck with that.

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK.

My latest novel Crushed Trachea Blues is available in ebook and paperback. It's a fun murder mystery featuring suicide by Jiu-Jitsu, AI Charles Manson, and tacos.