People Who Hate People (the charisma of)

Now, the subject of this blog is, I suppose, rather tenuous, but it has been lingering at the back of my mind like an unidentified smell for a couple of weeks now, and I therefore feel that I need to type it up, or else it will stay there, all ghost-like and disembodied, and drive me a little bit crazy.

This blog, as you may have gathered from the title, is about people who hate people. Or people who hate everything – known as nihilism. It may seem to be a topic that has been completely plucked out of the air, and one that there isn’t much to expand on, but not so. Or at least that’s what I hope.

I have two examples or case studies. The first is a Really Rather Famous pop star. The second is not really famous at all, except for winning some columnist award, I think it was best in England, but my memory fails me. At his young age, this is a fair achievement.

The Really Rather Famous pop star that I will first refer to is Morrissey – or Stephen Morrissey, on his passport, unless he was as serious as he seemed when he claimed, when asked by one lighthearted TV interviewer, that the name on his passport read simply ‘Mozza’. Having discovered, quite by happy accident, Mozza and his previous band The Smith’s music just weeks ago, I entered into something of an addiction, leading, of course, as things do in this day and age, to much googling and Youtubing of this character with the smug, sneery face and the gloomy lyrics, full of anger, storytelling and almost inverse-snobbish self-hate. What I found painted a picture, perhaps slightly sanded off and idealistic in my mind, of a creative genius loner with a dislike for people in general.

Now, what I mean to explore in this blog, if I succeed and my thoughts come out anywhere near coherently, is the respect that these people command.

Of course, it may just me only my respect that they command. Which would be rather interesting, and would join the stack in my little surreptitiously smug and pretty pathetic mental list of ‘Things that make you different’(it’s terrible, I know, but I think that deep down we all have one of these that we need to go to every now and again and check on to make us feel that bit more like we matter – and no, a list of rock bands and a dyed hair colour will not suffice). Despite this, something tells me that I will not be granted this little nugget for that hollow cavern.

I have felt, on quite a few occasions, whether I noticed it or it’s reasons at the time or not, respect for people (and respect really is the only word – it is not an affinity, and it is not strictly a liking) who come across as so confident in themselves that they can say that they are annoyed by people – or even, in the somewhat one-dimensional world of the internet, people who have expressed intelligently nihilistic opinions. All the punks of GSB – I think we all can picture a profile belonging to one, even if we can’t name one, full of all the caustic-named bands that they fly the flags for and images of anarchy and disrespect for authority (or simply the police) – that seemed punker-than-thou, and how I felt that, if they knew me during that period when GSB was something of a second mental home (albeit one where I failed to make any friends past a couple of tentative PMs or profile comments), they would surely look down on me for being something that was a bastardisation of what they, definitely, incontestably were. I was a pretty lousy punk. I have blogs from that time if you want to look at the artefacts. It was something of an obsession, and I thought too much.

What I am trying to get at is, I suppose, that it was a sort of fear that made me look up to them. Even if I never interacted with them (and you know, now I think that really they were probably all really nice, friendly people that could possibly have been of the philosophy of respecting everyone no matter what music they listened to or what they professed to be, or what their opinions were – although their general abhorrence for police doesn’t bode too well for that possibility), what they would think of me if a confrontation would ever arise summoned up respect for them. Oh, it wasn’t the only reason I respected them – their band listings were pretty impressive, and I was in awe of their punkicity – but…

I suppose case study two is needed.

The columnist's pale face, with it’s bowl haircut and sour expression, gazes wide-eyed out of the small photograph above his column in every Friday’s edition of the Evening Courier, my local paper, as if to say “Yes, I am young and world-weary, and too tired to care about your stupidity�. His column does not exactly spell this out, but he writes with a certain intelligent diluted bile that very much matches his lemon-sucking face. In the second occasion that I have hinted that I may create opinions of people mostly from imagination, like some kind of paranoia without the fear, I will take this opportunity to say that I am a little worried that any points that I make are irrelevant because I have not researched my subjects deeply enough and have sifted the things about them that add to my point from the things that do not. Morrissey, in an interview recorded a couple of years ago (the same one where he said that his name on his passport read ‘Mozza’), claimed to have only seven friends – and spouted this number quickly, as if it was a figure that he kept in check. I currently can’t think of anything about Morrissey that does not support my ramblings, but perhaps that is due to my mental idealistic filtering system, and if one surfaces I will get back to you.

Now, here we get to some sort of crux – or at least I attempt to create one. I know that both of these people, on meeting me, would probably disregard me as just another annoying person (and, of course, teenage girls probably have a capacity above many others to be immediately annoying). I dress in uniform teenage-wardrobe black, and/or things created specifically to make me stand out. This was probably why dressing like a punk appealed to me – I am an attention seeker of the most selfish and irritating order – teenage, fame-hungry, a little self-obsessed, who would feel immense satisfaction rather than discomfort or embarrassment if an entire city street turned to gawp at her (but only in certain moods – hence the typical teenage uniform of black, for my more retiring mindsets). I suppose they would not know this immediately by meeting me, but I can guess that from my wardrobe, depending on what I was wearing, they could gather quite a lot. To summarise this, in stark and self-pitying terms? I often feel like certain personality traits of mine that I am convinced are immediately evident make me pretty loathsome. Therefore, if these people who, through my eyes attempting to look into their heads, through scant evidence such as their writing and, with the former, interviews, already rate everyone with a fair amount of loathsomeness on meeting them, surely I would be pretty much hated?

Yes, I realise that everyone has things about them that they perhaps deserve to be at least disrespected for.

But yet, even though I am pretty sure of this fact, I still put these people on a pedestal in my mind. I have a love/hate fixation with Morrissey – I can’t decide whether I want to bring him down and wipe the smug look off his face, or be in his circle of selectly chosen humans worthy of his affection. I read Colin’s column whenever I can get hold of it, and find myself questioning my beliefs strongly if he does not share them. It would seem that, in his case at least, we take the people who have intelligently-worded and self-confident disgust at other people’s beliefs to be almost omnipotently correct – maybe because they seem to be so confident that their view is right. Have you ever felt a rush of respect for someone who ended a board post on something not extremely controversial with “It’s just my opinion, though�, or something similar about not wanting an argument or to offend anyone – as if to say “Please don’t leap on me, I’ll buckle.�

This has been a blog by Abigail that quite possibly did not make any coherent sense.

See, there I go with it, the self-deprecation – although I reckon that in the case of this blog it is justified.

As an ending note, that may or may not be quite important enough to begin with the phrase “See, the thing is,� I wonder if, in my perhaps misguided respect for these people, I am turning myself into one. Heaven knows that in my immense respect for Gerard Way I have begun a love affair with comic books and adopted much of his dress sense for my aforementioned days when I feel less like being noticed by people on the street (it’s a validation thing, I have concluded – they may well go home and remember the girl with hip-length hair and tartan bondage pants). I have the occasionally troublesome ability to be an emotional and mental chameleon – if I want to be a person, their views on life will pour into my head as easily as if I had formed them myself. Although, it must be said, that I have always found myself drained by time in company and energised by time alone (the official definition of an introvert, ladies and gentlemen), and that I often find myself wishing that I didn’t have all these troublesome friends to care about how I am or what I am doing – just the odd one, the one that I can have deep discussions about life and writing with, or the one that I can satisfy my teenage urges on until inevitably we fall out with each other, and I would be set. I find myself not exactly horrified, but disappointed, that some of my reasonably wide circle of friends simply annoy me, along with many of the people I encounter in life – unless of course I get the impression that I annoy them. Plus, I didn’t make friends very easily as a child – I would always be the one to be buffeted about by bossy, curly-haired girls with better toys than me, and therefore at points I would simply give up and be happy talking to imaginary imps. Therefore, I suppose it wouldn’t be too extravagant to say that, in general, people have always kind of pissed me off.

Thanks for slogging your way through all of that. Have a medal on me.