Backslidden Rants

Don't be alarmed, gentle reader, by the District Superintendent's backslidden departure from all things sanctified. I have taken a leave of absence from being twice graced and on the road to Christian perfection simply to serve as a warning of what can happen when you let your holiness drop like a hooker's thong. Consider this an admonitory missive, issuing guidance for what I hope never happens to you.

That being said, aren't there certain types of people who consistently make you want to stack them in your crawlspace like cordwood, perhaps covering them with baking soda and lime to suppress the stank of their decomposition? I'm not talking about your alcoholic dad or your handsy uncle or the woman who ran over your kitty in a drunken stupor. Crawlspaces, by their design are very small and therefore require a certain economy of effort when selecting which of the legions of people who piss you off deserve a berth in the basement.

In order to organize my own space planning, I have developed a top ten list of the people who immediately create a visceral surge of rancor. I will submit one each day until we have a definitive list, a catalog of archetypes that gives fair warning to the sadly unsuspecting. While these are in no particular order, I would suggest that their rank in my consciousness intimates some sort of ordinal standing. In the event that I rediscover my sanctification, I will of course relent on the ninth verse of some cloying invitational hymn and confess my transgressions to a professional altar worker with a smudgy King James.

Until then, here we go...

1) You met her in my previous post. She's a white, 50ish woman. Critical and carping, she is joyless, sexless, tedious, and petty. She pretty much hates everyone but her own offspring, although there are many days that she would retroactively abort them given the chance. She wears her bitterness like a drag queen's feather boa.

She stopped loving her long-suffering husband about 15 minutes after she reluctantly consummated their union. Never fulfilled by anything, her only gratification comes from sneering at others and pretending she is more affluent than she is. She hates that she has to work, and never misses a chance to puke her passive aggressive antipathy on the women in her nondescript office, particularly if they are even slightly younger, leaner, or prettier.

Her weapons of choice are terse, demoralizing cracks that cut to the embarrassed core of their intended targets. Usually, they have to do with the most miniscule foibles - a tragic haircut, a pair of slacks that are slightly too tight, or one too many personal phone calls into your cubicle. She hates men as well, but recognizes that she is less likely to get under the skin of most oblivious males, and much more likely to dupe them with her veneer of a pained smile. She also knows that should she challenge them, she may get a full frontal in return.

The brilliance of this bitch is that she does this all while vocally metering faint praise and pretending that she is civic-minded and upbeat. If I shot one of them, on the hour - every hour - until the end of time, there would still be more.

Here is a sample of these bitches. Note that this image is purely representational, and in no way suggests that these women, unsuspectingly culled from Google images, are in fact women of this description. Draw your own conclusions.

My assumption is that (L-R) woman number 1 and woman number 3 fit this description. Woman number 2 has genuine warmth and woman number 4 has a mood disorder and low self-esteem.