- Days that are sunny but cold. Because no one likes being lied to.
- Curtis Mayfield. Because if one more person tells me they adore Curtis Mayfield, I swear to God.
- Other people named George in the same room as me. Because the neck seems like something that has only a finite number of turns built into it, so why squander them.
- When cooks on cooking shows add an ingredient, but almost go out of their way not to spread it around as they add it. Because excuse me but it’s like they can’t be bothered.
- Everything about the phrase “Ashton Kutcher’s record-setting Twitter following.” Because I have a soul.
- People who drink martinis with onions. Because I hate them even more than martinis with onions, which I hate.
- Remakes of old songs. Because they are (1) arrogant, for requiring a presumption on the part of the remaker that it’s his or her place to make one, (2) superfluous, for rarely representing an improvement or even a memorable undertaking, and (3) disappointing, for invariably featuring a melodic line dictated not by what sounds best but by what sounds most pointedly different from the original, such that the result is not unlike those summers in Florida when your nine-year-old cousin would contradict you no matter what you said just for the attention even when you said exactly what he said like ten minutes ago.
- Skeeball inflation. Because between those long strips of tickets lolling promiscuously out of every machine and those price tags lurid with Weimar Germany commas lies a chasm waiting to dash the expectations of your nephews and mine to bleeding bits.
- Steak tartar. Because, though it may be of some consolation to people with suppurating boils to know that something still more revolting exists, there are fewer people with suppurating boils in the world than there are people stuck at the same table with people who, and you wouldn’t know it to look at them, are fools for steak tartar.
- People who say “whilst” instead of “while.” Because if you didn’t attend Balliol then come on.
- Remakes of Curtis Mayfield songs. Because, like the famous gulags of Siberia, these are a hell within a hell.
George Choundas has fiction and nonfiction in over forty-five publications. His work has been selected for The Best Small Fictions 2015, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and awarded the New Millennium Award for Fiction. He is a former FBI agent and a proud Gruban-American.
Latest posts by George Choundas (see all)
- Things I Hate - April 5, 2016
