Please direct your fat rage at somebody who's NOT a raging solipsist. Thanks.

Fat rage: (n) An overtly mean-spirited projection of anger originating from someone in their 20s who has a negative self-image. Fat rage is often directed at somebody they don't know, and occurs regardless if the negative self-image or anger stemming from it is warranted or not. This person is often female, as "man rage" is a different phenomenon with vastly different repercussions.

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Group psychology is wonderful. It really is. When you get 3 or 4 people together, any stupid idea seems brilliant, if only because you have the support and understanding of people who may or may not have the brain power of rotten vegetables. In groups, bad ideas turn good so fast that your head will spin.

To wit:

"Let's rape this stripper!"
"Let's hang this black guy!"
"Let's run Kerry for president!"

The oddest thing about group psychology and it's inclusive nature is that if you disagree, no matter how right you are, you will probably feel wrong on some level somewhere in your psyche. Somewhere something will snag at you, tug at you, and make you feel that much more subhuman in your dissenting viewpoint. Is it shame? Anger? Fear? Whatever, it's a pain in the ass. Most of the time I've managed to curtail it, usually by thinking "that's a moronic idea, and mass acceptance doesn't make it OK", but sometimes I feel bad even when I'm certain I shouldn't.

Now, as I'm not a square and tend to go out every now and then, I've been the recipient of fat rage before. Cock-blocking, derision, screaming, crying, bitching, moaning, and complaining are all a part of fat rage. Hell, even this year a "colleague" attempted to convince somebody that I was intent on murdering their family. That was probably the gulliest moment of fat rage I'd ever witnessed, in fact, if not the most pernicious. But fat rage coupled with group psychology is deleterious indeed.

Thursday of last week I went out to a night market in Hong Kong with a friend from northern Europe, AKA "the well-adjusted part." We had a good time, despite my being a bit out of it all due to travel sickness, and all was well. Cool.

So towards the end of our sojourn I decide to have a night-cap at the bar next to my atrocious hostel. I step in and look over my VCDs at the bar. I'm a movie lover, and frankly I cleaned up on flicks while in Hong Kong. Seeing my stash, the man next to me started asking where I picked them up. I informed him of the appropriate markets and the appropriate places wherein the "moves could be made," and he offered to buy me a beer as compensation.

(No brokeback)

After that, this gentleman and I got to talking about movies, television, work, and vacation. Not only did he offer me a discount cruise down the Yangze from his company, but we also agreed on the validity of television and diversified markets for niche programming, in addition to discovering a mutual admiration for The Family Guy and Adult Swim's programming savvy.

Cue the fat rage.

There were three people sitting next to us. One was an older guy and his wife, and another seemed a slightly younger, manic fat girl from one of those countries who's accent seems to mangle English beyond all comprehension. She kept trying to stick her head into our conversation, opening with a question for the ages:

"Does my bum look big?" she asked, sticking her (frankly formless, large) ass out at us.

"Well, I live with Japanese women, so anything that doesn't look like a plywood board is fine by me," I answered. And she laughed. OK, now we can all go back to our individual conversations, right?

From that point on, every few minutes the increasingly rowdy morons to the left of us kept trying to bring us into their conversation. Eventually the line was snagged and we started talking to them.

Say it with me: MISTAKE.

For some reason the girl kept talking to us. She eventually asked me to guess her age. I said "29." Her eyes went wide in shock. She started freaking out. I hit the bathroom.

Say it with me: MISTAKE.

When I came back, the girl was STILL complaining about her age. STILL. She tried to let it go, but kept referencing it over and over. Turns out she was 23. Before that point I had been nailing ages left and right when people asked, as it was something of a hobby of mine that I never took seriously, but I fired wide and to the right on this one.

The joys of entitlement mean you get to hear people discuss things they shouldn't discuss, talk about themselves in glowing terms, and otherwise have the chance to torture yourself by listening to the kind of self-involved garbage that would make you want to cut off your own dick and cram it in your ear. And when you "insult" somebody like this with a (non-desultory) query about their age, well, the entitlement on the poor cow will probably turn into fat rage.

And it did.

Oh boy, it did.

For about 40 minutes this girl just started going off on me. All the while I sat there, just drinking and smirking to myself as she got more and more derisive.

"Where are you from?"

"Texas."

"So you're inbred? And your grandmother's your sister?"

"How is that even possible?"

"All southerners are stupid."

"Yeah. Hey, how's YOUR space program?"

"You're single, aren't you?"

"Yeah."

"Probably not by choice."

"No, I just don't want to put up with anybody's ridiculous bullshit."

(drunken, unintelligible ramble)

"What was that? I couldn't hear you."

"Probably because of your hair there. You need to cut it. It looks like shit."

"Yeah, I know. Got it off a horses' ass."

"You need to get a tan."

*shrug*

"Did you just come here to be HATE-ED?"

"High price of being number one."

This just kept going ON AND ON, all of this was "aided" by the asides of her friends, who frankly lacked the mental power to remember to wipe after taking a bowel-deflating shit. None of it was well-thought-out, witty, or smartly delivered. It was like hearing a retarded kid call you "fat" for an hour, over and over again. Pointless and sad. The guy who was buying me beer just shrugged through it, though eventually they started being nice to him and trying to level insults at me.

At the same time though, I couldn't help but feel a little wrong. What did I do to engender this shit? Where was this coming from? Was it the fact that I wouldn't deign to give them the satisfaction of being angry because I was too tired? Was it because I wasn't angry, which probably pissed off "Tons-o-fun" even more? Was it just my aloof nature making me an easy target for people that didn't seem "there" mentally?

Why was I feeling bad for not being the kind of asshole that randomly accosts somebody in a bar for no reason on an off-night at 1 AM? Somewhere deep down, I did feel bad. I did. So I turned to her and asked her:

"Do you feel better now? Do you feel better now that you've got all the negative attention you could want just from sitting there and saying mean-spirited things about me?"

Her answer was pricless: "Do you?"

Huh?

Here's where I realized what the deal was. The gist of it is: morons are morons. Three of them being moronic doesn't make anything they say "right," just as the Backstreet Boys being popular doesn't automatically equate them with being "talented." They're morons. Fuck 'em. And they're squares. It's not like we were talking music or movies or modern art. It was just vague, general, "I hate Americans shit." Yeah, well, you're also fat. Who cares? Learn how to construct an argument. Learn how to navigate beyond your blind rage and self-hate. Wire your head together and direct your dissatisfaction proactively.

Or what about this... how's by you get back on your meds or just stop going out in public? Nobody can like you that much. And this coming from a guy who goes to bars "just to be HATE-ED."