You Will Be Bald!

Normally I’m very careful about how I think about others. I don’t like how easy it can be to fall into the trap of silently judging the people around me; hatred is a weakness that I’m working very hard to dispel from every part of me. But it turns out, there is a very funny side effect of training all knee-jerk rude thoughts from your mind when someone offends you: your brain gets creative.

For example, the other day while I was walking down a wide sidewalk, a random man speed-walked right up behind me, passed me and then slowed to a near-crawl to walk less than a foot in front of me. I practically tripped on his shoelaces. But, since I’ve been so rigorous in eliminating thoughts as “what a jerk!” or “what’s wrong with you?”, a completely different phrase came white-hot and visceral from my mind: “YOU WILL BE BALD.”

This was no doubt due to the inklings of a bald spot glinting through his hair, but I found the sheer ferocity of cursing a vaguely rude man with baldness to be a wild experience.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this, either. (Well, the baldness is new. I meant more like the highly specific venomous thoughts part.) Once, after witnessing a grown man with the world’s biggest truck throw a tantrum in the REI parking lot, my brain supplied me with, “he would be very popular at the human zoo.”

Which…a lot to unpack there. I don’t really want to know what the human zoo is, much less why my brain came up with it, but there is less of a moral to this story and more of a promise: if you do your best to be a kind person, you’re gonna get some weird thoughts.