To love people is to hate them. It would seem impossible to feel strongly without those feelings running from the positive to the negative. If I didn’t much care one way or the other, I could probably regard people with a healthy indifference. But, by opening my heart to the possibility of loving, the possibility of hating cannot help but seep in. There is no sweet without sour, day without night, love without hate.
I think hate is a natural part of the human condition. I try not to let hate or any negative emotion overpopulate scarce territory in my head, but I am only human.
I used to work with this guy at an ad agency. I was the better writer but he’d been there longer. I guess he must have felt threatened. Rather than trying to do a better job, he decided to tell people that I’d made a pass at him. I hadn’t. He, on the other hand, had slept with a sizable number of the women on the staff — married and single, college girls and grown women. He broke up at least one marriage. He married one of the women and continued to cheat on her afterward with other women from the office where they both worked and elsewhere. But since I was gay, I was run out of town.
I hated him.
Eric Shaw Quinn 