Cake or Death by Heather Mallick

Author:Heather Mallick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307369987
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2007-01-20T22:00:00+00:00

The People I Detest

I know what you’re thinking, she can’t get that in one essay but see, there’s the magic of categories

SUBSET: THE I-FAIL-TO-SEE PEOPLE

If there’s one phrase that sums it up, and there is, it is “I fail to see …” Since I live in Canada, this is usually followed by “the humour of …” and if it’s a newspaper I’ve written something for, “Heather Mallick’s recent remarks regarding….”

My recent remarks embrace a multiplicity of things but what they all have in common is that a certain type of reader took them deadly seriously and wrote to complain that I apparently did not.

Now it is a law that only mad people write to newspapers or TV stations to complain. I’m not quite comfortable with this law given that over the past few months I have occasionally felt a passion about something and considered writing a heated letter to a newspaper about it, something beyond “We moved the mailbox to the side of the house last week. Can your delivery people grasp that now?”

Having once edited the Letters page of that under-cooked tabloid The Toronto Sun, I know about mad people, and I don’t wish to be one. But the fact that I occasionally think of joining their ranks means a) they’re not all that mad and b) I am quicker to anger now. Furthermore, I am getting older like a pet, i.e., seven years have passed for every birthday cake I’ve had presented to me (here’s a housekeeping tip: icing sugar’s fine, but mousse cakes sieved with cocoa should never get a hearty blow, just a little something my carpeting and I have learned over the years) and I’m a coffin-dodger whose clothes are getting baggier and beiger by the minute. I both irritate the world and am irritated by it. I irritate the hell out of myself. (Here’s another housekeeping tip: there’s a place and an outfit suitable for spraying black Suede Renew on Christian Louboutin pumps, and indoors while wearing the pumps isn’t it, when will I learn that?)

Look how hard I try to make myself useful to you. I’m old in mind but I’m sweet and handy as a chunk of apple in a bricklike bag of brown sugar. (That tip actually works; don’t say I never taught you anything.) There, I’ve softened you up.

In truth, aside from politics and the coming destruction of the planet, I have no problem with the way the world is headed. It’s better and offers infinitely more opportunities for pleasure and adventure than when I was a child twitching the rabbit ears on the TV.

But I still want to write these letters. Then I read the letters that are written to me and the humourless editors of whatever I’m writing for, and I realize that there’s a phalanx of crazed, spittle-spraying, damaged and dangerously un-straitjacketed people out there with nothing better to do than complain about their own wildly incorrect interpretations of what I wrote, having convinced themselves that I will be deeply moved by their complaints.

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