Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton

My mood tends to rotate about, like a squab on a spit.

At times of manic bonhomie, I become paradoxically vicious and attacking.

At times of melancholic self-pity, too delicate to withstand a harshly elevated eyebrow, I become as obsequious and deferential as a socially anxious titmouse.

I coined a term today, or at least I think I coined it, for as Ecclesiastes tells us, there is nothing new under the sun.

At worst, or at best, I independently coined a term today: Hatertainment. The idea is that when you rally another's hatred for X or Y or Z, the rallied often repay you with something akin to love, or at least gratitude, and they will keep on coming back.

Hate, if evoked well, is as pleasure-giving as laughter or love. It's the ambergris of human emotions, the foulest smelling of them all, and hence the raw stuff of which the greatest perfumes are made by our most skilled hatertaining parfumieres.

On Facebook, I noted that Rush Limbaugh may be a modern pioneer, and current king, of the hatertainment industry, adding quickly that Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are natural born hatertainers, too.

Anyhow, no sooner had I coined (more on this in a moment--I shall check at the end of this vlog to see whether I did, in fact, coin hatertainment or merely rediscover what seems such an obvious neologism!) the term than I began to wonder if I, in my own way, from my own leftist perspective, might be an amateur hatertainer, too.

Surely, when the squab on the spit is turned in such and such a way, and my manic bonhomie unleashes the viciously good-natured furies from my nostrils and ear drums and urethra and other orifices, one of my favorite subjects is the heaping of execration upon the heads of those I deem deserving.

Ah, but as Eudora Welty (I think) so sagely observed:

Even the wicked get more than they deserve.

And the pointy headed frogs add, by way of mellifluous night ribbets: Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner!

and still I do it!

And no faster had I expressed such self doubt, such self hating, if you will, trying to do so in a self hatertaining way, but my noble twin brother rose from his own obsessions to call me not a hatertainer at all, but rather his own neologism:

a lovemedian.

Me? A Lovemedian? Why it would be such an honor to call myself such, but as we all know, I am the owner of a serious bubo, one whose nature the doctor--his eyebrow raised in harsh censure--on this very day, in confusion, perhaps, an diagnostic frustration, not wanting to rule anything out till the villain be named, this very same clinician used the word "venereal" as a possible descriptor of my Pinchas and his tendrils of nerve pain to the left buttock!

Not saying it is, not saying it isn't; can't rule anything out yet, with the exception of syphilis and rocky mountain spotted fever (tests negative!)

and so I told my brother, with my penchant for verbal attacks and blue subjects, that I am at best a hatertaining cumedian who must not be confused with his beatific kind: a true lovemedian.

I feel the spit begin to rotate once more.

A nicer Jim turns his face to the fire to roast like a snack-sized titmouse!

In illness a new me is born for now.

______________________________________

Alas, too late!

Google has found some rappers who beat me to it.