A curious collection of odd little prejudices

Lee A. Dean screendoor@sbcglobal.net

“Really? You don’t like that??”

This is a sentence often heard by the contrarians among of us, including me. If you put a Latin taxonomic name under my picture, such as the ones found underneath the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, the name is likely to say something like “Contrarius Perplexicus.”

But I’m not alone. We all have our odd little prejudices and dislikes that make our friends and family members scratch their heads and roll their eyes. Some of these little biases are unique in the real sense of the word, meaning “one of a kind.”

Have you ever known someone to have a strong dislike for popcorn? I didn’t think it was possible until a co-worker expressed that opinion one day at work. He couldn’t stand the texture of it while eating it and especially hated the aroma. “I can’t go to movies because of how awful that smells,” he explained. The rest of us looked at him as if he had revealed his impending decision to join the Communist Party.

Even stranger is my neighbor growing up, who hired me and a bunch of the other neighborhood kids to bale hay. His custom was to feed us after a hard day’s work. At one of these meals, a friend asked if we could have pizza for one of these hearty repasts in the future. The farmer looked at my friend as if he were a rat floating in a septic tank.

“Pizza? PIZZA!? That’s nothing but a piece of cardboard with a bunch of (crap) on top of it!” he thundered. My buddies and I were gobsmacked. Explorers have searched in vain for unicorns and Bigfoot but we had apparently found the only person in the world who hated pizza.

My father had a fairly large collection of odd little dislikes, but he could provide an explanation for them. He had an easy answer for the “should pineapple be on pizza?” debate. He didn’t think pineapple should be on anything. His reasoning had nothing to do with pineapple and everything to do with the state it is associated with.

In 1945, Dad’s troop ship laid over at Pearl Harbor for three days on the way to the Philippines. All the men on board had visions of some R and R in paradise. The powers-that-be had another plan. “They never let us off the ship,” Dad groused. I realized he didn’t have a problem with pineapple, but with Hawaii itself. This might explain why there were no Don Ho LPs in his album collection. Dad had equal disdain for oatmeal, which he called “sheep snot.” We would be eating a hearty cold weather breakfast of oatmeal with brown sugar and raising and he would be digging into half a pineapple. One day I asked him about the origins of his oatmeal-phobia.

“You’d hate it too if your mother served it to you every day for breakfast,” he said. “I remember one day I stayed overnight with Aunt Bea and Uncle Bill and thought at least I’d get a break from the oatmeal. Guess what I had for breakfast every day I was there?”

Sports is another area where people develop curious little hatreds. In 1987, Andre Dawson hit 49 homers and knocked in 137 runs for my beloved Chicago Cubs. No one else on that team was a threat to hit a loud out. And yet, my father-in-law would mutter, “That guy’s no good. They oughta trade him.”

I have odd little prejudices of my own that go decidedly against the grain. A conversation between me and Everybody Else (EE) about these topics would go something like this:

EE: Want a donut (or a bagel)?

ME: I do not eat disgusting lumps of dough.

EE: I have a spare ticket to “Mamma Mia!” It’s a musical based on the music of ABBA, and everybody loves ABBA!

ME: I’d rather watch and hear a dispute between two angry tomcats.

EE: Have you seen an episode of (name 98 percent of television series of the last 40 years)?

ME: No. I’m weird. I read books.

EE: Which fireworks display are you going to?

ME: None of them. Seen one, seen them all. I’ll go only if the fireworks spell the words, “OOPS…YOUR CAR IS ON FIRE.”

My bias against the kind of fireworks that annoy neighbors and scare animals is even deeper. I watched in fascination one July 4 as my neighbor stood in his back yard with a brick of firecrackers, lit each one individually, and tossed it a few feet to the side. The only thing lacking from the scene was a soundtrack of the stoned laughter that punctuated every episode of “Beavis and Butt-Head.” I still regret passing up the opportunity to warn him about activities that indicated he had the intelligence level of broccoli. We’ve covered quite a collection of dislikes. But have you ever heard someone say they hated chocolate? Neither have I. Some things are beyond comprehension or imagination.