I went outside this morning to find someone had jammed rude, mean little letters on all our cars. A simple request -- "don't leave your trash bins on the sidewalk" -- was expanded by several paragraphs into a severely insulting, threatening, harassing diatribe about how everyone who lives in our house is scum and horrible. Cute.

66 was full of the usual assholes who think turn signals are option, proper following distances are for losers, and safe driving is insanity.

One stop in on the Metro ride, an old guy in his boxers parked it directly in front of me, stinking furiously from lord only knows how much sweat; I can only assume he was jogging. As his odor assailed everyone within ten feet, he turned to the girl next to him and demanded she turned her (perfectly muted) iPod down.

The next stop after, I got the guy who after jabbing me with his elbow repeatedly, demanded in the most condescending matter possible that I wedge my arms awkwardly in front of him so he could spread out with his newspaper, because of course I was less important than him and so hardly deserved my portion of the seat.

Walking to work, I got hung up on an intersection where four drivers, cheerfully ignorant of lights, sat honking at each other and anyone who tried to cross -- with the bright walk signal.

Getting into work, I discovered that the people responsible for shipping us documents to send has swamped the system (which they'd already flooded with documents at 4 pm on Friday, same as every week) to the point that it was about three times as full as I've seen it before. Of course, none of my coworkers seemed particularly enthused about working on them, leaving me to do the vast majority of them.

And yet if I picked up a shotgun and wiped all this excrement off the face of our planet, *I* would be the bad guy.

How did we come to this? How have we let our civilization ignore, nay, REWARD jerks, assholes, willful idiots, the disgusting, the disrespectful, the intolerable, the fools? Why do people who'd never done a thing to earn the title of human constantly run roughshod over those who've fought hard to be decent?

I hate this species. I hate it so much, so much more every day I'm forced to see just how scum-ridden and irredeemable it is. Thank God for the exceptions out there who rise above the filth.