And don’t get me started on other people’s smells. Their garbage left out to cook in the sun. Their pea soup redolent of unwashed armpit. Their garlic and seafood recipes — just to clarify, are you literally cooking excrement? And their steaks. Their barbecues. Their cigars. That inimitable mixture of mothballs and mould wafting from old people’s apartments. The stink of fried foods from restaurants. The signature soggy-bread stench of that well-known chain whose sub sandwiches are chosen on the criterion of length. Oh, I’m not done. I also hate all perfumes: those so liberally doused you can smell them fifty feet away; those that grow vinegary at the end of the day; those that have, like the people wearing them, long ago passed their best-before dates; those that would attract blood-sucking insects by the swarm in the wild but, here in civilization, merely give co-workers headaches. Verily, the catalogue of my irritants knows no end. A list with several thousand entries would include the white expectorations of hockey players next to the so-called “antibacterial” household cleaning products sprayed indiscriminately on every surface, the nail in the coffin of our already enfeebled immune systems. Let’s not forget the stares of children for whom I imagine silent ends in the depths of their above-ground swimming pools. Small talk. The many daily outrages I’m subjected to, cats and their diseases, men and their obsession with pissing in alleys. Hell is other people, and all it takes is a few seconds for me to list off exactly what I hate about humanity to dispel any sense of guilt. All these people writhing like maggots: I hate them all, with a passion.

On bad days I feel like those dogs locked on roofs in the sun, despondently running around in circles, whose owners think they’re treating them well while the creatures are undergoing such profound alienation that they’ve ceased to notice their own misery. Animals need to go down onto the sidewalk, explore a little, smell things, look around. Get out of the city, out of their homes, out of the known world. They need to be able to walk four or five hours without a thought to where they’re going, slowly and without getting tired, without anyone waiting for them, without anyone chasing after them. They have to run down roads where the asphalt is chewed up and gravel turns to dirt, all the way to the end, where the trail simply ends without warning. And then keep going.