I don’t usually indulge in petty hatreds. Oh, there are lots of things I dislike–Republicans, BMW drivers, JJ Abrams movies–but I usually reserve my hates for those who’ve unleashed great evil on the world: aged Nazis, General Efrain Rios Montt, aging members of the Khmer Rouge, the Kim Dynasty of North Korea, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, ISIS, Boko Haram. These are evil mothers we can still do something about. (Well, some of them anyway. What anyone can or should do about the Kim dynasty is beyond me.) Petty hatred is almost always unnecessary. To paraphrase Henry Rollins, indulging in petty hatred is like having someone offer you a pile of shit, accepting the offer, then blaming the person for the mountain of scat in your house. Just saying “Fuck you, man”, walking away, and forgetting cures a lot of life’s ills.

But there are two petty hatreds I entertain. One is for movie director Michael Bay, and the other is for the New England Patriots.

My reasons for detesting those red, white, and blue escapees from Satan’s rectum are well known. (They begin with something that rhymes with “Fuck Drool”.) But I feel it necessary now to take the measure of the dimensions of my hatred, its length, width, height, and duration.

I don’t simply bristle at every Patriots success and take unreasonable joy at their every failure. I don’t merely grin whenever a defensive lineman blasts Tom Brady in the back, forcing the ball from his hands and pasting an expression of ultimate agony on his face. I don’t confine myself to laughing when Bill Belichick has to cross the field to grudgingly shake the hand of the coach who vanquished him in the playoffs, as he has every year for the last ten years. I don’t just take joy in the fantasy of tasting a cocktail made of the finest rye whiskey, Peychaud’s bitters, absinthe, and a twist of lemon, served in a glass chilled with ice cubes made of Tom Brady’s tears. I, in a move rare for an atheist, get Biblical. I root for Psalm 109 to be the eternal fate of all associated with the Patriots. I cheer on the pain, misery, and degradation I hope will lay them waste, and the suffering I pray will dog their every step through the blackened, blighted, empty places their richly deserved destiny forces them to walk–weeping, naked, and alone.

This hatred sees for miles. It burns with the intensity of a hundred trillion suns. It lies at such depths that if the word hate were encoded in every atom in every molecule in every cell in my body, it would still underestimate by a factor of 12 how steeped my being is in hatred for Rob Gronkowski alone. It shall linger long after old age has desolated me. It is a curse that will last as long as language and thought, dimming only slightly with the passing epochs.

Their only consolation shall be that I hate them slightly less than I hate Michael Bay. Because with Bay, it’s not like the Coen Brothers are going to take over one of his movies at the half and defeat it magically in the final seconds. Would that they could. Would that they could.

All this is my way of saying–even though I’ve long been indifferent to you and am likely to remain so after the Super Bowl–Go Seahawks!