Words by

Catharine Fulton

Dear douchebags with no regard for the physical wellbeing of those around them:
You may not remember me, but we’ve met before. You slammed into me at full force while you were determined to get from point A to point B no matter the obstacles in your way at [insert any Reykjavík establishment or street name here] on [any date]. I wish I could say it’s nice to be in contact with you again, but our primary meetings have not left positive impressions on me and have caused many aches and pains and, on occasion, mild bruising.
I write you today, not simply to express the physical hurt I have experienced on account of your flap-happy elbows and linebacker-esque shoulder actions—which, all in all, are inexplicable and entirely uncalled for—but also to express concern for you and your obvious lack of awareness of your immediate surroundings or physical motions. Why else would a highly functioning human being willingly push and collide with their peers in public places and at otherwise upbeat social settings?
I fear you may be living with a slightly malfunctioning hippocampus or cerebellum, responsible for your spatial navigation and sensory perception, coordination and motor control, respectively. Alternately, I saw an episode of House once in which a young girl had a case of CIPA so she could throw herself off the balcony in the fictional hospital’s atrium and not feel a thing. It turned out she also had some massive worm living in her intestine that House removed surgically without administering an anaesthetic, ya know, because she can’t feel anything. Maybe you have that? Not the massive intestinal worm. Maybe your inability to feel is the reason you forcefully knock into people in crowds and on the street. Do you just not feel it? If so, you should definitely get that checked out when you go look into that brain thing.
I’m worried about you, man. If you continue to violently push into people you’re not going to make any new friends and you may even be relegated to a sad existence of solitude, settling for body-checking door frames from time to time just for the sake of maintaining what you construe to be normalcy. But it’s not normal. And it’s not very nice.
Please stop.
Your friend,
Everybody who’s sick of being pushed and knocked by asshats like yourself.