Nice people, while they may well actually suck, are a lot better, as a group, than mean people, a sour-smelling pack of unhappy assholes.  Most of us are not strictly nice or mean.   We swing both ways, according to circumstance.   One good “fuck you” deserves another much of the time and the reciprocating can be done in every flavor from affectionate to sadist.

I was grown in a hothouse of rage.  It took me decades to start to understand the obvious:  that it’s better not to engage with insane anger.  There are things you can do to become less angry yourself, to resist the impulse to engage with a person who is mad.  But only if the pain of that pushes you to change the pattern.    

One of the most important things is recognizing what is intolerable to you.  This will help you stay out of situations where anger starts to look like the best option.   Easier said than done, of course, in this often infuriating world, where the aggressive and unscrupulous always seem to have a much bigger say than the meek and kindly, but it is something you can work on.  That’s all I’m saying.

My sister once gave me a great compliment, by expressing confusion that I wasn’t like either of our angry parents (although, of course, she noted that I am angry too, just not obviously like either of them).  

“If the only option was being like one of them, I’d have bashed my own head in years ago,” I told her.  It never occurred to her that there could be a choice beyond one from Column A or one from Column B.   Given two bad options, she chose the seemingly strong one to model herself on and has done pretty well struggling against the mean side of what she learned from the Master.  

It’s hard work, Brownie, to overcome deeply ingrained reflexes, but something that can be worked on. That’s all I’m saying.

So on the old “what is hateful to you do not unto others” tip we have the woman who told me the other day that it bugs her that the excellent writer she sends her work to usually writes nothing more than “nice!” in reply.  “Sometimes not even the exclamation point…” she exclaimed.  

“Whell, shoot,” I said, spitting a stream of terbaccer juice past my horse’s ass, “ain’t nothing wrong with ‘nice’, especially from an excellent writer.”  I spat again, much more taciturn than I am in real life.

In real life I explained, in tedious detail and dispassionately, that I’d learned, after decades of aggravation, that most people you send creative things to are at a complete loss for how to respond.  They think, incorrectly, that writing something like “nice!” is insufficient, perhaps even insulting.  They figure they need to write more than that, the ones who even click on the link to see the unsolicited creative work.

And even if they opened the work in question and thought it was cool, not having the thirty second attention span it would actually take to make a comment more detailed than “nice”, they forget about it.  Even if they were in that 5% that actually clicked the link and thought the thing was genuinely nice.

If someone has paid for the creative work, people are much more likely to understand why you did it and take thirty seconds to reply.  “You’re so talented, glad somebody paid you for it.  Good work, brilliant!” they will write of such things.  But anything else?  Good luck, kid.  

Most people have no idea why anyone would spend time doing something creative unless someone was paying them for it.  Just the Free World we live in, brothers and sisters.

“Nice is nice,” I told her.  “Nice is excellent.  Nice is all you need.” I neglected to tell her the excellent point some wise man made on a TED stage about the difference between a teacher who encourages and a teacher who discourages her students being one tiny, elemental thing.  

Overworked teacher looks over the student’s work, searches it for completeness, hands the kid back the work without a comment.  This is the way of the world and it is basically discouraging — all you get is a grade.  

The other overworked teacher reads the work, searches it for completeness, hands it back with a small smile and says ‘nice’.  Investment of time and effort– almost none.

But the second student’s work is no longer Sisyphic, as the man on the stage who described this said.  That five seconds of connection and appreciation is all it takes to make the other person feel they are not talking to a wall, a fucking firing squad wall that stinks of the shit and piss (while mention the bile, blood and puke?) of everyone the commandant’s ever lined up there, the line of Nazi sharpshooters spattering their fucking guts on it.  Can you dig that?

“Nice!”