Why do people do that smiling mean thing? Where they are teasing too close to the bone, meanly, with a smile. If you object, then you are labeled as someone who can’t take a joke or who has no sense of humor. How do people handle them? I put them on avoid and do not want to be around them. But really, what motivates them? Power? Humiliate others to feel better about themselves? What a very sad and pathetic way to go through one’s life.

This is related to me thinking about what people think about. I think about what motivates people a lot and why they do what they do. This, apparently, is NOT what most people think about. My curiosity about people dates back to being a very small child and being passed from household to household because my mother had tuberculosis. I decided that adults did not understand children and that they loved me but didn’t understand that babies should be kept and loved. My sister was born when I was three and I told people that she was MY baby. I was determined to take care of her. Alcohol continued to make the adults in my household unpredictable and sometimes dangerous, at least emotionally.

My mother could charm a room and all visitors, but sometimes she would talk about them after they left. My family tended to ignore me if I was reading, because I really did not listen if I was deep in a book. Books were an escape and a safe place. People would have to call me three times to get me out of one. But sometimes my brain would click me out and I would listen to the conversation. My mother would talk about people’s motivations and was often quite negative and not nice. Interesting, but not nice.

When I realized that most people don’t think about others’ motivations most of the time, I felt rather freed and enlightened. I promptly ran into not one, but two mean people, at different sites. I do not understand meanness. I worry that it will be in the White House soon, as well. And what, that meanness wants to annex part or all of two other countries? Is this fascist envy? That’s what I think. So there.

The photograph is Sol Duc in 2022.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: mean.