Once upon a time there was a mean mean very mean man named West Coast Bill. He was the meanest on the whole coast and he was even meaner than East Coast Bill who seemed nice by comparison.
West Coast Bill woke up and threw his beans out the window and howled, "I hate beans!" And the beans splattered onto a bean pile that was nearly as high as Bill's third story window because he did this every morning. Having not eaten anything for breakfast, his glucose levels were low as they always were and it made him particularly grumpy and irritable.
"Time to walk these streets!" he shouted at himself in the mirror as he ripped out a single toothbrush bristle and jammed it into the gum above his left incisor. "Ahh! I hate brushing my teeth because I always do it wrong!"
West Coast Bill had a voice like an old gravel road covered in rusty barbwire.
The first thing West Coast Bill encountered on his walk was a line of ants carrying away tiny bits of the foundation of the building West Coast Bill lived in so that it might one day collapse and force him to move.
"Tiny Ants! You are small and insignificant! You'll never put me out of a home! The day you almost cause my foundation to fail, I'll just mix some concrete and in a few hours I'll undo the generations of work you've put into this! HA HA HA!" He laughed a horrible laugh that made his own ears bleed.
"Mr. West Coast Bill you're awfully mean." A tiny ant protested. "And you may get away with being mean to us but I doubt you'll find it so easy to be mean to a much larger animal like a slug or a crocodile!"
West Coast Bill was almost too stunned to speak. No one had ever challenged him before. But then he realized that the ant's challenge only spurned him to be even meaner.
"So says you, puny ant! I'll find a slug and a crocodile and be mean to both of them at the same time!"
And West Coast Bill marched his way over to the boggy swamp and started kicking over rocks in his steel-toed boots that said MENACE on the sole and and on the shoelaces there were frowny faces. He kicked over thirty stones before even bothering to look for a slug and then twenty more until he found one.
"STEP ONE OF MY PLAN COMPLETE!" West Coast Bill was nothing if not systematic in his campaign of malice.
Because crocodiles were not in season, West Coast Bill had to settle for a caiman instead and he placed the slug atop the caiman's head and began to preen and pose in a most obnoxious fashion.
"HAHA! In a standing up contest it looks like the two of you don't have a LEG to stand on!" said West Coast Bill, pointing and laughing at the pair.
"I have legs! More legs than you!" shouted the caiman. But then the caiman heard the muffled sniffles and weak cries of the slug who did not have any legs and could not stand up tall no matter how hard they tried. And the caiman was moved by a deep sense of inherent animal empathy and could not muster the strength to maim and dismember West Coast Bill.
And West Coast Bill marched away with an angry song in his heart and did not learn any lessons that day which was the most terrifying part.
And so try to never let yourself become so awful that people won't even bother to correct you because then you will truly be trapped in a prison of your own design.
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