Icebergs on the Seas of Possibility

In 1975, Patti Smith spoke of  the“seas of possibilities,” imploring us to“seize the possibility”.  

In 1976 Richard Hell articulated his concept that he called The Blank Generation.

He envisioned this term, not as a nihilistic summation, but instead as a realization of potential, Do It Yourself, as opposed to waiting for someone else to do it.  

Following the lead of these two visionaries, Dense Milt was reinvented as a performer.  Hell and Smith (what a great name for a law firm) may have provided the concept that became my creative license, but it was my own license that allowed me to drive on the new roads built by this community of outsiders.  

In a similar vein,  a concept in business emerged around 1990 called “seizing the white space.”

A company may look to exploit their “white space”, which is defined as when we move far beyond core competencies into uncharted territory -- into the white space.

Some companies miss out on capitalizing on opportunities when the opportunities did not fit within their preconceptions of what they do well.   One needs to look no further than the contrasting stories of Apple and Kodak to see how we must escape our self-imposed constrictions.

We either think outside the box or climb within the box and start piling on the dirt.

To realize new value(s), we must first recognize what it is that we are doing well.  

But what to do when our recognition is defined by what we see in the mirror, and not what we or others can see within.

Perhaps we should explore the iceberg metaphor on this sea of possibilities.

The iceberg metaphor is defined by the empirical fact that what rises above the surface of the water is only a fraction of the iceberg that is submerged below the water’s surface.

We see visually what is above, while the iceberg below remains hidden, unknowable and therefore frightening. 

What is it that fuels our perception of the unknown as something to fear?

What if we were to view the unknown as a blank page, a palette waiting for our brushstrokes, a song waiting to be sung? 

What if we could see the unknown as something discoverable, and not threatening?

Can we derive understanding from the fact that the iceberg above the surface and the iceberg below the surface are both the same iceberg?

What we see on the surface is ice, but what we can’t see below the surface is also ice. 

So what separates the ice?

Surface tension.

The surface of the water.  Yet ice is also water, just in a frozen state. 

If the temperature above the water or below the water rises, more of the iceberg becomes water. 

So another factor in transformation is heat, the atmosphere and the relative temperature of the water.

Both the temperature of the air and the water can affect how fast or how much of the ice  melts. 

The lesson of the Titanic was the danger of ignoring what was below the surface, while the lesson of climate change will be the danger of ignoring what we are doing to the surface. Of how we ignore just how interconnected everything is.

If we apply the iceberg metaphor back to human potential, we see that what lies below the surface is our potential.

This potential is hidden, unknown and frozen in time.  This potential houses all of our fears, unknown dangers, and obstacles.

But it also contains seas of possibilities, discovery, magic, and new ways of thinking and being.

So release the potential.
Turn up the heat, raise the temperature.

Both inside you

and around you. 

dm 2013 

“Up there -- there is a sea
the sea's the possibility
There is no land but the land

Up there is just a sea of possibilities
There is no sea but the sea

Up there is a wall of possibilities)
There is no keeper but the key

(up there there are several walls of possibilities)
Except for one who seizes possibilities, one who seizes possibilities.

(up there)
I seize the first possibility, is the sea around me”

Horses  Patti Smith 1975

Nancy With The Smiling Face

www.nancysinatra.com

Nancy Sinatra has a new album!  It is a new musical work called SHIFTING GEARS,  a collection of previously unreleased songs.
There is a special cheese to this collection.  She starts off with As Time Goes By, there are two Neil Diamond songs; she kills us softly with his song, hangs out in MacArthur Park, and a song for Christmas.
Like Claudine Longet, she is a bigger star than her voice might suggest, but there is a character to that same voice.  There is a believability, a casual cool, a 60's-70's languor that slides down like fine Spanish Brandy.  It is instantly warming, a slight fire around the edge of the tongue,  a soft gooey centre.
You see her old man in her eyes, the cheekbones.  There is a confidence to the voice, "We know she believes and how".

She is a Sinatra. I do think she will find the recipe, despite her protestations.  I would melt through the dark if she left my cake out in the rain.
Oh NO!!!

Piss and Vinegar

Piss and Vinegar Still from film

Ruth Leitman's humble documentary Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar:
The First Ladies of Wrestling 

Piss and Vinegar

I come home drunk with nothing but a bone

the voices in my head  screaming in the telephone

the whole world's gone crazy and thats no lie

my little piece of heaven just got eaten with the pie

I got a pie chart here that explains it all

we get the shaft- they own the ball

sometimes we want a little coffee in our cream

then we wake up screaming "it's a bad bad dream."

If you wonder how I do it, well  I just say screw it

Got the lightbulb in my hand but I don't have clue if it

screws to the left or it skews to the right

Piss and vinegar's on the menu tonight. 

Don't wait for heaven- Jesus isn't going to come

He's still hanging on a cross But I got a bible you can bum

words come cheap like they teach you in class

Hey that's my masterpiece that you're wiping on your ass

this song came to me in the morning from a dream

i can't decypher if it's genius or a schizophrenic scream

A cry for help or help is on the way

there's a fire and it's  burning in my mind if i may

Ask me why you listen to these crazies on the loose

Looks like Darwin's monkey mind is driving this caboose

It's all ass backward and thats being polite

you see this all came to me at the ass end of night

now the times running out the door to get to work

Was Jesus still breathing or was it death's last jerk?

if you got any questions still then the answer is this

Piss and vinegar with just a little more piss.

dense milt 2013. ©

Cougarbait in Love Land

Courtney Love blonde as a verb  
gave the love last night at the Commodore
She looked as good as money can buy
Made whole by the sheer will of her  Supreme sweet bitchiness  
Her Love Crowd a 30+ something prime fertile expression of their Love. 
Here to court the Queen on the day of the Royal Birth. 
Feedback abounds. Reverb primal fury.
First band STARRED, wannabee reverbal transgender on hormone shots 
drawls something about suicide without the honesty of a sharp object.  
Getting mighty crowded. Love crowd in a Fever pitch for the bitch of alt rock/ post punk Any movement of the lights, sound, and they are ready to erupt with Love
Not asking yet for my drugs or walker
Courtney all Ages and Attitude- skinny little bitch dedicates song to "5 Number Orange" 
Gives us a peak into her ancestral roots 
Voice to the Mouse Brown underwear underground underclass Class of 92.
Love refers to herself as Mommy onstage.  "Mommy needs a little vitamin - 2 tsp of tequila." Smoking her e-cigs, she lights up Gold Dust Woman so fucking Alt-Stevie. 
Love is the Black Widow in Plastic
She kicks and she kicks- in a good way.
Her Dolly Parton lips Parting words Parting shots 
Not the blonde hair but the surgical manipulation.
In the words of his Bobness, By god she looks just like a woman. 
She breaks out all the  hits - Pacific Coast Highway, Celebrity Skin- Don't Make Me Over!
A threat delivered.  Everything is good natured.  the Love Crowd drinks it in. 
His Denseness stood up on a chair to get a picture- politely tapped by a busgirl to get down. 
I-phone all fuzzy anyway. 

Her surgically enhanced  tits stand out in the crowd. 
If you're Going to go fake- Go Big and Fake. 
Her band I call Cougarbait. If this was rock n roll heaven, would the band be made up of Dave Grohl clones?  She has a pair, bookending the stage.  A guy with a faux hawk, bless his pointed head.  Joe Strummer channeled through Mike Reno.
Love growls constructed from the ashes of Cory Monteith, rolled in angels. 
I am Loving this if you can't tell!!
She introduces her fucking band how fucking awesome is that? 
She engages the crowd in a exchange of fuck yous? Wasn't that fun? 
Show us your tits!! - The crowds shouts. That's an oldie, Mommy remarks from the stage.  This right after Mommy has just led us in a fuck you chant- Rich.
Well, she is a rich punk, if you don't count the bills to the IRS.
Who was the meanest bitch today, she taunts the crowd:
Man in front of me blocks my vision with his sculpted jewfro- more Linc from the Mod Sqaud than Larry David with a Wig, but still, I have to ask is it pareve to stand in front of his Denseness?
It is not about body identification or types, but are all of Miss World's female/shemale fans Pudge queens?
So much to love and so little to wear?
Her Loveness returns with a Manufactured Consent of an encore- CL and guitarboy On acoustic.  Courtney in a Wardrobe change- relaxing in a red dress.  She has her war paint on.  I leave before the encore that I read about this morning was Rocknroll Nigger by Patti Smith.  
My mind wanders as I am already on the street by then asking 
Where is the weiner pizza? 

A Sinatra Intoxication

Old souls, young souls.

Dancing in our heads, dancing in the aisles or dancing in the street?

I am lost in my Sinatra intoxication.  No watered down Watertown for me.  

I am drawing yawning drowning in his pathos and poetry.

Not his exactly, but the material written by Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes.  Watertown- links below.

Pre Watergate.  Sinatra's concept album that was too conceptual for the time.

But do not give Frank short shrift.  He is not a mere vessel.  He puts the art back in artery.  He puts the oy vey back in vein. 

The critics did not know what to make of it.  The public was distracted, in a dissociative state, distanced with the spectacle of men o the moon, wondering if Tang was orange juice or modern science.  GMO foods would have been welcome in 1969.  We would have bought the science experiment.  Today, we pine for authenticity, organic, a reality that is less real than the manufactured conceit we call life. 

I'm not sure what your opinion of Frank is.  The old slogan is "This is Frank's World. We just live in it."  I said old.  No one says that.  Just like no one says I'm so bright my Dad calls me son.

I am a relic.  A curiosity.  A curlicue.  Can I take a cue?  Do I have a clue? 

I am listening and falling in love with Sinatra's 1970 album, Watertown. 

The opinions makers ( you know who they are) call it his Berlin.  Can you imagine Sinatra doing The Kids?  "They're taking your children away. Because they said you were not a good mother." 

Maybe I can envision this.  

Give it an honest listen.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAVN4zdjbDg&feature=share

If you want to read about it, I recommend this review in the Paris Review:

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/03/14/blue-eyes-in-watertown/

Watertown is about a man whose wife leaves him, leaves him with two sons.  That doesn't happen.

Except I know people who have experienced this.  There are many ways to leave.  Fifty ways according to the poet Paul Simon.  

Just take it to the bank, Frank.

What is the gory story, Cory?

Poor Cory Montieth.  Why does the public always want to condemn the dead?

He was weak.  Who isn't?

He gave up so much.  Who doesn't?

I spent the week thinking of bridges and how the water is closer than the land, and this kid takes a trip to his home town, a bad relationship, the toxic girlfriend he can't avoid even though by all odds he should shun, and she gives him a hot shot.  

And it's quarter to three, and there's no one in the joint, except you and me.

So set 'em up Joe.   I got a little story I think you oughtta know.

I take no Glee in trying to make sense of something that will never make sense.

Success is no panacea.  It is not sugar coated, but it does leave a film.

Retro-Perspective

The beauty of growing older is that there are more memories to share.  But what is a memory? Can we "trust" our memories?  Can you trust any history to be told without omissions, additions, substitutions, or even outright lies?

I had a social studies teacher in grade 10 who we called Bonehead.  Bonehead said that to understand the true meaning of history, to know what really happened, we must follow the money.
Certainly that is good advice in any discussions of politics, religion or sex.

But what about the personal?   Haven't we been told that the personal is political?  Does it mean that to understand our own personal histories, we also need to 'follow the money'?

What is there was no money to follow?  What other currency can we trust, like In God We Trust?

To reanimate our life and memories, we must find perspective.  What did we see then, and how do we see that view now.  Don't forget to mind the gap.  The gap between the past and present, how reliable is our memory, just how do we choose to fill the gap.

But is any memory reliable?  Even one that just happened, we colour with our perspective of the present, which is now past.  Would an impartial observer have the same impression?

I have gone through a particularly dark few weeks, where I have been sifting through past memories, trying to gain a perspective, so that I may "file away these memories", to create a new understanding of what they mean to me now, and what I thought they meant then.

About half of you who are still reading this post, may have left me by now, while the other half acutely knows from which I speak.

"Someone left a cake out in the rain, and I don't think that I can take, because it took so long to bake it, and I may never have that recipe again."

As I look at the picture above, which was taken more than 30 years ago by Hans John Schneider, I see  a dark beauty to his perspective that captures an image of  me that I still find to be powerful, crippled and obsessive.  The eyes draw you in, but I particularly love the twisting of  my hands and the legs.  

  It is the same look that informs the drawing to the left that my wife did about 34 years ago.

I am reminded of the song FEAR by AKA:

"I feel I fear I feel I fear.

Fingers stroke against my neck.

Gotta get real.

I'm racked I'm wrecked.

I feel I fear I feel I fear....

Cut off my reality.   Cut off by reality.      Chop Chop Chop Chop."


What is the thread that ties my life together?  

From the young man with the burning glare to the present version?  

What is aging but the effects of oxidation, gravity, and the lovely thing they always use as an excuse for not paying someone- experience.  Don't complain about the money, you are gaining so much experience.   So if we follow the money, and there isn't any, do we follow the experience?

We can't go back.  We must go on.

As fragile as we may feel in the present, we have no way other way forward except the slow march to Neverland.   Except in the real Neverland, we can't remain children forever.

What is so good about being a child, anyway?  I never felt free or relaxed as a child.  I had the same dense intensity then as I feel today.   I remember sitting in my bedroom. I was around 8 years old.
I was angry, I was depressed and I didn't "fit" in. I knew instinctively that I was different.
At least, that was my perspective then.

Today here I am.  It is 48 years later, and I am still depressed angry and not fitting in.
But the experiences....
Let me tell you what happened:

Happy Father's Day

I was speaking with a friend who told me one night that the best birthday gift he had received this year was the following words from his daughter

"Dad. I need you."

Being needed is one of the most urgent reasons to live. My own daughter just turned twenty.  Two decades.  She will start her third year in university this fall, which is something I always wanted to do, that is to go to university.  I am proud of her accomplishments, but more to the point, I marvel at her growth and how smart and funny she is.

She has  a generous spirit, and strength of character and she is beauty inside and out.  I could say that she is perfect, but it comforts me in some way to note that her bedroom is a perfect mess.  Always has been.  Her mother once did an art piece showcasing the array of pink plastic that embodied the pre-teen years.

I have been in love with her since long before her birth.   She is my love child, born of a desire to create  an expression of  love.  She is my reason for believing in a future.  

When she was small, she would say to me, Dad, I demand a hug!  Those are the kind of demands that are acceptable to this management.

Mothers have a bond with their child that a father has to earn.   This creature did not come from inside my body.  So fathers have to earn that closeness.

I had to take  her to the emergency room at Children's Hospital when she was very young.  She was in pain, and I couldn't make it go away.  She needed me. And so a bond was forged; she looked into my eyes, trusting me.  She held on to me a little harder.  This was a feeling that I had never felt before in my life.  She was someone who needed me.  Someone who was placing their  faith in me to be there for them.

I still feel horrible about one time when I wasn't there.  I  remember taking her to the dentist, and telling her everything was going to be fine.  She was fearful of the dentist that day.  He told me he would have to pull a tooth.  I wanted to tell her first, but he thought it was better if  he pretended to take a look in, then pull without warning.  She screamed like I had not heard before.  I'm sure it was the shock of the extraction, but I felt it as the pain of having been told by her father that there was nothing to fear, and then being betrayed.I felt horrible.  I would not lie to her again.

One day we were on our way to school.  I was running late, but I told her I would get her there on time.
She made a sarcastic comment about being in a family of liars.   Ouch!  We were always late.  Then I made her get herself to school.  Funny thing, she wasn't late.  We joke about it now.



I have no idea where I am going with this post.
I just wanted to say to my daughter that I love you more than life itself.  You make me proud to be your Dad.

....the water was closer than the land.....

It was one of those days when the water was closer than the land.

Learning to love the questions and live with loss

To grieve means to bear a heavy burden.  To grieve is to live, for life brings us heavy burdens.  How does the ant move the boulder up the hill?  Only with the help of other ants, with community.  The ant moves the boulder one step at a time.  The ant must find the leverage, by which to position in such a way as to lessen the dead weight. 

The Hindu god Shiva dances the cosmic dance of creation and destruction, she teaches us that each act of destruction calls for an act of creation. We must absorb that thought into our grief so to teach us that we heal our loss through acts of creation. 

Why honor loss?  Grieving takes time. We owe it to ourselves and to each other to feel the pain, to feel the fear, to feel the anxiety and, ultimately, to live the questions until the answers begin to reveal themselves to us. 

The great German poet Rainer Marie Rilke said: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. (So) live the questions now....

Grieving takes us to the depths of hell on earth and makes us crawl through glass.  Grieving takes us to love and to loss We grieve for that which we have loved. Love and loss are intimately connected. Not only are we all going to die but every moment is changing and as it changes, it brings loss. All of us experience some level of loss in our everyday lives, from apparently minor situations to major loss such as the loss of a loved one, a job, a relationship, or a dream. Healing our grief is a step by step journey. This return to crawling in order to heal  In Good Grief, professional grief educator Deborah Morris Coryell describes grief as "the experience of not having anywhere to place our love, of losing a connection, an outlet for our emotion."  Is healing possible with grief?  In North America, we are expected to go to the funeral, or celebration of life, as we are now calling these events, be sad for two -three days and then get back to work.  Get over it.  Move on.   But to deal with grief, we have to learn how to continue to love in the face of loss. We have to live the questions. Another thought that comes to me is to critically think of what is loss? Loss is the removal of something, leaving a hole, a gap, a chasm that cannot but must be bridged.   I am reminded of the song Many Rivers to Cross, especially as sung by Nilsson and Lennon.  The raw emotions expressed in this song are visceral.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgzWqfZo8fY "Well I been ripped, washed up for years, and I nearly survived.... And this loneliness just won't leave me alone Its drag to be on your own My woman left me and she didn't say why And I guess I have to try. Many Rivers to cross and where to begin? " What is loss?  For to have loss, you must have had something to have lost.  You must have known love. Just because this person is gone, does not mean you no longer love them.  In fact, the love intensifies, as it always does when we perceive that we cannot "have" it.  But you still do have it- you still do have the love.  You still can talk everyday with your loss, but the conversation now goes in a different manner.  We can say the conversation is one-sided, but are we listening hard enough?  We know what the other person would have said, don't we?  We move into the terrain of imagination and memory.

A Certain Density

I was reading the Book section of the Sunday New York Times, drinking my third cup of coffee, and mentally making a list of what tasks I needed to accomplish on this day 2 of my weekend.  Should I should start on the vacuuming and floor cleaning, or check my work email, or make sure that I see the open house for a loft off Main street by 2:00 pm, or read one of the many books I have on the go, or have another coffee.

The day is approaching Timex time (1:50 pm), and my wife just informed me of an acquaintance who died from a massive heart attack this weekend.  Yesterday our realtor told us of her brother-in-law skiing on Whistler mountains, who just happened to be paired up with a doctor (not planned), and when he didn't show up at the bottom of the mountain, returned to find said brother-in-law apparently dead from a heart attack.  Being a doctor, he administered corrective actions, and the gentleman is in hospital.

News like this kind of puts my chore list in perspective.  Or does it?  I am approaching six years after my heart attack; now I am wondering why I first thought to write "my first heart attack."  Life is short, time is precious, blah blah blah- we all know this.  Yet what does it take for these truths to sink in?  Yes, I know I need to exercise, but when I say exercise, I don't mean to say exercise more. I mean that I need to make time to exercise at all.

So why don't I?  With all the many choices of what I could do on a sunny day, why was exercise not one of the first choices?  After all, this choice could mean life or death for me.

Choose your words carefully, my inner voices tell me.  But not only do I need to choose my words, but  I must choose which inner voices in my head in which to listen to.  There is the voice that says "one foot after the other, word by word, live life in the moment/now/present." This voice tends to dominate my inner conversations. Then  there is the "do everything in moderation- including moderation" voice.  Also the "forget tomorrow, live for today voice."  Even a Love Hard, Live Fast, and Die Young" voice that sounds a little like Elvis if truth be told.      

So many voices with so little to say.  

Then I hear a voice from when I was a younger man, and I was afraid to express my anger, feeling somehow that if I chose to let it rip, as my father often did, my temper would rule me, as his temper ruled him.  A volcano would be opened, spewing endless angry lavas.  Of course, the longer I bottled up my anger, the more the wine turned to vinegar, and it was not a good year for the roses, and explosions result when simmer becomes a rolling boil.  

The fear of rage morphed with age into a more primal fear, which is the fear of life itself.  What do I mean by fear of life; isn't it more natural to have a fear of death?  But death is not as fearful as life; death comes on its own terms.  Death has its own best before date.   But Life is made up of moments, and with each moment we have yet another choice to make. My choice has been to not become paralysed with thoughts of death, but to just live.   Just live each moment not like its my last, but live each moment just as it presents itself.  I am lousy with planning ahead.   It is not that I don't believe in the future as I once did as a younger man, but that I find it hard to conceive of a time that is not here, that may come, but may not. I have to give each performance my best, not because it may be my last, but because that is how I roll.

Today I read in the Sunday New York Times about essayist Phillip Lopate and his new collections of essays.  I had not heard of Mr. Lopate, and so I looked him up.   He is apparently quite well known in the circle of essayists, as a first class practitioner in the artform of choosing your words.  I was intrigued with this following excerpt from him: 

"How can you tell a first-rate essay? I am tempted to repeat what St. Augustine said about Time: "When no one asks what it is, I know what it is; if someone asks me, I don't know." 

He then goes on to say: 

All I can say is that I was looking for a certain density of thought. A living voice. A text that would surprise me and take me through a mental adventure."  

Lopate not only writes essays, but obviously reads them as well, as he has edited collections of some interesting essays from the Classical Era to the Present.  It seems that Mr. Lopate not only lives in the now; he is equally comfortable in ancient Greece, and Japan.

He quotes from Kenko, Essays in Idleness:

"You should never put the new antlers of a deer to your nose and smell them. They have little insects that crawl into the nose and devour the brain." 

Hmmmm.  Braineaters.  Or like I say, maggots love the meat. 

The original Japanese name for Essays in Idleness means "with nothing better to do."  Kenki employs the "random mode of composition known as zuihitsu (follow the brush) in Japanese. Zuihitsu was popular with  Japanese writers, who felt that it was perhaps less dishonest that creating fiction. The random nature of zuihitsu caused readers to take "pleasure not only in moving from one to another of the great variety of subjects, but in tracing subtle links joining the successive episodes."

For readers wanting to trace my subtle links, may I suggest the following choices to better "parse my weird."   

I possess not only what Phillip Lovate calls "a certain density", but what others have remarked as an undefinable "miltiness."  Oh milt, salty and sticky, sweet and sour, unctuous, ready-to-mix, no fuss-no muss, flavour enhancing, sometimes entrancing, slippery, rubbery, hopefully enchanting.  Milt fuels the ever changing choice of which of my inner voices will cause fingers to hit keys, causing words to form, gather, come together in paragraphs to express my thoughts.  This propulsive process yields some strange fiction, and an even stranger non-fiction.  

It is this certain density and this uncertain miltiness that makes me who I am, the man you know as Dense Milt. I never asked for this job.  But I do love this job more than any other.  When I am letting go, setting the inner voices free to speak to you through me.  On behalf of all of us, we hope this time you have just spent reading us has been a worthy use of your time.  There are no guarantees; every word is presented on an as-is basis.  That is the thing about free speech, you get what you pay for.  

    

  

   

Parsing People Based on Degree of Problematic Personalities

DENSE MILT'S PARSING OF PEOPLE BASED ON DEGREES OF PROBLEMATIC PERSONALITIES

"Psychologist Dr David Zald of Vanderbilt University in Nashville has identified a tiny part of the brain which he believes governs people's tendency to have regular bouts of irritability, anxiety or anger. The more active that part of the brain, the more likely someone is to suffer bad moods."

This is not rocket science.  Some people are just impossible.  The impossible are not only possible, but are now parsable. 

Age is definitely a factor.  Some infants are cranky; some teenagers uncontrollable.  Over fifty, hormones kick in and the curmudgeon gene is dominant.   People simply quit caring what other people think. 

asshole

Someone being arrogant, rude, obnoxious, or just a total dickhead. 

bitch

a malicious, unpleasant, selfish person, especially a woman.

crab

A quarrelsome, ill-tempered person. 

crank

A person who holds an unshakable belief that most of his or her contemporaries consider to be false; an ill-tempered individual or one who is in a bad mood; German krank has a modern meaning of "sick, ill", evolved from a former meaning "weak, small".

A crank is defined as a man who cannot be turned.— Nature, 8 Nov 1906, 25/2

cunt

A mean or obnoxious or contemptible person

curmudgeon

An ill-tempered (and frequently old) person full of stubborn ideas or opinions.

dickhead

A stupid, irritating, or ridiculous person, particularly a man.

geek

A person with an unusual or odd personality. A carnival performer who does disgusting acts.

grump

A cranky complaining person.  A surly or bad-tempered person

hater

A person that simply cannot be happy for another person's success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person.

jerk

an unlikable person; especially : one who is cruel, rude, or small-minded

kook

A kook, Daddy-O, is a screwball who is 'gone' farther than most— Daily Mail, 22 Aug 1960, 4/5

misanthrope

A person who dislikes or distrusts other people or mankind in general

nutbar (also nutter, nutjob, nut, nutcake)

A person who is regarded as eccentric or mad

Parsing people on the basis of degree of their problematic personalities is not easy; this is a job for an expert, which is why Dense Milt has dedicated himself to this task, no matter how onerous.  

Do not believe for one minute that mere identification somehow excuses said behavior, or marginalizes such behaviour.  

Negative behaviour can become quite an artform in the right hands.  

This is not a private pursuit; there would be no need of psychiatry without negative behaviours.  There is actually an International Society of Curmudgeons.  They are very serious about what comprises acts of curmudgeonry, and do not take to unauthorized acts of curmudgeonry.

As such, they have supplied an incident report form if you witness said behaviours.

Unauthorized Curmudgeonry - Incident Report

If you have witnessed unauthorized grumpiness, grouchiness or curmudgeonry, we strongly encourage you to report it. The ISOC does not take unauthorized grumpiness lightly by unlicensed grouches. All reports will be thoroughly investigated. 

If after reading this, some of you may have comments.  Do you really think I care what you think? 

Really?  

Have you been reading this?

And you still think I care about what you think?

Impossible.