Looking out my Backdoor: The mosquito buzz of epicaricacy

A friend introduced me to a new word: epicaricacy. An Olde English word. Means joy upon evil. Like schadenfreude. Like when someone else stubs his toe and stumbles, you gloat that it wasn’t you. Which has more than a sniff of self-righteousness.

I know the word intimately. I try to keep it swatted away and like a mosquito, it returns.

What strange creatures we are who live much inside our own heads. And what a strange head, speaking for myself. I cannot trust everything I think.

An example: There is a truly wretched person, disagreeable, passively aggressive, rude and dishonest and always righ...