A message to the person who threw a beer bottle at Ryan Howard

As you curled your yellowed finger nails around the Bud Light Lime bottle, I'm sure it seemed like a good idea.

"Everyone sure is frustrated with this Ryan Howard fellow," you thought. "Perhaps if I take matters into my own hands, I'll finally win the respect of not only my parents, but all women everywhere."

It had been a long day - a long couple of years, in fact. It turns out that branching off developmentally and, instead of becoming a fully-formed adult, evolving into a wretched hobgoblin with a backwards hat on makes no one want to respect or be near you. "God damn it," you must have thought earlier, "Am I really in line to buy another Bud Light Lime?" But what choice did you have? All of your friends were talking about the important things they were doing with their lives - their lucrative jobs, their loving marriages, their exciting trips - and all you have to look forward to is the buzz you're paying $11 a beer to maintain.

You can't be faulted for this, though. Think of all the positives! It's a well-documented fact that women prefer a man who is most likely to pick a fight with a professional athlete as long as there is a wall and several security guards between them. As you have seen on Tinder, endless women list "Raucous coward outfitted with flaccid personality" as their top choice in a mate.

And your parents? You better believe they'll take any opportunity they can to lean on the picket fence and inform the neighbors of your exploits. Sure, the Nelsons may have just video chatted with their son in Africa working with Doctors Without Borders, but think about what your folks get to tell people: "Our son? Well, he unfortunately woke up again on Saturday morning, asked us for money, and headed down to Citizens Bank Park, where he filled himself with the most expensive horse piss they put in bottles, and, once again drunk during the day with the crushing weight of his complete and utter failure as a son piling up on him, decided to take his rampant insecurities out on the professional athlete nearest to him who has managed to do something productive with his life. Later that day, our beloved offspring returned home to the basement we never told him he could move into, cursed loudly at a video game until three in the morning, and passed out using a greasy Wawa wrapper as a pillow. Tomorrow he'll say he's going to apply for a part time job but actually go smoke weed in a van while his friend tries to talk him into breaking into a school bus."

Can you imagine if your life suffered a level of scrutiny even close to that of a professional athlete? If reporters showed up to cover the most important events of your dumb, toxic life as if they mattered in the slightest to you or anyone obligated and/or pretending to love you? If someone actually wanted to talk to you about the intramural basketball league you play in, instead of nodding as you inflate your feeble, entirely humiliating stats and wishing, instead of talking to them, that you were still out in the Xfinity Live parking lot hoping that last Bud Light Lime you bought for a woman you will never see again didn't overdraw your checking account and force you to steal more money out of your mother's purse.

"AREA TURD-PERSON ONCE MORE DESPISED BY EVERYONE AT PARTY," the headlines would say. "Probably will start fight, piss self soon."

So, good job. Great job, in fact. I'm sure the guys in the hover board shop that you don't get paid to hang out in are going to love this story. Because that's what life's all about, right? Accepting who you are. And in your case, who you are is a human-shaped mound of crusty, centipede-ridden Philadelphia street sludge that makes pathetic attempts to be a person each and every day. But it's not going to happen, because, as the thoughts that haunt you as you try to go to sleep at night confirm, you are just another superfluous life trying desperately to drag the rest of us down to your level so that for several precious, fleeting seconds, you don't have to feel like the most odious, hateable, incompetent, shit-covered parasite to ever crawl out of a K Lot port-a-potty and scurry into the ball game.