Saturday, March 16, 2024

Annoying Ways to Refer to Interstates in Washington: I-5 vs "The" 5

Laughed wryly at this video of a man's furious extra-dramatic rant depicting "Washington natives when a transplant says 'The 5' instead of I-5" (via @rjromain who says "t’s like dragging your nails across a chalkboard for the born and raised lol #seattle #seattlewa #seattlewashington #pnw #tacoma #washingtonstate #pyuallup"):


As a 4th+ generation Washingtonian who grew up near the crotch  of I-90 and I-5, this doesn't annoy me as much as people calling Puget Sound "the ocean", but ... yeah. I do mentally assign demerits to people who say "the" instead of "eye".

Modest proposal: you must pay five-times pricier tabs if you give directions like this or refer to interstates in Washington this way, or say "THE 520" or "THE 405" instead of just fucking 520 or 405. 

You just TAKE 405, not take "take THE 405". Like ... we don't need that extra pretentious California verbage cluttering up our shit for NO GOOD REASON. And I don't need to insert a fancy i as in verbiage for you to know exactly what I'm talking about.

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT.

And if you don't like "Seattle" or the way people have been doing shit here for decades or more, WHY DID YOU FUCKING MOVE HERE? You didn't fucking know we lived here and had ways of doing things before you fucking tailgating, California-stopping, road-raging assholes inserted yourselves and brought all that smog with you? And don't even get me started on crazy cult-mindset motherfuckers from Idaho, Utah, Arizona, etc. infiltrating like that stupid selfish shithole cunt who moved to Redmond and things he's going to be the new and improved Tim Fucking Eyman.

Friday, March 15, 2024

A Peaceful Rantless Moment

How happy it made me, sitting on a plastic stool on our front stoop on a fully-formed spring day during a moment of neighborhood quiet, seeing someone walking a dog. Quietly ambling together. No phone in her hand. Just her and the dog. Walking. Together.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Back When We Only Had Scanners

I miss the days before facebook when you had to get a scanner if you wanted to eavesdrop on local tragedy porn and gossip.

Now every motherfucker is on facebook and "nextdoor" and whatever the fuck putting on grotesque shows pretending their interest in the most macabre accidents and crimes is prompted by genuine concern for their fellow men and neighbors.

That shit belongs in your grandpa's garage, not publicly displayed on the internet.

OH GOSH I HOPE EVERYONE'S ALRIGHT THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS DO YOU KNOW WHO IT WAS WHAT WAS THE VEHICLE CAN YOU DESCRIBE EXACTLY WHERE IT HAPPENED OH THAT POOR BABY DOES ANYONE KNOW IF ITS MOTHER WAS AN ADDICT IS IT POSSIBLE I CAN  VERBALLY TONGUEFUCK A FIREMAN'S SMOKEY FURBALL ANUS FOR HIS HEROIC BRAVERY AND RESCUE ATTEMPTS PLEASE NOTICE ME HOW MUCH I CARE I AM NOT MERELY CURIOUS BUT ENTITLED TO THE MOST INTIMATE HORRIFIC DETAILS BECAUSE I CARE SO EXTREMELY MUCH I'M CRYING CAN YOU SEE MY EMOJIREACTS WITH THE TEARS CASCADING DOWN MY FACE WHILE I MASTURBATE MY EMOTIONAL VISCERA OVER TOTAL STRANGERS WHOSE LIVES I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING BUSINESS KNOWING THIS MUCH ABOUT

I get the macabre curiosity. I get the desire to gossip. I really do. What I don't get it is the entitlement and the barfy-weird-ass advertisement and hours invested in checking and posting and desperately waiting for NOTIFICATIONS of some potential new gory tidbit of calamity.

What a fucking shitshow of grody shameless "social" parading and poking, and on top of it squatting on it when they can to piggyback their stupid fucking irrelevant selfish-ass political agendas and willfully ignorant opinions.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

The Most Abhorrent Thing About Being Miserable

One of the most abhorrent things about feeling horrible is not wanting to feel better -- actively RESISTING feeling better -- because you think everything will get worse if you feel okay (or, God forbid, GOOD), and you believe feeling horrible is the only way to solve problems and avert disaster.

On top of that you think you're doing damage control by letting people see how shitty you feel about yourself, hoping they will have mercy upon you and not make things worse or try to point out your sisns that you already openly cop to.

Is it some kind of an Irish Catholic DNA problem? Or just a general miserable-bitch malaise?

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Plastic Christmas Candy-Cane Sheath

This motherfucking SHIT-to-remove plastic sheathing wrapped with devilish "care" around my sweet stick of striped peppermint sweetness that I am so desperate to unwrap and suck on in my headache-riddled PMS state of post-Christmas come-down.



Got a box of these fuckers on sale the day after Christmas (yesterday) for a dollar and sixty-four cents (even the price is depressing, like nobody is even going to try to make this shit sound attractive or compelling, these frigid old-lady leftovers untouched during the jolly season which is now OVER, and it is just THE SHIT-PIT OF WINTER when conservative responsible retirees immediately take down their light displays so as not to alleviate any of the gloom of January and February for people whose electrical bills are NOT padded with social security or retirement funds.

They will horde all their white-haired light for themselves, letting them be a lesson to us that we should rise and retire early to get cracking on our menial low-paying jobs if we want to enjoy the spirit of giving brightness and joy beyond the cut-off date for anyone giving a token fuck about hardships or humanitarian helping hand-outs. The free turkey dinners are OVER, and the faceless fairy-lit angels are going back into storage in their two-car garages on carefully-organized shelves of boomer propriety. At lunchtime they will walk their stupid little stunted-legged lap dogs by our broken-down cars we can't afford to keep running and cast their condescending cataract-riddled eyes towards those of us bringing their property values down with our squalor even though only one of them will live long enough to need that extra dough for their twilight years in assisted senior living, let alone be conscious enough to enjoy. And the assistants will string the lights up on a two-story artificial tree in the drafty dining room and play nostalgic music from entirely the wrong generations while the drool dribbles drearily from the mouths of their near-death fellow residents.

Fuck this fucking candy-cane wrapper.

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

TINS that are HARD TO OPEN

OMFG trying to open this fucking tin of fancy candy:


It says "HARD CANDY" but really it should say "Hard-To-Open" Candy.

It is comical, to get some queenly bon-bons for sucking on in luxurious repose, only to have them result in the most inelegant and unrelaxed display of incompetence, scrabbling against smooth metal for purchase, trying to wiggle the lid up enough to get it off, and then finally having it fly across the room and spill the candies all over the floor.

If you're going to get this kind of bon-bon, you really should have a servant at your elbow to pop them in your mouth while they do all of the dirty work and you sigh at their slowness. Or demonstrate Jeeves-like proficiency in the handling of such peevish matters. WWJD, indeed: what would JEEVES do? Jeeves would have it down to a science, or implement some graceful back door by which he retrieves the carefully-wrapped and preserved candies while also maintaining the *illusion* they came from inside the tin, even performing enough with the container to get the magic-metal sounds to slick out as though the package presented no trouble at all, but actually retrieving the candy from a silent container secreted under a sidetable or something.


This is actually the second tin this year to give me trouble. The other is a tin of CBD-infused salve (coincidentally also scented with a cinnamon aroma, like these pear-and-cinnamon candies, but more medicinal). It sucks because I want to be able to use the stuff when I'm feeling ghastly with head- and muscle-aches in bed, but being forced to leave the tin open means it is drying out. I worry it is losing its potency, or at least some of the pleasure of dipping my fingers into its grease. I'm afraid the salve now looks and feels like a container of ear wax.

When tins are hard to open it's quite disappointing; I *love* the old-fashioned vibe of tins, like they came from antique-y snake-oil-salesman times where shit was totally unregulated and you could get coke and opiates and exotic tranquil poisons in all kinds of over-the-counter seemingly-innocuous syrups and compounds. Those things came in TINS and bottles, right? Folded into little papers, and produced to impress with their qualities remedying a diverse range of ailments.

Which reminds me: I had a vivid dream last night about being surprised with a gift of cocaine.

Kind of ruins the fantasy when you can't even open the stuff. Like a nightmare-dream where all of the good stuff is RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU, but you can only struggle to figure out how to move it from right-there-in-front-of-you onto or into your body or mouth.


Monday, December 11, 2023

Can You NOT?!?

 I'm sorry but I just fucking hate people talking on their phones in grocery shores. Fucking HATE IT.

And I'm not even lying about being sorry. I try -- I *keep* on trying -- to remind myself sometimes people have good reasons to do this DISTRACTING SELF-IMPORTANT SELF-CENTERED "multitasking", completely inconsiderate of everyone around them and unable to detect how much they are in other people's way, blasting their hot stupid breath and voices and ring tones all over. And any morsel of empathy, understanding or tolerance I can summon is overshadowed by just FUCKING HATING IT.

It's one of those things we have to resign ourselves to, apparently. An unaddressed much more distressing aspect of "the new normal" than the new normal things that never fully took off as normal and preceded this phase and I just think a lot of it is a performance. It is an advertisement of not giving a shit about others. A show of being soooo important soooooo busy sooooo consumed with sooooo many socials and/or dramas and/or demands placed on you and requests for your supervision. A visual and auditory demonstration of being tuned into something soooooo much more entertaining and on-your-level than this boring mundane process of grocery shopping. Unless it's that thing where you and your mate are SO BUSY *all* THE TIME that you can only synchronize your shopping lists while you're actually doing the shopping at the last minute and it's imperative you consult with one-another while you're doing it and you accept ALL of your calls in the frozen foods aisle as this is your second office, your home office, and everyone else can just accept it -- that you are very important, and this is your time for personal home office work, not when you're in your car or standing in front of the milk in your own refrigerator in your own kitchen because you'll be TOO BUSY in your kitchen or to take the necessary moments in your car because you are so busybusybusy and not a moment to waste you're sooooo important and EVERYTHING in your life and on your phone is SOOOO IMPORTANT and if you aren't important enough to talk on the phone in the grocery store than you must be so lucky and completely ignorant of the extraordinary amount of skill and multitasking an important person like you has to do.

Fuck you and your super-important life where everything is of equal importance except for what you are doing RIGHT NOW, and the people around you who have to passively participate in your bullshit life.

I am trying to think about how to apply the metta meditation stuff to this. I'm able to do it with traffic. I should be able to do it with this phone-talking grocery-shopping thing. But I may have further to go towards actually feeling the same kind of human-animal as these phone-talking people. Maybe it's because grocery shopping (any shopping, really) is often really hard for me and I can't conceive of how talking on the phone at the same time would make it easier.

I also just don't understand people's lack of self-consciousness in general with conversing in public, not caring how many people are overhearing your personal business or the privacy of the people you're gossiping about deserve. I have to be at least a little drunk-ish or in a super-psycho place to get that way. Not unheard of, but definitely not in line with my values or how I want to be. Which is one of many reasons I have not had any alcohol this entire year.

Honestly though? I think it is less shameful to do your grocery shopping drunk than talking on your phone.

Okay ... maybe another thing, I just realized, is probably RESENTMENT. I resent that it is acceptable to broadcast your inane phone calls in the grocery store, but viewed as psycho to DANCE IN THE AISLES OF THE GROCERY STORE WHEN A GOOD SONG COMES ON. I still do it sometimes, but man ... I wish I could do it more. I wish we ALL could dance in the aisles of the grocery store more. It's the only off-topic thing I believe in there, I think. And it's not even off-topic! They're PLAYING MUSIC!!!

Everything is so fucked up. See ... it is not bitchiness that makes me hate the phone talkers. It is my desire for all of us to dance more. To dance whenever we hear a song that makes us want to. And I don't understand not wanting to dance, but wanting to talk on the phone. Why should I be embarrassed of dancing in the aisles of the grocery store, but you're not embarrassed of making everyone listen to your stupid fucking irrelevant ridiculous phone conversation with someone who is not even HERE? 

I am not a bitch. I am someone who wants us to be here together where we are, aware of one another.  Caring about what we're doing. Hearing the music. Dancing.

I guess it comes back to recognizing those phone talkers are not happy. They are suffering. More than I am listening to them, and I should just feel sorry for them and pray for them and shit.