I HATE It, Y'All

I fucking hate it when people in the Pacific Northwest say "y'all".

It is such fake-ass sounding bullshit. Unless you or your immediate kin that you grew up with are from parts of the country where that is a natural contraction, please stop trying to sound folksy. ESPECIALLY when you're actually being condescending.

Yes I just saw this on a stupid facebook post where someone asked a dumb fucking question and then when people politely explained the answer to her, she was like "it's not so clear, y'all". Here's the thing; if you really want to talk like that say it ain't so clear, y'all. But you're just trying to dumb down and gentle up what you really want to say, which is "my question has still been unanswered, and you don't even understand it, how complex it is."

Like ... just fucking be a straightforward bitch instead of tossing around this whole "I'm an unthreatening simpleton, y'all ... y'all gonna have to SPLAIN this timmee better."

Bright Bird Mornings

June 9th, 2023

June in the Pacific Northwest: the month when days are the longest, and so much of the night is too bright.

Is it my imagination, or is the moon brighter than it was when I was a kid, or even just twenty years ago? PAINFULLY bright … like staring at the sun. A reminder that’s what it truly is: SUNLIGHT bouncing back to us. Reminding us it we’re about to be penetrated to the point of blindness and subjected to inescapable heat.

I am afraid. We’re all on The Raft of the Medusa, in a burning hell of our own making with too many people fanning the flames … adding more fuel to the fire. People who literally would not piss on you — their neighbor — if you were on fire. Cannibals, bullies, and tyrants.

Four in the morning and the birds are SO LOUD. But it’s the time of the year where a lot of the birds have moved along to cooler pastures, so the variety of songs and birdcalls has diminished. Replaced by One. Shrill. Repeated. Warning. Like this one bird stayed behind to sound the alarm, and is only quiet for perhaps six hours per revolution. Over and over, through the smoky-fog, the unending bright blue light in all of its harsh near-solstice permutations, this bird repeats the the same shrill message and I can’t close the windows against it because it’s already too hot and stifling.

“Boundaries are not real”, people are saying, pointing to the wildfire smoke from Canada choking MORE PLACES THAN TREELESS NEW YORK CITY / MANHATTAN.

Right now the boundary between night and day feels unreal. Non-existent. A former figment of my imagination that I can’t pretend to believe in anymore.

Only a shadow of night remains, cast by the big bad sun’s rays, bouncing around the corner where AM meets PM. When I get up after midnight to pee I step outside in bare feet to catch it, wondering why nobody else seems to hear its rhythm, but grateful they are so willfully deaf I can still enjoy some semblance of privacy. Taking sun spots back into bed with me, laying face-down in my sooty pillow. Suffocating to block out the light.

Stupid F*cking Kleenex Boxes

Monday, June 12, 2023

Jesus Fucking Christ, WHY does getting the first Kleenex out of the box have to so fucking annoying, clumsy and inelegant?

Kleenex is a CONVENIENCE item — a wasteful paper product — so I think it should feel more EFFORTLESS to use, right from the word GO. But it is not.

There is nothing like trying to finesse the first tissue out of the Kleenex box without ripping it to make a bitch feel feeble and afflicted with some kind of neurodegenerative disease that primarily affects sensitive aging bitches as they phase out of their compulsive sluttery stage into their dried-out pinched-grimace cranky-ass phase of mid-life jittering around with a cane. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Take these two fresh boxes today. One of them ripped even when I gently tried to wiggle the first sheet out of the box in order to prime it for my wife’s side of the bed.

I did not waste time prepping MY box, though, so when I reached for it actually needing it to blow my nose, of course THE WHOLE BOX lifted up when I tried to pull on the first tissue, and then the cardboard base banged around on my nightstand/sick-old-lady-lapdesk as I “pulled” through the air trying to extricate it from the box which then KNOCKED OVER my pen bag into the residue on my lunch plate, sullying one of my most precious possessions (it’s nigh on impossible to find this Mead pen bag without their bigger bolder five-star branding nowadays).

Sure, they’re not name-brand (they’re Safeway's “Signature Select”), but that’s not the problem; I’ve had the same issue with The Real Kleenex boxes, so I’m not paying more for the same snot-nosed experience I get with generics.

I imagine one of the issues is that they OVERSTUFF the boxes so nobody feels like they’re getting shorted on the paper products they paid for. But really what good is that when you wind up with the first two tissues pulling out together and all ripped up?

I could go on and on about Kleenex boxes: the word “tissue”, that super-aggravating THING my wife does with her Kleenex, and ways I fetishize kleenex to the point of crazy old-lady-bitchiness (why are old bitches so keen on collecting and hoarding and displaying the absolute corniest little pleasures of life?). Also? I have very specific Kleenex PREFERENCES. Woe to you who helps with my errands and selects the wrong fucking type. But let’s save those topics for a revisit or three down the line.

For now, just know how fucking annoyed I was today in the heat of late-spring allergy season to clumsily, wastefully struggle with these chintzy fartknocking disposable snotrags.