Yaaaaayyyy BURN BAN!

 After posting about shitty air quality created by neighbors burning wood the other day (AND the way that pollution always seems to be overlooked), I was happy to see this as a headline in the Seattle Times:

Burn bans in Snohomish, Pierce counties amid unhealthy air quality

"The use of some wood-burning stoves is temporarily banned in Snohomish and Pierce counties amid concerns about unhealthy air. 

The Puget Sound Clean Air agency imposed a Stage 1 burn ban in Pierce County on Saturday and another in Snohomish County on Sunday, citing stagnant air and high levels of wood smoke that have created unhealthy air quality for sensitive groups. 

'The purpose of a burn ban is to reduce the amount of pollution creating unhealthy air, usually due to excessive wood smoke,' the agency said in a statement.

Those are not counties where I live now (no such burn ban is in effect, or if it is, nobody knows about it or enforces it), but I grew up in King County (sandwiched between Snohomish and Pierce) so I know the culture of those places and the amount of diversity in the cities and towns within them. Maybe I just haven't been paying attention, but for all of the Seattle area's (King County's) reputation as being insufferably liberal and supposedly progressive ... NOT SO MUCH. Very few people give a fuck about clean air, very few people support mass transit, and fuckers in Seattle and the Eastside contribute at least as much waste, groundwater pollution, etc. if not more than other places, and do it without a morsel of guilt or jot of awareness of their hypocrisy (if they actually are hypocritical at all: for real most people just don't give a fuck and don't even really pretend to). So it's actually unusual in my lifetime to see this kind of attention paid to private individuals' contributions to air pollution and an actual attempt at regulation being communicated. In the county where I live our cars do not even have to pass an emissions test, which I am kind of fine with because of what a burden it puts on poor people like us living in a very out-of-the-way place requiring us to travel for jobs and a lot of services, like seeing medical specialists, etc.

Actually, now that I think of it, I vaguely recall my grandpa complaining about such burn bans. So maybe I just haven't been paying attention and/or forgot about this stuff. We rarely watch local news, too, so maybe I'm just missing it.

I should learn more about this "Puget Sound Clearn Air agency". And ... like ... why the fuck isn't King County included in the burn ban? Which counties are covered by this agency anyway (where I live is still on the Puget Sound, so, again ... why are we not included? Or are we and I just don't know about it?

It is not surprising that Darrington and Eatonville are not covered by the ban; it sucks for people living there who have to breathe it in BUT there truly are a lot of poor people in those areas who can most affordably access a relative abundance of wood to burn for heat, so ... yeah. Tough one.

VOLUNTARILY SHITTY AIR QUALITY

 I love this time of year in the wet (but not as wet as you probably think it is) northwest. I love BEING OUTSIDE in early November.

But of course just as soon as the huge forest fires stopped raging and went into smolder mode -- as soon as the air quality started to improve -- here we've got a couple of fucking neighbors who have now decided it is too cold for words and they MUST BURN WOOD! ALL DAY! ALL NIGHT!! STOKE THE HOME FIRES AND TRAP ALLLLLLLLLL OF US LIVING NEXT TO THEM IN THE SHITTIEST SMOKE-POLLUTED AIR QUALITY EVER!

It is hard to take people's take on air pollution seriously when they never say word number one about how absolutely shitty and PERSONAL it is to shit on your neighbors this way.

In the past few years as forest fires have become a yearly dark stinky cloud every fucking year for weeks and months on end (made worse by not having rain for weeks and months on end), I literally did not even notice how bad the smoke was the first time it laid a blanket of smoggy gloom over the Strait of Juan de Fuca here. You know why I didn't perceive the air quality as being significantly degraded? BECAUSE I HAVE GROWN UP SO USED TO INDIVIDUALS BURNING WOOD FOR SIX MONTHS OUT OF THE YEAR AND POLLUTING EVERYTHING AROUND THEM IN THE PROCESS.

My grandpa was one of these people. He did not care about my dad's asthma. Rather, he did not believe that his wholesome naturally man-make-FIRE in homemade FURNACE wood smoke could possibly cause another man to NOT BE ABLE TO BREATHE. My dad later wound up on oxygen for years and died of emphysema, and I believe living for years under my grandpa's smoky thumb contributed to it. 

So instead of taking a walk in my own neighborhood on this beautiful sunny Saturday or even just spending more than a fast moment passing through the backyard as quickly as possible trying to hold my breath, I AM INSIDE. BITCHING ABOUT THIS SAD STATE OF UNHEALTHY HELLISH AFFAIRS.

TRUTH: HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE.

I'd say I can make up for being stuck inside on a beautiful sunny day by instead going out on cloudy days when it's raining, but it's often EVEN WORSE when there is cloud cover trapping all of the smoke under a lid of grey.

People do not know or care how fucking poisonous they smell. Another reason why I hate hearing the word "toxic" used to describe politically incorrect behaviors or personalities or relationships. It's fucking ridiculous coming out of the mouths of people who never say (much less DO) anything about actually toxic air, water, etc.

A Person vs PEOPLE

Between Election Day and Veterans Day and Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, rewatching Men in Black (one of my favorite super-entertaining comfort movies) feels appropriate, and a good time to quote Kay:

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."

I should put this into more context and tie it into my bitchy alarm bells for what I call "The Tyranny of the Social", and how ~25 years after this movie came out dealing with how much truth people can handle and whether staying in denial is better,  we are now living in an age of massive disinformation, viral propaganda, deep fakery and boy oh boy this week it sure is relevant but still, at its core, a tale as old as time.

One of the things I love about this quote is acknowledging WE ARE ANIMALS. I have a major bitch bone to pick with people who think being human makes us non-animals, or that referring to a person as an animal is some extra huge insult that means that person is less-than-human. HUMAN = ANIMAL. It is vital to craft all policy bearing this FACT in mind. We are animals. Count on people to BE the animals WE ALL ARE. No judgment, just acceptance.

*****

As humans, the only things that we can rely on as relatively-forever (permanent for our lifespans) are The Sun and The Mystery.

That Was Easy!

 Okay, so we've established that I fucking HATE reading or hearing people say "YOU GOT THIS!". I'm also not a big fan of how people say "amazing!" these days, but I realize that's just a younger generation's "awesome!" which I *still* say with complete sincerity (most of the time I say it with completely sincerity, I mean ... maybe 10% of the time sarcastic. Or ... more than 10% of the time. Because sarcasm is AWESOME, riiiiiiiiight?!? I'm on the fence about "right?" at the end of sentences nowadays. It doesn't bring out the bitch in me but I'm not, like, a proponent (though it is sneaking into my speech now and again).

I want to balance all of that out with a ... what is it, like ... a catch phrase? that I actually DO like. Nay, LOVE:

"THAT was easy!"

Yeah, like that big red button you could put on your desk and slam your hand down on it when you finished something, and this robot speak 'n spell voice would diminish your accomplishment

In theory I should hate "that was easy!" Minimizing my efforts and such. But it really reduced anxiety and felt like an accomplishment. It felt like such a beautiful way to finish something ... ANYTHING ... and reward myself with a sense of mastery. See? That wasn't so bad after all! And now it's done! And I'm a red button right here waiting that you can pound any damn time you want and I won't argue with you or grade you ... there's just one congratulatory thing letting me know I am competent and/or I have actually finished something, even if it was just one small step in a long list of commandments.

I didn't have to smile at the red button or demure the compliment. It wasn't hyperbolic, but it *was* something I would not have awarded myself naturally. Because of this "growth mindset" thing I'm learning about that I don't have / need to work on. Because it wasn't a real person or actual social or professional interaction, you didn't have to take it too personally (yet the positive components of it ALWAYS sunk in for me, every time). I didn't have to replay the interaction over and over in my head to try to suss out some nuance or covert message in an actual human's inflection. The red button had no ulterior motives. There were no hidden feelings towards me or judgements about me inside the big red button. I never had to question it. I just DID it when I finished something ... and lit up inside.

The big red that was easy button was great, too, because it is so tactile. That shit is great for kinesthetic learners (even if that visual, auditory, kinesthetic learning model is out of vogue now) that need to move their bodies through space and slap something and jump around. The big red button encouraged that, and there was no hesitation ... it's right there on the desk where you've been working so UNkinesthetically. 

I'm relatively easily stimulated and rewarded by sounds (it is part of why you could say I go through phases of addiction to video games and have been since I was in elementary school) so as a reward, the "that was easy" button functioned really well for me. For another reason, it was an EASY IMMEDIATE SYSTEM for rewarding myself by acknowledging I accomplished something. I've tried SO MANY SYSTEMS to reward myself like all of the books on ADHD and motivation tell you to do, but pretty much all of them are so time consuming and so much work to administer that they rarely worked, or if they did it was only under very specific circumstances. "That was easy" was one size fits all, and really worked so well at not requiring finishing the wrap-up complete fully-stuffed big beef end-of-quarter burrito of a whole entire PROJECT that it rewarded me WHEN I NEEDED IT (doing the painstaking SMALL STEPS of chiseling little tiny chunks, and separating big to-do's into smaller components, which, again, all of the books tell you to do but they never seem to really give you permission to micro micro micro task them into every single one of the genuinely small components -- they never give you enough lines in the workbook for that, instead it's like BREAK YOUR HUMONGOUS PROJECT DOWN INTO FIVE SUBTASKS OKAY GREAT SEE HOW EASY THAT IS?!?!? and I'm always like what? NO! Or ... oh, I must be REALLY stupid). The big red easy button never fucking told me I was stupid. It was like ... I'm here for you and I'm RED don't ignore me THAT was easy *I* am easy I am a button and you don't have to modulate your tone with me I am sturdy I can take it you can hit me whenever you want that touch of finality that's like okay you did that! And the unspoken thing that amounts to growth mindset is that I'm not minimizing your efforts, rather I am letting you know you have a level of mastery that gives me every confidence you can do more and more and more. One step at a time. One little slap of my red with white first aid text face. Like a boxing coach or a punching bag, holding up those red paws. Bap bap bap! Pff pff pff! Mgh mgh mgh! 

Patience. Practice. Nothing grandiose. Private moments encouraging you to keep doing the small things. That shit works.

See? I am not a bitch about everything.

And I do think the whole "growth mindset" thing is a big key in overcoming a lot of the anxiety and judgment that bitchiness wells out of. If I remember correctly, one of the characteristics of people like myself who do NOT have a great growth mindset is that we perceive a lot of shit as being realllly reallllly haaarrrrrrrrrd. "That was easy!" didn't make me feel like my assessments were incorrect though. It didn't make me feel stupid or like my mindset sucked ass. It just recalibrated shit. The kind of shit that I didn't think of as hard on a conscious level most of the time. It really helped me put the small things into perspective. It was built to be hammered on OVER AND OVER AND OVER lots and lots and lots and lots of times. It wasn't like "you have to do EVERYTHING, all of the HARD things, to add up to one big gigantic haaaaard ass thing before you get one big reward like a platinum keychain or a car or a massage or whatever. It was like ... yeah, that little thing MATTERED and now it's done ... I'll bet you've got another one in you but I'm not going to psych you out with my robot voice. I don't even have eyes to see you struggling. All I know is when you tell me you did it, I tell you yeah! You're capable! And that is just way fucking better than some bitch with perfect makeup on instagram who doesn't even know me sneering "you got this!".

No You Don't!

 "You got this!"

No, dumb ass. You don't got this.

They don't got this. I don't got this. Stick your bullshit vote of super-confidence right up your fucking ass.

I hate this stupid fucking thing people say to each other and themselves now when any of us are having reasonable misgivings about our qualifications to accomplish whatever, assume a risk, etc. It's the dumbest fucking shit I've ever heard. Insert eye-rolling barforama animatronic emoji react.

You hear this everywhere nowadays. It's spectacularly stupid. Some glowing POSITIVE VIBES ONLY way to shut down someone's second-guessing or insecurities with a crazed scientologist Tom Cruise blazing white toothy grin. It's a line out of the handbook for The Tyranny of The Social. Pretending everybody's equally qualified whenever they SENSIBLY consider that maybe they're not up for whatever the fuck. Pretending somebody's not going to get burned while you push them into the fire naked with that extroverted smile when those bitches know perfectly fucking well you're going to bomb and it's going to fucking hurt and you're going to cry. They don't give a fuck about that, and they won't be there with an effective salve or appropriate facial expression when that happens. Because half the time they know you are a loser and an outcast and an incompetent hypersensitive fuck-up, so they just say YOU GOT THIS to act like they support you when really all they mean is YOUR FEARS AND WORRIES AND GRIEF ABOUT WHO YOU REALLY ARE are a fucking GROSS WASTE OF TIME TO THEM and they WILL NOT BE DRAWN INto your pathetic reality or let you drag them down in your morass of mediocrity or substandard unsuitability for coolness, whether it's a burlesque performance or hitting up someone totally out of your league for a date or running for president or going cliff-diving or VAN LIFE or whatever the fuck.

I feel badly for saying it since I definitely know a lot of people a lot of times have their hearts in the right spot when they say it, and have genuinely enthusiastically supportive intentions but OMG I've never seen a bigger advertisement for anyone being totally unqualified for whatever undertaking they're about to embark on. I would rather someone say, well ... even if things go poorly you're not going to die from it, and will learn something from it. Unless of course PEOPLE COULD ACTUALLY DIE because you decided to fly a small plane at night in bad weather like JFK Jr when you were grossly underprepared, or drive a UHaul that's too big for you and you are already a shit driver.

You don't got this, fuckers. Every so often just please let's recognize. YOU DON'T FUCKING GOT THIS.

Maybe I just so totally don't got shit that I cannot even conceive of someone's confidence being bolstered by these dumb fucking words and the manner in which they are delivered and the type of people who say them. Do you know a single person who appreciated hearing this? Does this shit really work for some people? For as many people as it's said to? My god I do not fucking get it.

I am more comfortable with a lot of risk than most (women) I know, and have taken A LOT OF RISKS. All different kinds. So it is not that I'm a big fraidy-cat. But that is not the mentality or words of non-wisdom that get me to take a leap or feel good doing it. IDK. I don't fucking get it. It's just offensively fucking stupid to me. Maybe part of it is that I am comfortable taking risks and NOT feeling good or confident about it. I will still do a lot of shit. Maybe that is because I do not feel good or confident about anything in life most of the time? Who knows. All I know is this is probably a big part / example of my bitch makeup.

"GUARANTEED TO FIT"

 Oh my lord when are they going to stop making these ginormous extra-super-bulky toilet paper rolls? They say “guaranteed to fit”, but where? On one of those giant spools in a car wash?

I picked up a pack of these ridiculous “LONGER-LASTING ROLLS” and I guess good news because I can only get between one and three squares of toilet paper off of them because the roll WILL NOT SPIN; it is TOO BIG for our normal-ass toilet paper dispenser / roll-hanger thingy (what are these actually called? You know what I mean anyway…).

Yes, they’ve had the super big rolls before 2022, but they seem to have scaled it up even more because these ones are HUGE. The others before this were big, true, but Charmin has taken it to a whole new level.

Maybe it’s good. Maybe they actually will last longer (because we cannot freely ROLL the toilet paper off so, like I said, can only get a couple hard-won squares at a time). The extra-big ones before this iteration made me feel so ABUNDANT, so toilet-paper RICH, that I found myself using EXTRA while each roll was fresh. Or maybe I just wanted to reduce the uncomfortably-decadent size of the roll as fast as possible to try to just get back to some semblance of normalcy.

God forbid you take a bath with these super-sized rolls; I soaked in our small bathroom without a fan on to enjoy the steamy humidity during too many months with no rain and the toilet paper swelled up so much it almost popped itself off the hinges. We had to unmount it in order to use the paper as originally designed.

Poop Sleeve

 I am short. I have short arms. But the sweatshirts and hoodies I wear have normal-length, non-petite sleeves. And even longer sometimes, because my gut and tits are large while my arms are short, and I believe in catering to the extended size of my core and chest before my meat-deficient arms.

Having too-long shirt-sleeves is often pleasant, but also often annoying. The MOST annoying thing about having too-long sleeves, though, is after taking a messy shit.

When the elastic cuffs are sprung and the sleeve won't stay pushed up over elbow or even hug the forearm at a decent sanitary height. And I'm wiping this whole messy area ... and the sleeve slides down, brushing against my backside that may have stray fecal matter ... and the cloth comes down like foreskin over the limpening cockhead of my hand's palm and knuckles: entirely too close for comfort to the whole unsanitary area, putting the cloth at risk of retaining shit you don't want coming into contact with the edge of a a plate or ... anything ... at lunch or whatever.

I detest the exaggerated C shape I have to make with my arm trying to keep it the cloth of my sleeve out of the way, posing like a malformed coffee mug over a soft-boiled-egg cup posing as a saucer that is really a toilet and I'm just trying to describe this so you can picture it if you've never had this problem.

By the time you realize the sleeve is going DOWN mid-wipe like a baby elephant's trunk snooping around for a little brown peanut candy, it's almost impossible to catch it with the other hand in time. Sometimes I succeed, but that unpleasant sudden jolt of adrenaline to avoid sleeve-contamination really detracts from what should be a relaxing experience attending to yourself in private and makes me feel quite bitchy.

Now that I think of it, even if my sleeves weren't too long this would still create a problem owing to the whole posture and depth/length of the asscrack. 

Unmask the Glasses

 So many things to bitch about when it comes to the era of pandemic masking. But just for today, all I have to say is how awkward and gimpy and frustrated and bitchy I feel when trying to pull one mask loop off my ear ... and my glasses get pulled off my face with it.

The fumbling. The blindness. The vulnerability. The impatient inability to perform this action gracefully ... smoothly: with efficient commanding ease.

The desire to feel and swallow and gulp all the fresh air immediately upon exiting the store, and finding yourself holding up traffic fumbling to catch your glasses while your hands are full with heavy ungainly grocery bags and a purse strap your stupid fucking long hair is caught under and being pulled by before they all fall on the asphalt. 

The horrible comedic unglamorous juggling of my middle-aged ugliness. The near-blindness adding to the sensation of being genetically inferior. And I hate my hair and I hate going to lady salons and even though there is a new thing people who are supposedly like me are talking about -- "quiet appointments" -- I haven't gone inside one of these places since pre-pandemic and I so desperately do not want to that even the thought of it makes my eyes burn with hot don't-make-me saltwater. Please I am begging "you" -- the world of you -- somehow I need to find a way to be less ugly but also not attractive because the last thing I want is for people to like me enough to think they want more of me: to know more, to talk more, to be around more, to "everybody has to eat" more with each other why not let's be friends. Some kind of a face and haircut and unbudgeable unsmudgeable spectacles and uniform that say "there is something strikingly enjoyable to observe about this weirdo with their set of extreme limitations that makes them unapproachable but admirable from a distance, and lovely to interact with as a stranger under very specific unusual structures and time constraints; I would count myself lucky to exchange nonverbal greetings or rhythmic multisyllabic nonsense salutations and knowing facial grimaces with them someday but for now we shall give minimal nods acknowledging one another's strange presence on this physical plane at this moment wherein we both feel connected to shared memories of paths crossed and spaces traversed in other worlds and dreamlike dimensions. Hello human; isn't this charade we're engaged with tiresome yet hilariously absurd and even charming when we wink at one another and pretend to play along while we mark time waiting for the band to start playing the music we instinctively know to dance wildly to or get knocked into sedated delirium? God it's so fucking exhausting but I see you too have the ingredients for root beer floats and hot nachos. We will enjoy these gross foodstuffs within the privacy of our own respective hidey-holes."

Why is that so hard for everyone to understand? Because you'd be surprised how often that does actually happen. Or probably I just imagine it does. I guess. Because see I don't believe that. I know that it happens and it is real, so OF COURSE I DID NOT FIND EVERYTHING OKAY TODAY. That is to be expected. There was not a rainbow with a pot of gold and lobster at the seafood aisle end of it today, but I wasn't actually expecting it. I can't say that I had it on my list so maybe I wasn't looking for it in the way you meant (and lobster isn't the actual epitome of luxury to me, it's just a stand-in for whatever and because it is not actually my favorite would make it more like a surPRIZE since it's not something I'd ever actually put on my list and look for but caviar on the other hand) ... though I did keep myself open to being surprised by something like that) but again, if I wanted help finding something AT THE REGISTER is the last place I would ever go to try to get that help, and if I did approach the cash register as a last resort in trying to find something, I would not have placed my basket on the shelf that is too small for the baskets, and I would have said oh excuse me actually I'm looking for _____ before I check out ... could someone help me?"

I wish there were handicapped stalls close to the grocery store doors not for parking, but like large phone booths with curtains and cots; a place to hide and gather yourself for a moment when the sounds of car alarms and closeness of strangers and terrible questions like "how are you today?" and "did you find everything okay?" get to be too much and figuring out what to buy to eat when you're so hungry you could eat what you came here for without cooking it but when they're OUT of that thing you counted on and you have to come up with another plan but you can't think because you keep saying excuse me when someone else wants to look at the shelves of so many things that are not the right things and you can't process the things and you're trying to stand there and figure out but you can't figure it out and nobody else says excuse me and you just try to go to another aisle but there are people there, too, talking on their phones and not saying excuse me or even noticing anyone else while you're noticing everything but not able to filter out anything and actually process the overwhelming data and you need to buy something to eat but you can't make sense out of anything or breathe right and you just need a time out but you can't go home without food so just a little quiet dark room and little door nobody else notices except for people like us with headphones and a cot but with arms like a dentist's chair and lead-lined weighted blankets encased in hypoallergenic sanitizable coatings and it's okay if you go in there and lose your shit and cry hysterically for three minutes after which an understanding hunchback in a pistachio lab coat emerges from behind a shadowed curtain to extend a very grown-up lollipop to you filled with lickable unsalty lithium, valium, and/or CBD flavors and a paper cup you can refill over and over again with  a effervescent restorative beverage dispensed from one of those big upside-down jugs and it always makes a satisfying plunky burp-bubble sound every time you hit it without ever seeming to actually be depleted of its thick blue translucent-walled store of hydration.

What I'm really upset about is actually the way the post office laughs at you for wanting to look at the stamps and pick out special ones and needing a receipt for $1.68 after they already mocked you after you stood in line and listened to much stupider extensive useless personal asinine chatter, and you did it all for your mom (but also wanted to look at the stamps and pick out good ones for yourself, too, it seems like a small understandable thing to ask for just a moment of sticker sweetness via government-issued tiny unframed wavy-bordered art) but your mom was texting you while you were being mocked and hurrying to get home in time for your phone call that you planned for at the same time as every time but still double-checked and confirmed FIVE TIMES with her saying can we make it 5:15 instead and you didn't see it until you already rushed home robbed of stamp joy and fully made fun of all for her (but for yourself a little too, let's be honest) and had to find a way to kindly say NO I CANNOT DO THAT TODAY. I have to stay on track, especially now that I will have to waste time crying and everything is thrown off and I feel badly for not being flexible but also mad and misunderstood.

And that's why I have this blog. To prevent misunderstandings and hope nobody ever reads it. My hair is so long and ugly it gets sucked up into the metal when the seat belt retracts and almost strangles me and I have to cry for the raccoons and squirrels to come and puzzle and chew me out of there. I just want to get nailed one weekend a month by some big-dicked simpleton who is endlessly intoxicated by big tits and has virtually no refractory period in a clean-ish dark apartment with no pets or kids or laborious poly complications who just wants to feed and fuck me and act like every hour with me like that is Christmas morning with Daddy Warbucks and we have nothing to do with each others bills or routines or the dailiness of life outside of that. I don't want to hear another dog fight or guilt trip or cat fight or dumb fucking phone conversation or coded etiquette question where they ask you something you're supposed to understand they don't really want the answer to ever the fuck again. I am going to make a store full of simple magical things where weirdos can come in and look at things quietly for fifteen minutes by themselves if they want and it doesn't matter how old or young they are and if they can buy the magical things they will still fit them forever even if they gain or lose a ton of weight and I have the stuff that gets everyone wet in any color they want and it will make you live and not die at least for another day or night and I won't judge you for using cheap paper and I would give it to you for free if I can.

But if I can't have any of that, cocaine and valium will do. And you know I am crazy because everything I said before that sounds more attainable than those two specific things.

I got a subscription to the paper archives and my family names and forefathers and foremothers and side-aunts are in them going back back back back back back back back in jail bars and river cars when boys were named after summer months and bridges galloped and fell into the giant octopus depths where one of them took the pictures for the Mad Men company but not the famous pictures ... the ones on the other side. Wars and wars and lumber mills and deputized recordings. Songs and pictures and stories with voices and chin dimples I didn't know were on both sides.

Big Baby’s Righteous Bitching

 At first I was a little annoyed by the just-barely-bigger-than-a-bonafide-baby in a stroller parked at the edge of their table in the restaurant, under the corner. The parents didn’t even look at it when it screamed; placid, they just kept eating.

I was proud of myself for not being MORE irritated than I was. It wasn’t even close to ruining the pricey summer lunch meal my wife and I were sharing; the first time she finally got to eat in this place I told her was pretty great. I was so happy we got my favorite table in the corner even though they were very busy: not totally slammed, but close.

Other than the big stroller baby and the scorched lentils on top of my vegan lasagna that was way prettier and saucier the other two times I got it, everything was pretty much perfect. There was the perfect amount of noise/conversation, and like I said, my favorite table in the BEST corner with me tucked as deep into untouchableness as anyone could get in the joint had me pretty blissed out.

While I ate and the big baby screeched like a parrot hitting puberty every other minute, I realized I wasn’t irritated with the big baby at all. I was irritated at the parents who were in the opposite of a staring contest with each other; “who can act completely deaf / ignore the big baby’s demands with the most chill while completely avoiding eye contact with anybody in the room, each other, and, of course, big baby below table level?”

Then I realized I wasn’t irritated at the parents on behalf of myself as a diner. I was irritated on behalf of the big baby; it has to fucking suck to WANT to eat, to be SURROUNDED by people eating … but be at the mercy of those big assholes hoarding all the food, waiting for them to fucking feed you. Like … if you don’t screech, they’re not giving you another fucking spoonful. And since you don’t have words you can’t specify WHAT you want. I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier and more resentful, not having any way to keep a steady flow of food coming, having to make these awful noises for anyone to even notice I am under the table and would like to eat too. I chewed it! I swallowed it!! I’m WAITING, bitches!! It’s not fair, you getting five bites to my ONE :( :( :( >:( >:(>:( Like, FINE, you don’t have to change your expression to acknowledge me as a human at this table — I fucking prefer it that way — but KEEP THE FOOD COMING, CUNTHOLES.

The parents’ expressionless silence was preferable to listening to them trying to reason with the big baby to be quiet or addressing it in cute voices (or worse, talking to each other or on their phones OVER the sound of the big baby), but it allowed for the big baby’s frustration to really take center stage and maybe forced me to have more empathy and really HEAR and UNDERSTAND what the big baby was trying to communicate more than I otherwise might have.

This quotation I read today is what reminded me of my sympathy for the big baby at our meal out last week-ish: 

"I understand keenly why babies are such inconsolable and miserable bastards sometimes." - Jarred McGinnis, “I’m a father in a wheelchair” - The Guardian

It sucks to not be able to do basic shit for yourself.

RECREATIONS *Should* actually require SOME CREATION

 So I’m reading about a cool-sounding little “art” project a woman did where she made an Instagram account specifically to post every image suggested in a funny song. The title of her post about it is

“I recreated [so-and-so’s] [song about a certain kind of influencer’s social media feed]”.

It sounded cool to me because the way she hyped it;

“I decided to do an interactive adaptation of the lyrics”

So it sounded like she was going on a real life scavenger hunt for all of these quirky things (that the song was making fun of) and was going to experience them and share snapshots from the way she experienced them in her personal life and location. 

Turns out she mostly just used royalty-free images off Unsplash.com for her ambitious art project. On one of many misspellings of the song title since a bunch of other people had the same idea she did (FIRST, *before* she did) so the usernames matching the song title in dozens of permutations were already taken. She describes finding and registering an account name for her super unoriginal concept as “the hardest part of this art project”. It’s … I don’t … wow?!? So I guess we should all give more credit to trolls, catfish, sock puppets and fan accounts for actually putting way more effort and creativity into their handles and that making it through the exceedingly difficult obstacle courses of registering them on SM sites.

As someone who started self-producing content and blogging in 2001 (before Twitter or YouTube or Instagram or camera phones like we have today existed), everything post-Tumblr smacks of this bullshit. Bitches think they’re fucking “curating” shit when they just snatch and steal and repost stuff according to a theme. 

The bar for what people apply words like “art” and “interactive” and “evergreen” and “create” to IS SO FUCKING LOW AND STUPID, the words don’t even mean anything anymore. Which really devalues the work of people who ACTUALLY DO CREATE STUFF or at least put in a modicum of effort, and make themselves vulnerable in the meantime.

It’s especially offensive when the whole point of this is to make fun of women who post frothy foam designs on their fancy coffees, etc. Okay … yeah, that shit is insipid and overdone and maybe sort of begs to be mocked, but what the fuck is wrong with you that you’d waste time looking up and downloading images you have no personal connection to and have the audacity to call it an “art project”? “Recreate” implies actually … creating something. Not just finding creations that already exist. Like … put your own fucking spin on it (maybe do a goth version, or bokeh-fied version, or dirty realism version, or middle of the night version, or even AI art version). Otherwise, why even bother? And how can you possibly BRAG about it under the premise of DEMEANING WOMEN WHO ACTUALLY DID MAKE CONTENT FROM THEIR OWN LIVES? Sure, fucking complain to your fellow lazy bitch friends about how silly they are if you want to, but WHAT THE FUCK MAKES YOU SUPERIOR?

She also brags about her planning and execution in rolling out the posts so they would appear in the same order as the song lyrics, meaning she had to (wow get ready to be blown away) POST BACKWARDS. Well fucking congratulations, asshole. Influencers and content creators regularly do that kind of admin and planning WHILE ACTUALLY CREATING THEIR OWN CONTENT. They frequently line up their content and schedule it down to the minute to roll out according to when it will perform best, to tell a coherent story, to ACTUALLY BE ENGAGING AND ENCOURAGE FOR-REAL INTERACTION, etc. It is A LOT OF WORK. No matter how “basic” you think the actually is. So fucking insulting. At this point you’d think she’d give the people she and her comedian-idol are making fun of some fucking props, like “wow, this is a lot harder than I thought it would be! AND I’M NOT EVEN MAKING ANYTHING!!!!”

I am actually tempted to do this project for real-for real. And I think the reasons I want to do it double as the reasons I have such a strong adverse reaction to this woman’s insulting lazy-ass unfair-credit-taking mock-up; three of my “signature strengths” are *Love of Learning, *Curiosity, and *Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence. So to me, right there are three fine motives for really and truly RE-CREATING all of the things listed in the song. To have a window into someone else’s life and values, find beauty in it and mutate it to reflect YOU and where you live or at least a different aesthetic or doing it all on a budget or for free, and to see my own life through different eyes. What would one of these “basic bitches” do in my shoes, where I live, with my tools and budget. And you don’t even have to come up with a list of things to do; the list is made for you, and you get to go forth and discover how it would look if you did it (and whether it really is so fucking easy and laughable to do this shit, and IF SO actually have researched it to have data backing up why it’s all so lame or whatever … like even just “wow this was really soul-sucking pretending to be this person with such standardized routines and visions” or “man if you are poor it is impossible to do this shit”).

The only reason I can think of that she did this and wrote about it is if Unsplash paid her to. Which opens up a whole other piece of less-judgey and actually-worthwhile critical-bitch thinking: is sponsored and commissioned content better or worse than content created by folks promoting their own brand and products (and/or egos)? And why do people get SO MUCH FUCKING MADDER AND JUDGIER when IT IS CLEARLY “self”-promotion that creators directly get paid for FROM THEIR AUDIENCE versus shit that’s shaped and molded by a sponsor with much less transparency, consistency, and authenticity?

To be fair, she does throw in some humility at the end, calling the end result “trivial”, but I couldn’t tell if the end result she’s referring to is her IG art grid or the less-than-stellar number of followers and likes she got.

I may be extra-resentful about this one for a couple of reasons; on top of being the kind of creator who has worked very hard making my own super-personal content (and feeling like I have to apologize for trying to be compensated for it AND being judged by bitches like this who just sit on the sidelines fully-dressed “curating” shit and writing critical think-pieces, laughing at women who showcase their own lives, faces, and bodies in their work), the whole reason I saw this lame-ass “art project” write-up is because I liked something else she wrote and subscribed to her … and noticed that she has really excellent placement on the site for writers where I found her AND has accomplished MORE WINS in contests than anyone else I’ve seen on the site. It made me think less of what I read of her before and really liked; even though I’m pretty sure that other piece was really funny and well-written and self-created, THIS piece made me think NAH — she made that shit up and was being phony and probably didn’t even really earn all her wins. She’s just one of the site’s darlings (and I didn’t even know they had darlings; I still don’t, but BECAUSE OF THIS PIECE making this one writer come off as an overrated untrustworthy fraud, that is what I think now). A lot of her posts, now that I look at them, look like they're hyping the site in ways that make her wins look highly suspect (but it's very possible she is just doing a good job of creating the kind of specific content people on the site want to read, and/or that her well-earned wins got her some sponsorship maybe).

The whole thing makes me feel disillusioned. It’s not that I had such high regard for the quality of writing on the site — that’s not even it; there are a lot of rank amateurs, and that’s part of what makes it cool — it is that SHE IS BRAGGING ABOUT THE (NON) WORK / “ART” SHE “MADE” ****MAKING FUN**** of a whole bunch of other people’s real (and personal) work. It’s fucking gross.

CLAIMED: Whole Entire World is Other People's Phone Booth

I fucking hate people who exist EVERYWHERE on their phones with zero consideration of others, complete lack of self-awareness, no respect for space, and/or outsized pride at broadcasting their private and/or totally fucking boring phone calls. EVERY WHERE YOU GO, it's like trying to buy a .com these days: THIS DOMAIN IS TAKEN. How about (dot)crusty instead? How about you just relegate yourself to a SUBDOMAIN of the paradise that we *could* enjoy or create?

I know I've bitched about this before but summer requires revisiting it. The season of open windows in Washington state where most of us still don't have air conditioning but all of us really fucking need it starting LAST YEAR, sometime *before* that insane fucking heat dome, and NOW with the clear and present danger of it getting way fucking worse.

And people marching jogging wheeling cycling or even just STANDING under your windows, in the street, yackyackyackyackyackyackMWARHARHARHAAAA-LISTEN-TO-MY-OBVIOUSLY-FAKE-ASS-EXAGGERATED-EMPTY-SOULED-PERFORMANCE-LAUGHTER //inhale bitter shallow breath quickly through nose// yackayckayckayacyaka;kljasd;flkjas;dlfkjafd;io;ujidfakadfjslfdsl;adfklfdsl;

I promise I don't just bitch about it though. I fantasize about and envision solutions. And not just nasty violent ones, either! I think about how I grew up with PHONE BOOTHS: things that had DOORS ON THEM EVEN so they weren't just there to protect the telephone and cabled-on-phone-book from the elements, but ALSO TO PROVIDE THIS NOW-COMPLETELY-DEVALUED UNDESIGNED-FOR THING CALLED *****PRIVACY*****.

Oh, I know, there is a new very expensive fancy trend in open offices to finally provide little fish bowls within these spaces for such things, but it's not catching on as fast as it should, it's not affordable, and it's not recognized as a beneficial thing to build into other communal spaces or to have on offer or just to put on display as a suggestive hint. And it's certainly not a *requirement*. And now with pandemic there is the problem of needing to mitigate or eliminate the lack of air circulation.

I did read a novel that gave me some hope: TELL THE MACHINE GOODNIGHT by Katie Williams casually included wonderful phone booths in the near-future. I don't remember now what she called them, so let this be an excuse for me to re-read it.

So here's another idea: MOVING WALKWAYS. Like in airports. In big soundproof or somewhat-removed spaces (like dead malls?). Go to them to take your walk. Go be with one another, phone-talking-addicts.

Of course they won't do it, and in this era of people on all sides angrily refusing to give up a single selfish entitlement or make even the smallest concession to letting CLEAN UNDISEASED AIR or QUIET or DARKNESS be the default and it being SUGGESTED if they want to stray from that, that they make some small effort to contain their infectious noises, bright screens, or lung ejaculate, they feel SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OPPPPPPPRESSSSSSSSSED because it is their CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT (they think) TO DESTROY EVERY NOOK AND CRANNY OF PEACE OR SAFETY we "snowflakes" try to secure. THERE SIMPLY MUST NOT BE A SINGLE PLACE WHERE THEY ARE LOCKED OUT: the noisemakers, the spewers, the flip-flop-loogie-hauck boys, the busybody know-it-all next-door gossip tattle cunts, the IMPORTANT MOVERS AND SHAKERS on their fucking VIDEO CONS in every fucking eating and drinking and book-reading establishment you try to get a break in.

Can I really be surprised though when people seem to have lost the ability to prioritize RESTROOMS in their rush to LOUDLY USE ALL OF THE SHINY NEW-MODEL POLLUTION MACHINES while infrastructure under our feet and tires crumbles? I guess that's where I need to continue to refocus: we need to design the horrible cities and bullshit "communities" we are all being forced to live in with each other to at least have CLEAN WATER FOR EVERYONE, and 24/7 safe publicly accessible places to SHIT, SHOWER AND SLEEP, and reliable safe free public transportation to unburden and unclog roads and bridges. Otherwise? How can we hope to live in anything but each other's raw fucking sewage, exhaust and noisy insanity?

The Bird Does a Flyover after a Close Call

 Waiting for our turn at a red light at the same time a wiry but well-muscled pedestrian stood at the crosswalk, also waiting for the light to change. He wore tight charcoal jeans, had a grey 3/4-length zz-top beard and looked like he might’ve been heading to the boatyard or marina to get on his efficiently-tuned made-for-one-man-only flat-black motorcyle-boat.

The light changed and he started to step out into the crosswalk when A BIG RED PICKUP TRUCK FLEW THROUGH THE INTERSECTION. The motorcycle-boat-man yelled a HEY FUCK YOU!!!! As he jumped into the crosswalk and raised his tan flesh-machined arm for a very pointed single-finger salute that followed the truck until they escaped from view.

If he hadn’t had his wits about him, the truck would’ve hit him.

My heart soared, though, when I saw this man make such a solid show of protesting as much as he could in the moment. I can’t remember the last time I saw a pedestrian get that mad and flip the bird at a driver (other than the last times I have, which are fairly frequent and recent; I probably do it at least once or twice a month). 

You can’t fucking trust people. It’s not enough to get the signal. It’s not enough to wait your turn and go when your light turns green. People think the rules aren’t for them. They don’t give a fuck about consequences or are ignorant that anyone exists other than them and their busy schedules of getting another beer or fancy coffee.

ALWAYS look both fucking ways. Up, down, sideways … check your blind spots. And whenever you can … flip off the fuckers that would’ve killed you if you hadn’t been paying attention.

Contrary to Murakami: Bitch Thoughts on Books

 I love reading Haruki Murakami. Especially his shorts. But the other day when running up to the library book drop to return a stack of books (totally late/overdue), I noticed a quotation posted in their little display of announcements and such:

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. 

And I BALKED at it. My insides BALKED.

Because even when I read the books other people read, I always seem to think different thoughts about those books than other people. Maybe it's a bitch thing. Maybe I'm stupid. I don't know. But I frequently find myself not thinking the same thoughts in response to the same books.

Okay, I get it. That's not really the point of what he's saying. Which I probably do agree with. Like the most-read books of all time are The Bible, Chairman Mao's quotations, and Harry fucking Potter (which I read specifically because so many other people did, and it felt/feels important and useful to be able to talk about pop culture phenoms and be able to share something millions of people are familiar with; that's how I feel about religious texts too, and wisdom-filled propaganda that shapes generations of people's lives).

I guess I should be inspired by the point of Murakami's words, which I *think* is that you want to read a lot of shit that most of the average people aren't reading so you can have a bigger library of thoughts than other people and think things that aren't already being thunk and stuff. More doors will be open to you.

Maybe that's why I think different thoughts about the same exact books everybody else is reading, though; because I've read a lot of books that they haven't, and those thoughts inform and expand my brain's experience of, like, The Holy Bible and Harry Potter.

Before you DM ...

 OnlyFans is a great platform in so many ways, and rife with features we could only dream of back in my camgirl heyday. And I love most of my "fans"!

The system would be a lot better, though, if the DM function would not be enabled from fan  > to creator until AFTER said fan has demonstrated mastery of the TIP function, or at least the HEART/like function.

I wish they had a forced tutorial like in games. And if you ever want to send a DM, you need to demonstrate mastery of the other functions FIRST.

Don't fucking DM me, saying HI. Telling me -- totally fucking unsolicited -- what you want more of, what you KNOW my other customers would just LOVE (because you, dumb fuck, think you speak for them?) without ramping up to it with dollars. I don't fucking want to hear it. You stupid timewasting motherfuckers.

And please don't fucking brag like you're my biggest fan because you've been jerking off to my shit for free for a decade. Your gross freeloader jizz score is not flattering, moron, and is WORSE than useless.

Shitty Search Results ... Even on Bookworm Sites :(

 I know I should be over search engine & algorithm etc shenanigans, but I feel like Goodreads didn't used to be like this; I typed in INHERITORS (the entire title of hardcover book published in 2020 checked out from public library so ... not like a zine with no ISBN that someone mimeographed 99 copies of in the 1970s and distributed by hand at one rally in Topeka, KS) and seven books that don't even have that specific word show up before this one that I'm looking for! 

Instead we see

1. The Art of Inheriting Secrets
2. It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle
3. Inherit the Wind
4. The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School
5. Inherit the Night (Gentleman Bastard, #7)
6. Inheriting Edith
7. Fables, Vol. 17: Inherit the Wind

Allllllll of that fucking bullshit before we get to what I'm looking for:

Inheritors

by Asako Serizawa

This shit shouldn't surprise and enrage me every time it happens after almost two entire decades of google cunting up anybody looking for my super-campy, super-specific, super-not-used-by-anyone-else performance name which is also my domain name which is obviously what someone is looking for when they type it in. But search engines don't care what you -- THE SEEKER -- are really looking for; they only care about people paying for ad placement and fake sites with fake content designed and composed with nonsense to be "optimized" for search engine placement to make it APPEAR you have what people are looking for so just a bunch of maniacally repeated keywords and redundant bullshit phrases. And if you are in any way pornographic, it's pretty much impossible to even pay to be ranked higher by search engines.

But that's not what the problem is with Goodreads. I'm guessing search just got shittier when they (had to) give/gave in to Amazon. I could be wrong, though. And it's such a pointless losing game of frustration to dig deeper (and the algorithms chance so frequently) that I don't want to bother researching it.

Is part of the problem that maybe most people do not bother to type what they're looking for in full and/or correctly, and everything is adjusted for that? Which is fucking STUPID, even if true, since if someone types a real word into a fucking BOOK search engine that corresponds EXACTLY with an actual fucking BOOK that exists on that site ... JESUS. 

It's like the generational difference I notice between someone my age (49 in 2002 / born in 1973) vs people ten or twenty years younger than I am; when they watch me search for, say, a video on YouTube and get annoyed when I keep typing instead of fucking pausing after a couple of letters for autocomplete / predictive text / what-have-you to GUESS what I'm looking for (tell me I don't know what I want and suggest some other popular bullshit I'm not even looking for man I need to write a few jokes / hilarious examples here) ... I fear there are, like, two+ generations of people at this point who grew up with shit being fucked up like this, that they're waiting TO BE TOLD what they're looking for. That they don't ever even know, that they're just completely conditioned to feel a vague interest in something then LET THE MACHINES tell them what it SHOULD be before they've even fully formulated any actual desire or clarified any genuine need. It's scary as fuck. And, for better or worse, it's also fucking untrue because kids these days ... the way these fuckers will drill down to micronuanced minutiae ... JFC.

Side-by-Side SEA LEVEL stupidheads

 Check out this bullshit fact-checking news flash:

Side-by-side photo comparison can't determine sea level change, scientists and fact-checkers report / Twitter

NO SHIT, motherfuckers?!? You need someone to explain to you about fucking TIDES?!?

Apparently so. Apparently a whole shitload of people are so ignorant and easily-bamboozled, they think some dumb-ass then-and-now comparison photos taken in the same place are proof that climate change isn’t real, the glaciers aren’t melting, etc. NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT HERE. All that’s just “fake news”, and we have the photos to prove it! Can’t argue with that! Or so they aggressively slobber.

But how willfully ignorant am *I* that any of this still surprises me? That it raises my heart rate in frustration? Everything about the Facebook-meets-Trump era has confirmed that a dangerously large portion of the population is under-educated, media-illiterate and easily-manipulated. Even the smart and literate ones *want* to believe — are bound and DETERMINED to believe or at least fanatically embrace and repeat — whatever serves their lazy-ass or evil-motivated agendas of fear, hate and/or violently self-serving power-and-resource-hoarding consume-for-the-moment and prep-for-JESUS’-second-coming (a deluded fantasy cooked up fairly recently in Christianity’s timeline and popularized for profit and the powerful thrill of twisting weak minds by charlatans in the 1970s). So why do I bother getting mad and bitching about each demonstration of people’s idiocy?

*****

The good news is I paused and stopped before re-tweeting a link to this featured moment:

Let's try to not be so willfully ignorant. There is no excuse for most people to fall for & buy into this level of stupidity, or to be able to manipulate people with such incredible bullshit dumbassness.

THE TIDE. People haven't heard of it? JFC.

The (other) good news is I stopped to think about why I know about tides; I live and grew up in Western Washington where lots of stores of all different types SOLD tide tables on prominent display right by the cash registers, I had the privilege of taking Marine Biology in high school and Oceanography in college, my parents taught us things like which directions the sun rise and set at and took us outside to see meteor showers, and the newspapers had tide tables printed inside them too along with the weather so even if you didn’t experience for yourself what low tide smells like, you knew about this phenomenon of saltwater rising and falling to wildly varying levels and that fishermen and people with boats — of which there are many of both around here — need this information for safe travels and good fishing.

I wasn’t born with any measurable knowledge of tides (beyond the possibility that some of this information is programmed into us as animals living on this blue planet), and neither was anybody else. So even if tides are an observable phenomenon, maybe I’m just lucky to know better than take side-by-side photos of water levels someplace as evidence that sea levels haven’t changed / aren’t changing.

Point is, REACTING and calling people stupid may not be entirely fair and for sure is not the best tactic for getting people to learn.

It’s just so fucking gross though when the same people are shown images of water levels dropped dramatically and dangerously low in reservoirs like Lake Mead (the largest reservoir in the US in terms of water capacity) and they just … ignore it. Don’t bother to see that as evidence that WE ARE FUCKING OURSELVES quickly towards a parched inferno of hellish tortured extinction.

Or not shown. The truth is most people are not shown these images; it is not reported on in the news EVERY FUCKING DAY like the dire warnings this shit should be. It is not sexy, it is grim and people feel very motivated to stay in denial and seize any picture of reassurance some unethical shills will feed them.

Real Time Off for Bitches

I'm learning how much "bitchier" I am when/because I don't get any restorative thoroughly-hermitted solitary uninterrupted non-working flowy dreamy introvert time off.

I'm working on accepting what I truly need for restful leisure time, how much of it I need, how often I need it ... and actually PLANNING for, RESOLVING to, and TAKING IT.

The truth is I have been punished (all introverts and neuro-divergent/non-neurotypical or highly sensitive people are punished) for needing solitude, and choosing it. Enjoying it. "Rejecting" other people in favor of time alone.

It has taken me decades of experience (I'm almost fifty) and a lot of recent learning to understand THIS IS NOT A CHARACTER FLAW. It is the way I am wired. I am not less-deserving of rest and leisure than other people. I am not "selfish" for needing it. AND I AM NOT A BITCH just because I am wired this way: to love sleeping alone and spending whole days reading without talking to anybody.

But I *am* a serious fucking hardcore bitch-ass crazy person when I do not get it. So no matter how you slice it, it is a *need* if I am going to function in this world and/or have to interact with people at all, ever.

So after I post this and do the dishes ... I am going into serious staycation airplane mode for one day and a couple of nights, all by myself. At home (my wife is traveling for work / just left this afternoon).

I have done a very poor job of prioritizing this kind of time off. I have felt guilty and ashamed of it, and not PLANNED on it the way other plan weekends full of partying and potlucks and catching up with friends and family. Not taking care of myself -- forcing myself to do social work as a "reward" when I take time away from paying work -- has led to a lot of suffering. For me, AND for the people who love me.

I'm almost fifty and I don't want to go into my golden years just being a tired prickly bitch. I want to be happy and healthy and radiant! If people think resting and enjoying myself in my off time makes me a bitch, so be it. But I'm not seeing or responding to or getting any kind of notifications tomorrow from people communicating that kind of bullshit, demanding I be accessible to them. Time off means being fortified by DO NOT DISTURB signs and boundaries alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll around my entire being.

This stuff is super fucking central to this idea of what makes someone a "bitch".

THE TURN OF THE SCREWY HOSE/FAUCET

 You know how you estimate time for little itty bitty simple chores, not counting on them being more complex and multi-faceted with unforeseen challenges?

Yeah … I know you do. I may have bitched about this before, especially when those little nothing-to-it chores are HOUSEWORK in the domain of devalued women’s (bitch’s) work.

It’s especially frustrating when these tasks are viewed as so little and simple that any dummy should be able to knock them out with effortless speed and efficiency without breaking a sweat or frizzing a hair, all while also participating in a conference call, polishing nails, and preparing and consuming a healthy snack (hint: the most efficient way for the successful woman to eat is to create a video for social media showcasing the simple ingredients list, shopping and preparation, and save time and reduce calories by skipping the steps of eating, savoring and digesting it).

Anyway. It’s summer, so I have that simple (not) dum-dum (not) WATER POTTED PLANTS OUTSIDE tasks on my to-do list. It should be intrinsically rewarding! A breath of fresh air! Not really a chore at all! So full of fucking gratitude for the water and the plants and the going out of doors when other people are stuck in offices standing around water coolers getting paid to gossip and throw back complimentary work-provided coffee and cake every other day for some lazy coworker’s birthday whose name they don’t even know!!!

But it’s my first backyard-watering of the year after winter and a very long and (thankfully) wet spring. So the hose is still disconnected. And the faucet is hidden behind overgrown weeds and extra bushed-out bushes. So I have to trim some of that back.

Then I have to uncoil the hose and straighten it out, in part to prevent me attaching it to the faucet and inadvertently tying it in (a) knot(s) and making it more difficult to unravel once attached. So I get the hose untangled from itself (and in so doing have to tear through and pull up long weedy grass clumps that have grown around the hose; somehow the blades of grass are like long necklace-chain arms that have clasped their hands together, holding on tight to the hose they encircle).

After untangling the hose from itself and the self-weaving grasses, I have to crouch down low to the ground to ATTACH THE HOSE TO THE FAUCET (an extra task I actually recognized as being a real chore of its own and added as a line item to my to-do list, because I am getting better at this: breaking tasks down into subtasks, acknowledging each of them as real work, and giving myself credit for doing each of them, even if I’m still not a pro at setting aside enough time for the inevitable complications) and the hastily pruned branches of the clipped-back brushery scratches the tops of my hands. My squatting muscles are weak and flimsy … I’m shaking and tipping over very quickly as I clink around trying to fit the hose to the faucet when the screwy hose-opening doesn’t even seem bigger-enough than the faucet-screwy.

I can’t remember which way to turn the hose-screwy to attach it to the faucet-screwy. YES I know righty-tighty, lefty-loosey! But is it right from MY vantage point? Or from the faucet’s? I vaguely remember this hose-to-faucet thing being one of those exceptions to the rules, or a *complicating footnote or something to reference in a manual’s appendix (#for certain models of screwy things, see appendix 3b for wall-mounted jars and pipe-shaped lids).

I try a few revolutions this way (counter-clockwise from my perspective) but give up quickly when it the hose gains no purchase on the faucet, then a few revolutions the other way (clockwise, it looks like) which seems to get it threaded so I keep turning hopefully, then do a test-pull and of course I’ve just been clinkily screwing air.

At this point I shift from squatting to kneeling, thereby soiling my pants (the knees and calves, dumbass — I did not shit myself … this time) so I can get a closer look at the couplings with my extremely visually-impaired genetically-inferior eyes. This accomplishes nothing, providing zero clarifying details.

I don’t want to squander all of my squat and screw muscles without knowing and being fully-confident of the correct way to turn the hose onto the faucet, so I decide to switch to attempting to screw and unscrew hoses by the front of the house on a more easily-accessible faucet installed higher by an unobscured corner without pokey shrubbery.

This, too, proves more complicated than I imagined. While I attached this hose only a couple weeks ago, I do not remember which direction I did it, and I do not know if our landlord left the water off or on so now I am also confused about which direction to turn the actual knob to unleash or stop the flow of water. This faucet is newer and shinier and I seem to have connected it very tightly, so now when I fail to unscrew the hose I’m not sure if it’s because I’m going the wrong direction or because it’s just on there really tight. I do not know if I am making it worse/tighter. I do not know if I am making it better/looser, and in so doing if I’m about to get drenched with water. I put my ear close to see if I can hear anything, but on the other side of this wall is the washing machine where I (very efficiently) began a load of laundry right before I tackled this hose task-turned-project so I can’t tell whether the running-water noises are connected to this outside faucet or the inside washer.

I try spinning the blue-snowflake knob to see if water squeezes out  or changes the sound of things or makes the hose fatter or skinnier but I can’t make any sense of it and go back and forth and back and forth: right, left, right, left, right, left. Some water gushes out and I can’t get a firm-enough grasp on the shiny screwy metal parts to loosen the hose from the faucet, so I go to get some grippy garden gloves. But along the way I take a detour to google this shit.

Which way do you turn a hose to unscrew it, which direction to you screw on a hose when facing faucet, etc. But all the results are for videos of how to loosen a stuck-on hose or unclear explanations containing information I already had: lefty loosey right tighty, and counter-clockwise to unscrew, clockwise to screw on … but with no information about which way you’re oriented relative to a faucet, rendering these words totally fucking useless. Like … which thing is the lid and which thing is the jar? I think the hose is the lid and the faucet is the jar, but it still isn’t working. I mean … with a jar the only way to orient yourself incorrectly is to fucking turn the jar itself upside down and try to put the lid on the threadless closed-bottom of the fucker. This problem is a lot like trying to tell a new incompatible sex friend which side of the bed is his and which side IS MINE; you take the left side, the right side is mine (but *he* thinks I mean the right side when you're OUTSIDE of the bed, oriented from the foot of the bed instead of from the perspective of being IN the bed, seated against the headboard). Is this like stage left and stage right? I don't know. I am not an actor. I am a bitch trying to get a job done, and everything should be oriented according to MY operational vantage point.

I gave up on the internet answering my question, put the gloves on, used some elbow grease … and finally figured it out.

So the plants did eventually get some water, but I’ll be damned if I can remember now what the answer is; the very next day and I’ve already forgotten which way to screw a hose onto a dumb-ass faucet.

No Tree Cutting for Californians

 As the climate changes for the worse (more dramatic, hotter, EXTREME) and sea levels rise and eat up land, we need to do more to preserve TREES. Not just “old growth” trees, but even (especially?) patches of air-filtering, cooling whatever-trees within neighborhoods.

I’ve lived in the Puget Sound region my whole entire life. Almost fifty years. With four generations of Washingtonians preceding me (and three of those generations being ancestors I knew and heard stories from), I have perspective most of my neighbors do not. Actually, now that I think of it, ALL of the neighbors I know are originally from out of state. I am curious now to find out how rare and relatively-“expert” my perspective truly is because just writing this now I’m aware it is even more valuable and unusual than I loosely, resentfully suspected. Over the course of my lifetime I’ve seen over-development, massive loss of habitat, and extreme weather events along with disasters caused by all of these things coming together to shit on everybody.

My whole life I’ve seen the media REFUSE to connect the dots between flooding and deforestation. Between landslides and overdevelopment. They’re always like “wow lots of rain CAUSED this” with no mention of any other contributing factors. As though humans didn’t bring the shit on themselves. No it was RAIN! That completely unanticipated natural and LIFE-SUSTAINING NECESSITY. That people (especially fuckers who do not even belong here) ungratefully view as a disaster in itself.

I’m trying to funnel most of today’s / this year’s bitching about this into a fictionalized version inspired by real events / my current bitch-ass suffering. But I had to come here and vent a little because it is SUPER CLEAR that one thing we need to do as resources like water, clean air, and land/living space that is cool enough to sustain life become more and more scarce is GET FUCKING SERIOUS.

Between some pretentious fake-ass fuckers from California and a loud-ass cockholster from Pennsylvania, two+ treed lots next door to us were recently leveled. They made no attempt to preserve ANY of the trees on “their” new-to-them property (and even made sure to rip up and chainsaw down a bunch of trees and habitat surrounding “their” property).

We’ve been directly impacted in a shit-ton of ways with absolutely no meaningful mitigation, but what is even worse is the way the whole neighborhood will continue to be impacted in upcoming decades. All in a town-sized city that pretends to care about the environment. A city that is *obsessed* with regulating people and businesses in some ways, but not where it really matters.

It’s time to get serious as lakes and rivers and reservoirs (and freedoms) dry up and more and more people from California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, etc. inevitably move up here; those ignorant, clueless &/or uncaring fuckers — especially those rich fuckers — should NOT be allowed to cut down a single fucking tree to build *anything*, to buy anything, to expand anything, or to live or profit on themselves. We need to stop making it so easy for them. At the very least it needs to cost more, and a meaningful amount of that money needs to go to those who ARE local, who were here first, to at least provide some kind of compensation and future care for the shit storms that are raining down on us.

The heat dome last year was a huge wake-up call, but when you have fuckers from out of state who’ve experienced Chicago heat or LA heat or fucking Phoenix desert heat … they don’t fucking get it. They DO NOT FUCKING GRASP how absolutely abnormal this shit is for this land here, or the humidity. OR HOW MANY PEOPLE (and birds, and crops, etc.) DIED OR GOT VERY VERY SICK AND SUFFERED. They did not perceive it as life-threatening or a dire warning.

The heat dome last year and listening to motherfuckers WHO ARE NOT FROM HERE AND/OR DON’T EVEN LIVE HERE diminish the severity of it was an event like C19 where people’s reactions and behaviors in response to it were worse for me than the event itself. 

Don’t move up or over here with your dumb ass selves and destroy resources and set more shit on fire. You should never be given that opportunity in this century going forward. Don’t comment. Don’t legislate. Don’t regulate. Don’t SEIZE AND DESTROY.

We need trees. For clean air. For clean water. For *safety*. For cooling. For SURVIVAL.

God almighty I fucking hate people. If you are hell-bent on killing yourselves or just living a miserable near-death existence … FINE. But do you have to take every living thing around you with you?

Old Bitches Want PLEASANT TV: a (Partial) Tale of Two Grandmas

 I’ve turned into my grandma. But mot the sweet one I was named after. No, I’ve turned into the grandma I actually take after. Solitaire-playing scowly owl-faced big-ass gunny-sack-tits-under-her-housecoat grandma.

The grandma I was named after decorated cakes, played piano for schoolchildren, and fried chicken at midnight for friends in need of borrowing Grandpa’s tools. I’ve got her middle name, but I inherited my actual bitch personality from the other grandma, the one who chain-smoked and went fishing (and drinking) alone, catching big fish and being pulled over waterfalls … reeling them in without her cigarette even getting wet.

But that was before I knew her. She’d aged out of fishing and drinking by the time I knew her. Playing cards in her old-lady apartment, collecting adorable knick-knacks my daddy bought her: birds, kitty-cat, Hummel figurines …. detailed little treasures I wish I could picture more clearly now.

This grouchy loner grandma I took after had tastes that didn’t line up with her bitchy personality; sure she read thick bestselling historical fiction by James Michener, but she also devoured romance novels. Thin cranked-out sexless “Harlequin Presents” titles. Her crackly voice sounded the most joyful (and least bitchy) when she called daddy by his little boy nickname … and somehow managed to make it sound like a guilt trip for him at the same time.

My sweet grandma I was named after got her silver-white hair set in bubbly rolls and wore housecoats that were soft cozy pink velour with embroidered pastel flowers appliquéd above her breasts. But the grandma I take after had peppered pewter hair chopped off mid-neck, sticking straight out like a greasy bird’s tail feathers. The drab powder-blue fabric of her housecoats was thin, like cheap sheets with skeletal white flowers reverse-tattooed by some cold kind of soldering iron freeze-burning all the blue out of the cloth leaving behind decorations of white scars serving as chalky ribbons denoting time served as a matron: the chest candy of an old woman.

I’ve turned into this grandma I remember barking at me in the care center where she went to slowly die of lung cancer, complaining about how there wasn’t anything good to watch on TV. When I suggested a riveting program to her, she acted like I’d suggested flaying her flakey skin with pus-coated razor blades for fun. “WHY IN THE HELL WOULD I WANT TO WATCH THAT DEPRESSING SHIT?!? CAN’T THEY MAKE ANYTHING ***NICE*** ANYMORE?!? EVERYTHING HAS TO BE SO VIOLENT!!!”

This from the same woman my dad and his twin sister would recall yanking Daddy out of bed as a child in the middle of the night just to beat him. When they asked her WHY she said just because she felt like it.

Fortunately I do not have any kids to test my worst genetic tendencies. What I do have though is a growing resentment of alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the super-dramatic crisis-riddled conflict-heavy tears-to-the-eyes hyper-realistic “binge-worthy” “entertainment” we have to choose from. I’m so fucking sick of it, and how hard it is to just find something PLEASANT to watch. I want to relax, not be sucked into the tortured lives of imaginary characters just SUFFERING and being threatened and enduring frightening soul-sucking depressing PROBLEM after ATTACK after LOSS after INJURY after NAIL-BITING CONFRONTATION in ULTRA HD 4K SUPERMAX DETAIL. I don’t want to be on the edge of my seat. I want to watch something funny with someone familiar who wants me to have sweet dreams, not nightmares.

I am not one who appreciates the segregation of people from different age groups, but this desire for “pleasant” entertainment instead of stress-inducing media is, to me, something older people crave more than younger folks. And the bitch-ass irony of we old ladies reacting with such unhinged violent fervent cunty anger to even the mere suggestion of another UNPLEASANTLY upsetting tv show or movie … well … it’s pretty fucking funny. I DON’T WANT TO WATCH THAT NASTY DISQUIETING SHIT YOU DUMBASS MOTHERFUCKER!!! I WANT SOMETHING FULL OF SWEET SMILES AND SUNSHINE FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!! Isn't my preference OBVIOUS?!? Can't  you tell by my PERSONALITY?

S. Pellegrino: Wherever You Are (what about alone in bed? HUH?!?!?)

I like to watch escapist youtube videos while I’m eating. In bed. Alone. To pretend I am on a vacation, for example. And because I find TV shows and movies with plots and conflict highly stressful and too much to pay attention to when I’m trying to relax. So I watch videos about TRAVEL: trips that I will never go on, but I like the *idea* of the food that is served and the mode of transportation (cruise ships, trains, luxury VIP flight capsule-suites, Las Vegas buffet reviews, etc.). I will never go on them because I’m a bitch, of course, so the idea of being around people — stuck on a ship or plane or train or in a casino with them, half with their noses sticking out their masks or no masks at all — is a dealbreaker (on top of the lack of money, so it’s a moot point kind of but I’m enough of a bitch that I enjoy resenting people while I am taking IMAGINARY trips, so not *entirely* moot).

ANYHOO, I’ve been watching quite a few European cruise videos and this one short ad keeps popping up: an ad for S. Pellegrino (San Pellegrino sparkling water). It’s really short, but somehow after watching it half a dozen times it began to grate on my nerves. Not just because I have now seen it so many times, but also because this ad specifically represents a couple of elements that only a bonafide bitch would be in the HABIT of sneering at with irritable insecurity …

The ad has some kind of high-class Italian restaurant kind of music playing (like … a gently-strummed spanish guitar along with grapes falling from above onto another guitars strings making a festive-yet-sophisticatedly-muted plunky rhythm). The camera displays happy attractive people sitting around a big table, smiling and nodding at one another. Then this one actor I kind of recognize as being one of those elegant slender judgmental spies who thinks he can get away with espionage and embezzlement and eventually murder but isn’t young or muscular enough to play a heroic lead so he does NOT get away with murder instead even Phillip Seymour Hoffman nodding off at his fattest can put a stop to this snooty international maths-and-classical-languages-professor-turned-THEEEEEF enters the frame. You don’t know his name — god knows *I* don’t know his name even though I tried to figure out for the sake of this bitch rant — but you would recognize the thin but still elegantly salt-and-pepper hair-swoops and the know-it-all look of polite half-smirking disdain that is the guy’s signature LOOK.

He’s wearing a striped blouse with the top two buttons undone like they’ve just strolled through snootiest parts of the vineyard and are ready to dine on multisyllabic Mediterranean fare or tapas or whatever (is tapas Spain-ish or Mediterranean or is Espana part of the Mediterranean or ???) because they’ve worked up an appetite but not to a glistening sweat-level of ravenous sloppiness; his blouse is still CRISP, but not in a starchy way … in a high-quality-threads-have-stood-up-to-washing-so-as-now-to-be-quite-soft way. With the rakishly loosened collar imparting casual vineyard-strolling. I know men’s button-up shirts are not called “blouses” but fuck it man, the way the guy wears it so shapelessly, just lining his high-class privileged un-muscled healthy-svelte educated-and-wealthy-man privilege … anyway. When the camera pans away from the people at the table, this fucker is in the foreground in the lower right corner of your screen LOOKING at you, telling you how drinking this fizzy water is going to make your get-together CLASSY and upscale and exclusive and refined. He knows you don’t qualify to run in these circles, but since he is a soft-collar crook and he needs you to keep his secret yet still bow to his superior class … well, he’ll impart some wisdom to you on how to fit in: make the occasion feel rich and elegant with some of this S. Pellegrino bubble-water shit.

I don’t remember exactly what he says (even though I’ve watched it a bunch of times, all that sticks with me is the VIBE of this son-of-a-bitch), but it really rubs me the wrong way. It reminds me how much I *detested* the last part of Call Me By Your Name. Part 3: The San Clemente Syndrome. Ugh. And it all is really about not only feeling outclassed, but being an introvert which is part of why I am such a tremendous bitch (and why I am ill-suited to go on any of the vacations reported on by my favorite travel youtubers). Like … I just do not understand people prioritizing and celebrating traveling and dining together, and talking about literature and the people they know and remember that vintage and whatever-the-fuck.

I will take my S. Pellegrino in bed with my meal, where I can hear the fizzing of its bottle-green backwash fading out on my nightstand as I drift off to dreamland.

Bitch-Ass Bowl-Suction

That raging feeling when you're already pissed off that you have to do the dishes (by hand ... all the dishes I do are by hand, because I have never lived in a house with a dishwasher in my almost fifty years of life in the United States of America) ... and one of your plastic bowls gets STUCK inside another matching plastic bowl!

It would be funny to watch someone ELSE wrestling with and cursing at the obstinate thin plastic perfectly form-fitted to one of its siblings, trying to get it unstuck ... finally getting it unstuck and having soapy dishwater FLY THROUGH THE AIR and all over your shirt-front. But when it's you (okay, when it is ME, myself) it is not so fucking funny.

This is one of those menial fine-motor skill laborious tasks that do not require enough physical energy to RELIEVE some of your STEAM as it builds up pressure and more pressure and more pressure until you think you're going to blow. So you just ... BLOW. And it's all splashy and wet like some big bully in a swimming pool who won't stop "pretending" to drown you FOR FUNSIES. You are helpless. You just have to take it.

It's the kind of bullshit that makes you feel like inanimate objects are conspiring against you, fucking with you with such precision that the bowls MUST have wicked minds, or are imbued with some kind of justice engine to teach high-strung assholes LESSONS in PATIENCE (that we will never ever seem to learn, proving of course that we have seriously defective characters and are loose cannons who should never be trusted with anything breakable, let alone other human beings).

I think one of the problems is how often we underestimate household chores. We underestimate their complexity and how long they will take. We underestimate the variety of skills and strengths required to do these mundane repetitive tasks that are seriously devalued by the patriarchy. So we try to -- HAVE to -- squeeze them in between "important" work, viewing them as obstacles to completing the supposedly-more valuable work ... obstacles to being able to relax after that work is done, etc. They are these endless-feeling time-sucks that we fail to experience as intrinsically rewarding. Housework is supposed to be easy AND simple -- even a MACHINE can do it! But you know most machine dishwasher actually suck ass in my experience (albeit limited). We approach the dishes with resentment and disdain, failing to have gratitude, failing to find ways to accept the practice of cleaning up as opportunities to savor our resources, failing to acknowledge how much energy and intelligence actually is required to do a good job of keeping a clean, healthy, tidy, useful, reliable home and kitchen.

*****

I would like to wrap this up in a more polished manner, perhaps with some kind of wisdomful solution that puts my bitchiness to rest, but instead I have to just accept that doing SOME of the dishes is better than none of them. That no matter how much effort and anger I put into housework I, personally, am always going to have more shit lined up on the counter to grapple with, more crumbs on the floor, more dishwater-sopped and water-spot-stained shirts to try to patiently go through ... one. Dish. At. A time.

Pulling on the bowls when they're stuck inside each other makes it worse. You have to fucking FINESSE those bitches with a gentle side-to-side push-and-pull.

Ring-a-Ding-DING, Motherfuckers

 I think it’s fabulous – I really do – cutting down on traffic and carbon emissions and being ACTIVE and whatever-the-fuck-else by riding bicycles. I wish that the majority of people in America would stop viewing cyclists with contempt and mockery.

But come on … help us out a little. As a PEDESTRIAN we have good reason to fucking hate you two-wheeled assholes. I fucking hate you fuckers shooshing violently along on the sidewalk, for one thing, and even MORE so when you don’t even fucking bother to alert those of us that the sidewalks were MADE FOR by giving us the consideration of an audible warning that you’re zooming up behind us. DING-DING! It's JOLLY! Ring the bell! Did you not watch Mr. Fucking Rogers and learn some manners?!? It's cute, that bell! Why are you all so opposed to ringing it? I would ring one just for the pure fun of it without even needed an excuse like PROTECTING SOMEONE I'M VERY CLOSE TO CRASHING INTO FROM BODILY HARM (or even just the unpleasant feeling of being STARTLED). Do you think it makes you cool not to warn us? Like, is this supposed to impress people like you're one of those shitty waiters who refuses to write orders down because you want to demonstrate your supposedly-superior remembery-making skills?!?

Today this happened to me on a park road. I was walking doot-do-doot merrily along through the trees … kind of weaving around looking at the cedars and firs and madronas. Weaving because there were hardly any people around and I’m not paying attention to where I’m going on the smooth wide pavement so why the fuck not?

OH. Because some fucking jackasses are careening down the hill on their skinny-tired fancy-ass bikes towards me.

Fortunately my hearing is good enough that I could hear the sound of their wheels on the pavement in time, but WHY DON’T YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES SHOW SOME FUCKING CONSIDERATION FOR SOMEONE BESIDES YOURSELVES?!? LIke … a lot of people are hearing impaired. The onus of being hypervigilant should not be on people walking, it should be on YOU with the deadly hurtling meat-bags-full-of-bones on fast-as-hell fancy metal machines, you fucking skinny stringy-muscled motherfuckers. RING A FUCKING BELL to let a fucker know you’re close to mowing us down.

I wouldn’t be so mad about this particular duo of goggle-faced mofos if it weren’t such a common occurrence. So even though there was quite a bit of room today on the path (okay, really basically a bonafide road of like … a car-and-a-half wide) THIS TIME, my anger is cumulative AND I have experienced this enough to know these self-centered speed-freaks wouldn’t have let me know even if the path were 1/10 the size of today. They don’t care. They don’t care about people walking or have any concept of the extra care that should be given to people with hearing impairments, mobility issues, dizziness … whatever. Give people a wide berth and give them some fucking NOTICE before you’re whizzing by our elbows. I swear to god I fantasize about having a spike strip for bicycles specifically for teaching these cunts a lesson.

It grated on me even worse today when I had to endure these privileged shitholes headache-and-nausea-triggering flashing red tail lights as I walked behind them. It’s the middle of the fucking day and you need those on? You can afford every fucking bell and whistle for your cycling *except* the actual BELLS? It’s such a blatant show of them only caring about their OWN safety, and not the pedestrians they could knock down and cause gross bodily harm to.

And don't even get me started about skateboarders. Or even worse: BICYCLE COPS.