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.