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| Socrates expounding on his famous argument "You Don't Wanna Wear A Mask? THIS Is How You Don't Wear A Fucking Mask!" just prior to his arrest for indecent exposure, 340 BC |
The Beneficiary says I'm gonna wind up on You Tube sooner or later. I don't know about that, but I find that my patience and general disdain for humans have worn down to a veneer so thin as to be practically transparent.
It was another post-payday in a grocery store where people still tend to clot up, even in these times. This had early on resulted in me loudly telling some quintessential-right-down-to-the-haircut, snotty Karen waddling down the aisle trying to squeeze past me to get her self-entitled maskless ass the fuck away from me. She gracelessly complied while chattering about it on the phone she hadn't removed from her ear since I'd first seen her.
It probably didn't help that I actually called her "Karen" which may well have been her name for all I know. In any event, it's a near-certainty that no one had spoken to her "my shit don't stink, let me talk to your manager" white-bread ass like that in forever, but my vote was that if she couldn't be bothered to hold up her end of the social contract while in MY space, I had no obligation to do so when interacting with HER.
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| "Karen" Prototype For Those Of You Not Up To Speed On Your Current Insult Lexography |
This exchange did have the unexpected benefit of being an early warning shot across the bow of anyone within hearing, which kept other maskless twats away from me the rest of the time I was in the store.
Right up until checkout.
We'd unloaded all our crapola onto the conveyor belt to be scanned and went to the cashier's station to annoy the cashier as she checked our stuff through. Another couple pushed up to the end of the conveyor and started unloading their shopping basket onto the belt, giving our stuff a bit of a shove so theirs would fit.
The woman was that scrawny, diseased-or-addict-looking, indeterminate age somewhere between 40 and 200 that's so common up in the white-trash boonies of the area, and she was accompanied by a largish male probably in his 40s(?) Who knows. Graying hair, anyhow. He was dressed in camouflage from head to foot, which was surprisingly ineffective in the what you might call "lightly-forested" store. He (wonder of wonders) was wearing a mask. His (mom? wife? crack-whore? rag-picker?) was not, made even more apparent by her nasty pie-hole yammering at him while they stood there trying to squeeze another item onto the belt.
"Excuse me!" I said loudly. She glanced over at me. "If you ain't gonna wear a mask, get away from my food."
She ignored me and went back to haranguing Cammo Boy, so I walked back down to her end of the belt.
"Lady, did you hear me?" I asked.
She looked at me again, clearly in a Mood. "What?" she demanded.
"I said, if you aren't going to wear a mask, get the fuck away from my food, THAT'S what."
She seemed inclined to argue about it, but Cammo Boy pulled her back away while she fumed over how rude people are in this store. She simmered in the background as we finished checking our stuff out. The cashier, a dark-haired, pretty little thing, was flitting her huge brown eyes back and forth between me and the Rag Picker and Cammo Boy like a cat trying to figure out which way to run. She probably set a new land-speed record getting our stuff scanned, bagged and loaded.
As we loaded the last thing into the cart for transport to our car and The Beneficiary stuck her card into the money-sucking device, Cammo Boy and the Rag Picker came down toward the cashier to check THEIR stuff, carefully keeping their distance from me.
Cammo Boy mumbled something to me from behind his mask.
"What?" I asked, genuinely puzzled by what he was trying to say.
"I said you could have been a little nicer about it," he repeated louder.
"Bubba, this IS me being nice. It goes downhill from here."
At this point The Beneficiary said, "Let's go. We're done here," and I started to turn away to leave the store.
"Well, EXCUSE me! I didn't hear you — I'm hard of hearing," the Rag Picker yelled at me.
"Hard of hearing and apparently can't read, either, or you wouldn't be out here roaming around with actual humans without a fucking mask in the first place, you self-centered…"
At this point The Beneficiary grabbed my arm and pulled me away as Cammo Boy started to swell up.
Then we went for a drive-through Chick Fil-A lunch.
So then, another thoughtful and edifying interaction with the public. And how is your day going?
My day was way better than that. But we were discussing just how tiring it is having to be hyper-aware of the people around us, kind of regressing to cave-man mode where the grocery store is a hostile environment, survival requires your constant attention, and paranoia is just plain good thinking. In a slightly related discussion with neighbors, we decided that not wearing a mask but insisting it is your "right" to behave that way is sort of like saying it's your right to drink and drive.
ReplyDeleteAt this writing, we're in over 1/4 million deaths, and we're certainly going to wind up with over a half-million before the end of this, if we ever are. That 1/4 million is in TEN MONTHS and the half million will very likely be within 18 months of the time this showed up onshore. That's more US Citizens, military AND civilian, than were killed in ALL FOUR YEARS of WWII.
ReplyDeleteNow, as I've said, I'm a bone-deep Libertarian. But one of the things I recognize is a national threat. I do (and would have) supported exactly what happened in WWII -- a full-out effort to defeat an external enemy who has attacked us, drafts, rationing, bond-drives, little kids dragging their wagons all over neighborhoods collecting scap metal for the war effort, nylons for women becaming so rare that they draw lines on their legs to simulate them, rubber and gasoline became practically non-existent on the civlian market and (here's the important part) a MASSIVE social penalty for lack of patriotism. Over 1/3 of all GDP and 75%-90% of ALL FEDERAL SPENDING went to the war effort. And we went from a dead-stop, near-nonexistent military presence to the predominate military power in the world in less than 4 years.
In contrast, our "War On Terror" since 9/11 has so far cost around $6 TRILLION dollars -- sounds big, right? But, no, it is, and has been since 9/11/2001, MUCH less than 5% of GDP, and most years more around 2.5 - 3%. This seems appropriate, given the level of threat. After all, even to we libertarian assholes, protection against external existential threats reamins one of the vanishing few legitimate reasons to have a national government AT ALL.
But WW2 was the gold-standard of national response, of Americans hunkering down to fight. The "Greatest Generation" indeed. And look at the weak-chinned, bunker-bunny "patriots" we're stuck with today. We can't even get the selfish cunts to "sacrifice" by wearing a fucking $0.30 mask, stay out of the bars, and skip spring break this year to beat something that's going to kill more of us than all of WWII did.
Treasonous assholes, every single one of them.
Not that I have much of an opinion on it.
I'm probably just a left-leaning centrist. But in the search for a social identity, I think a lot of people lose sight of, or rule out some of the pragmatic solutions to problems that arise once in awhile. Humans have a lot of intelligence, (relatively speaking) but insist on using it to dig deeper into these ideological ruts. Take the fear of the slippery slope. I mean, OK, if you must skirt around something near that slope, just don't go too far, and then, come back. Stay conscious. Tall order. Anyway, I approve of the appeal to science to deal with the pandemic, since, well, witch doctors and chicken bones are fine and dandy, but what if EVERYONE killed a chicken? Think of what that would do to the economy.
ReplyDeleteThis entire comment was written before my first cup of coffee, so I take absolutely no responsibility for lapses in judgement or logic, or for any lack of grammatical precision.
Yep. All this ~waves arms wildly~
ReplyDeleteI just can’t even with people anymore 😾