Rude.

Why do people who are not members of a particular group feel compelled to weigh in on what is or is not offensive to said group?

More to the point, why are white people trying to explain away the insult inherent in the word "redskin"?  Seriously, shut up.  Is your skin red?  No.  Then why are you talking?

I don't follow football, and frankly beyond freeing a bunch of superhuman-sized people with possible mad brain injury and its potential for injury-based violence into the general public post-career with no mental health safety net, I don't care about the NFL.  But enough with the Washington Redskins already.

Like everyone would be cool with the Detroit N*ggers?  The Silicon Valley Dot Heads?  The UCLA Bird Flu?

Clearly the exact same white people telling the world how Native Americans should feel about "redskins" would take no issue with any of those team names, because their built-in racism is what conveniently blinds them to the dickishness of Washington's team name.  You don't have to ride around on a horse covered in a white sheet to be a racist, you just have to be the kind of obnoxious asshole who thinks he speaks for other people about their comfort level with terms and treatment when really all he is saying is, "It would be unfair TO ME to have to acknowledge that you might expect fairly a modicum of evolved consideration for some blatantly obvious undertones that aren't cool to your heritage."

But SWZA, isn't that exactly what you're doing?  Speaking for someone else?

No.  I'm not.  I'm not coopting somebody else's offense and trying to pass it off as my own.  What I am doing is pointing out that in this country, skin color is what the ruling class used to set apart ethnic groups and mark them as "other" and "less than." 

You can pretend otherwise all you want, but there're libraries full of history books to prove you wrong an internet search away.

Boo Hoo for You

Steubenville, Ohio, sounds like your garden-variety nightmare.  Any town that's so far up the asses of its local sports is nowhere I want to be.

I love sports but don't support the whole look-the-other-way premise upon which athlete worship exists.  Screw you.  If my sight-reading music skills don't get me out of a term paper deadline, then your ability to put a ball over a line shouldn't either. 

Are You Fucking Kidding Me doesn't quite cover my feelings regarding the outpouring of waah for Richmond and Mays.
Two boys, struck down in the prime of their youth ... Are you fucking kidding me?

Here's the thing.  You raped.  You are rapists.  Ergo, not only should the state slap you the fuck down so hard, but you should be walking the streets with a scarlet letter equivalent for your entire lives.  That's how it works, man.  Don't like it?  Try not shoving your fingers up an unconscious girl's vag, you fucking scumbags.

You are marked.  Every day, you deserve to get out of bed and have your first thought be, Shit, my life is a disaster because I'm a rapist.  You shouldn't ever be allowed to forget it.  I know that must be confusing considering the legion of self-hating women and girls including Rihanna who see fit to forgive violence against women, but you need to earn your way out of it.  Hang your head in shame and go knock on the door of a woman's shelter or crisis center.  Give up your free time and pay down your debt.  That's the only way you should ever get any relief, in my humble opinion.  You bought your own hype and now you're going to suffer for it, as you deserve to.

Personally, I hope you're too weak to take it and either eat a bullet or hang yourselves.  The world could use fewer of your kind and I have zero problem with you both becoming the dead ends of a rape morality tale.

Adults who live in Steubenville and facilitate this kind of shit?  Holy christ, grow up.  Really?  High school football is all you have to live for?  That is pathetic on a level that would be beyond mockery if you weren't directly responsible for the rapey climate of your town.

Teenage girls who testified that the rape victim is a liar?  Oh, girls.  So much you don't understand.  And that makes sense considering where you're growing up.  But one day, maybe you'll leave that bubble and realize that you don't back the men who abuse women, especially when you've seen the photos of the act in question.  You don't turn on victims because your high school reputation might take a hit.  Even though you feel like it's right to hate such a dumb girl for such dumb behavior, you don't give a pass to men who take advantage of women in a weakened state.  Unfortunately, you probably won't learn that lesson unless it happens to you.  So, good luck in college and maybe your puritanical attitude problem will keep you safe.

It won't.  But maybe you'll learn some compassion and understanding and that rape is never defensible.  Never.  Under any circumstances.

And moron talking in that 20-minute video?  Man, I almost feel bad for your parents.  If you were my kid, I'd hold your head underwater until you stopped kicking and take my chances with a jury trial.  Alcoholic Trip McNeely stereotype 5... 4...

Apatheism

It's raining and shitty out.  The kind of weather that soaks leaves and pine needles and makes driving doubly dangerous because every turn is caked in slimy tree droppings.

And yet, an hour ago, two Jehovah Witnesses show up at the door.

Seriously?  This is a god who interests you?  A guy who sends you out in inclement weather to annoy people in their homes?  I truly don't get it.

My usual response to these people is:  "Are women still the root of all evil in your little morality play?"

And it is, so the followup is always, "I need you to leave."

It baffles me how or why any woman could buy into that horseshit.  It's a religion BASED on the supposition that women are less than men.  What happened to you to make you think you deserve that kind of treatment?

Maybe the true message escapes me, but the Garden of Eden story always struck me thusly:  Adam wanted to sit on his ass, eat takeout and play X-Box forever.  Eve wanted to go to college.

Eve is evil for demanding a better life and forcing Adam off the couch.

This is reasonable to people?  This is the gender hierarchy you support?

If so, you really need to get and stay the fuck away from me.  I have no time for this idiocy.  And frankly, the fact that you buy into your own inferiority and want to spread it to me is so offensive, I literally seethe with rage when you dare to bring that shit to my front door.

I'm an apatheist.  I do not give a damn if there is a god or if there is not.  God is completely irrelevant to me and my life.  I'm not interested in a "creator," I think the entire concept is bullshit. 

I don't have any concrete proof, nor am I trying to dissuade others.  I just don't want any part of this weird idea that we're all pawns in the chess game of some godlike figure whose approval we should strive to get.  And I flat-out refuse to be bullied into living my life according to someone else's reliance on his belief in a higher power.  I care about the here and now.  I pay attention to what's in front of me.  The notion of an afterlife or some heavenly reward is so ridiculous to me, I feel like anyone who would propose such a thing must be talking to a child because no adult in her right mind would buy into something so obviously a tool of obedience.

Following the herd was just about the worst thing you could do when I was growing up.  My parents taught me to haul ass in the other direction when people tried to make me part of a group in which my personality or my desires would be suppressed.  They taught me to trust my instincts, and if something felt wrong, then it was wrong.

Why doesn't driving around to strangers' homes trying to get the occupants to join a cult of inferiority feel wrong to those people?

R.I.P., APL

The man who owned a company I used to work for passed away a few weeks ago.  I think Al was about 80 years old, but in great physical and mental shape.  Spry and sprightly would describe him accurately.  His passing resulted from a completely pointless infection due to a bone broken in a fall.

Al wore beautifully tailored '50s-cut suits, and his hair had to have been trimmed no less than once every four weeks.  His glasses were olde school, with heavy black frames.  And he held one hand in his trouser pocket as he walked.  It was a casual posture, not an affectation.  The family had Main Line money and he had been the valedictorian of his class at Yale.  His confidence was real, but relaxed in the way that he was comfortable in its second nature.  His walk always said to me, "Self-doubt?  Why would I have that?  Sounds counterproductive."

One afternoon my mother met me in the office lobby so we could go out to lunch together.  He walked in and said something like, "Oh, my, that is family resemblance."

I read somewhere that Mel Brooks described David Lynch as "Jimmy Stewart from Mars."  Not only do I wholeheartedly agree with that moniker, but I'd describe Al similarly, down to his saying things like "oh, my" and "good heavens" without irony.

I introduced Mom to Al and she told him that back when his father ran the company, she'd been in the secretary pool in their since-closed Suburban Station office.  That thrilled Al, he literally couldn't believe it.  Mom says she was 18 or 19 when she worked there, which meant she had met him and his wife when they were in their 20s.  Al remembered the man for whom Mom worked and they reminisced about some other names from the department.  And from that point forward, Al referred to me as "The Legacy."

Cool nicknames are not easy to come by, especially because the words so rarely keep their actual meaning to the giver or the audience.  "The Legacy" was dead on and made me feel connected in a way I didn't experience in college.  Frankly, I was flattered to have it.  It was just a nice, friendly mention to have made and I liked that Al and I shared that little joke between just us.

Interestingly, that didn't turn out to be our only joke.  Through a mutual friend, I found out about a decade ago that Al was the croquet champion at his lawn club.  That cracked me up no end, one, because I didn't know lawn clubs hosted croquet facilities -- at mine, it just meant grass tennis courts -- and two, because I am not surprised at all.  Of course he was club champion.  That fit him perfectly -- competitive and a seasoned winner in a realm he could own.  The facts that he had held that title for years and was a serious competitor really just make me laugh harder.  One of my dearest friends is the source of the croquet champ news, and his family and Al's family go back decades.

So in addition to his greetings to me involving my cool nickname, he'd usually follow up with questions about how my Mom was doing and did I have any news of our friend circle.  Many times these updates involved the current standings of the prestigious croquet league and the social events centered on it.  Terry, my friend and the son of the friends in common, is who clued me in to the croquet connection.  His family is from the Main Line area, and when his parents retired further south, I relied on him and his local cousin for news about how they were enjoying their new home and into what adventures they were getting.  I passed that information on to Al in our work sit-downs, though he was always infinitely more informed than I was by his country club network of social connections.

The "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" similarity came into play after a longtime colleague retired.  Rohm and Haas is the name on the building in which Al's company had been located.  Al and Mr. Haas had been friends for many years.  Mr. Haas either opened or bought an existing hardware store in Olde City, an easy walk from the offices.  When Al would leave the office, he would stop by and browse in the store and catch up with his old pal.

I was the recipient of Al's hilarious observations of hardware store stock and it tickled me so much that he was almost otherworldly in how out of touch he was with everyday things many of us don't think twice about.  To be honest, I would doubt very much without evidence to the contrary that Al had ever serviced his own car or knew how to install an appliance or repair a broken one.  My folks are contractors.  If you need a 16-speed floor drill press, just open their garage door.  Want to load your own sport-gun ammunition?  Help yourself to the wads, shot and primers in the labeled bins.

Al marveled at the existence of red light bulbs.  He'd never seen such a thing.  And who knew hardware stores carried upwards of a hundred different kinds of nails.  "Did you know there were that many?  Probably more?"  To say nothing of all the different sizes and shapes of screws.  Drill bits.  Hand saws.  "Isn't it fascinating?"  Not a trace of irony.  He genuinely didn't know.

I tell this not to mock, because if the situations were reversed and my many shortcomings were under scrutiny, I'm sure people would be appalled at my lack of business sense, never having ever filed a tax form correctly and general cluelessness about all things financial.  But it wouldn't be nearly as charming as Al expressing real joy and wonderment at learning socket drives and handles are referred to as "female" and "male."

Backpfeifengesicht

Is it me?  Or do you feel like punching someone in the face, too.

We went to the bank last week and while I was inside, some guy and his junkie-skinny girlfriend were in the MAC vestibule.  The guy grabbed enough pens to close both hands around and started shoving them into the kangaroo pocket of his sweatshirt.

The pens were falling all over the floor and he was stepping on them, cracking the barrels.  Junkie skinny looked around and saw Joe sitting in the car outside, staring at them and shaking his head.  She turned to her pen thief boyfriend and told him there's a guy in a car outside, watching.

He turned and looked.  Didn't react.  They walked out, leaving the broken pen shrapnel on the floor, what, 40 pens richer?

Who gives birth to the white trash that pollutes this country.  From where does this garbage come.