You All Suck (#48 - The Etiquette of the Unwashed)

 "If you find yourself obsessing over your social status, you probably don't have one to begin with..." -- The Overlord.

Author's Note: Putting the finishing touches an on another essay I will publish tomorrow, but I have to get this off my chest, first.

This tale of woe begins with a high school football game.

Someone close to the Overlord plays high school football, a game I generally dislike for obvious reasons. But, like most other sports, the further down the competitive scale you travel, the more-enjoyable the game becomes for both participant and observer. Released from the restrictions of an organized, multi-billion-dollar business, the sport becomes a better experience because the participants are genuinely enjoying themselves -- it's not a job -- and the game itself takes on a more-organic, less-artificially-constructed air.

So, when I made a phone call this morning -- to someone who will be referred to throughout this screed as This Person, so as to avoid embarrassing them further with my mere existence -- to make an inquiry into where and when this week's game was being played, I did not expect (although I really should have, since it's becoming something of a habit for This Person) to receive The Lecture.

The Lecture consists of a long list of things I'm not allowed to do. There are people I'm not allowed to talk to (usually complete strangers); there is a laundry list of things I am forbidden to say; subjects it is best not to discuss, at all; who I should avoid sitting near. It is, as if?, the Overlord, who has literally decades of education behind him in how to comport oneself within a mass of anonymous strangers, needs detailed instructions on how he should behave among people he doesn't know.

I'm only being half-sarcastic here: there is literally a list I'm being read to from, I think. This Person is seemingly unaware that the Overlord not only DOES have decades of experience of how to behave among a crowd, but that he also has decades of experience dealing with fucking clods, which is who this high school football crowd is most-likely to be.

And there's only been a few fistfights in all that time.

According to This person, my presence risks embarrassing them with the very remote possibility that any comment I might make, any expression of emotion I might emit, the fact that I might cheer too much for "My Side" and boo too loudly for The Other Guys, might somehow create some sort of social kerfuffle that This Person will have to deal with later on.

Never mind that I will be among a crowd of perhaps hundreds, none of whom know me. Never mind that the people whose tender feelings she's pretending to protect are, by-and-large, douchebags and dolts that I would never associate with -- or even talk to -- even on my worst day.

These are the sorts of people who buy million-dollar homes and then accessorize the front lawn with multiple shrines to the Virgin Mother and the Sacred Heart. 

These are people who haven't had an independent thought, ever.

These are people who will spend the majority of their time swilling high-end liquor like it was mouthwash and smoking joints under the bleachers between quarters, and then retreat to their oversized SUV (the one with rubber testicles hanging from the trailer hitch they've never used) in the parking lot to snort cocaine off the dashboard at halftime.

These are the people This Person is afraid of being embarrassed in front of in public. Let me tell you exactly who these people This Person is afraid of offending really are:

People who pick up garbage for a living.

People who stand around all day in the hot sun pretending to fill in potholes.

People who get drunk and high on construction sites all day, and then only start "working" when overtime begins.

They drive buses, make pizza, they cut hair, they "manage" the local Home Depot and fill their weekends with drunkeness and drug abuse, while they send their mentally-polluted offspring -- all named after cartoon characters or by the expediency of opening the medicine cabinet -- to Catholic Schools where they learn to be profane, obnoxious, and remain illiterate, the perfect training to produce either a major douche or a whore, and usually both.

People who do and buy things because everyone else does.

People who will stand in line to get a vaccine that hasn't even been tested on rats because to get sick for a few days means obtaining unearned overtime on your government "job" becomes that much more difficult.

This is The Working Class, elevated NOT by superior intellect, manners, custom or philosophy, for they are not very sophisticated in those regards, but rather by access to cash obtained on their overpaid-and-underworked "city" jobs, access to wealth substituting for lack of substance. They can afford to look like the rich and successful they're emulating, and that's as far as it goes.

They are what I have referred to on this page, quite often, as The Middle Class With No Class, and Staten Island, unfortunately, is their natural habitat, the land of Wifebeater tee-shirts and AquaNet, where the rivers flow with retarded children named Joey and Adriana, and where Costco hors d'oeuvres are usually the first item on the menu of international cuisine at any gathering.

Just before they break out the Sausage and Peppers.

These are people who will shell out $200 for a bottle of premium single-malt that they read about in Hustler in the porto-john on the work site, or The Journal of American Waste Management in the muster hall, or such, and then swill it -- literally -- with store-brand "mixers" that are mostly sugar and carbonated water.

The kind that will obtain expensive -- and illegal -- Cuban cigars from their cousin in Organized Crime, hollow them out, and then re-stuff the stogie with cheap pot they got from their kid's drug dealer.

These are the women best symbolized by Carmella Soprano, a shallow, make-busy world of PTA's in failing schools, social events centering around the mani-pedi and the "Girl's Night Out" of fake Cougar-Whoring and getting sloppy drunk to the Karaoke version of the all the Go-Go's classics (I see this often, almost weekly at the local watering hole), before throwing up and losing their underwear, muttering "Joey's gonna kill me when I get home", propped up by another fermenting bitch under each arm.

Only to do it with twice as much gusto the following week.

They all live in "Custom Built" duplexes, complete with the expensive, showcase kitchen that will never get used, and a living room covered in plastic slipcovers. Not to keep the furniture clean, but to make the sex stains she'll make when "the plumber" comes by easier to wipe off.

These are pretentious louts mimicking human behavior...like fucking chimps.

And while I'm certain I must sound like an effete snob at this moment, but if these people weren't walking semi-upright, we'd put leashes on them.

Real Housewives of Staten Island?

This Person apparently has some sort of social cachet among this Great Mass of the Unwashed that is somehow imperiled by my mere presence. As if I would actually TALK to any of these drooling fucktards?

Censors are usually motivated by fear. And you will know what they fear by what they censor and how strenuously they go about the censoring.

Apparently, This Person is afraid that they will somehow lose status among a crowd of ignoramuses should a 150-plus IQ show up and use a word the ignorami don't understand?

If you are so fearful of being shunned by people you otherwise wouldn't follow through your own front door, you have a problem.

If you somehow crave the shallow love and adulation -- but mostly validation -- to be had from a mass of drunken fools and drugged-up guttersnipes, you certainly have a bigger problem than anything I might say to an anonymous stranger I'm already committed to treating as if they were radioactive, and because fucktard, will more than likely be keeping 6' between us, conditioned like the aforementioned chimps to "social distance".

I am NOT saying that either This Person or The Crowd of Crude are bad people; I am saying they're not exactly the best company for anyone possessed of confidence and self-respect.

I am insulted by the insinuation that I must be told how to behave among people who will, most likely, be drunk, throwing up, and looking for fights in the aftermath of this game, who are regarded as something approaching an endangered species by This Person.

I am flabbergasted that I have to be figuratively read the equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws on how to not offend the tender feelz and limited intellect of people who, if they hadn't managed a 62 on a civil service exam, or marry someone who did by virtue of superior oral sex skills, would be standing on every off-ramp on the interstate holding "Will Work for Food Signs", or stalking street corners after dark, full supply of cheap condoms in their purse.

And yet one more of life's little pleasures is ruined by the need to kow-tow to the sensibilities of the senseless.