Passive incompetence is one thing, but aggressive Nazi hostility on the corporate level is something else again.

Well, THAT was a needlessly dramatic cliffhanger disappearance, wasn't it? Ha! I'm telling you guys, the hardest thing to do is to find time to write when Kid Gleemonex isn't in school ... anyway. To continue. 

That Time I Met One of Satan's Many Manifestations On Earth: Part Two of Two

So the airport was the pokiest little goddamn thing (I actually called it "hilarious" in one of my interviews -- oopsie), and not in a fun way -- just in a bare-bones, beige 80s ehh whatever this is good enough for the likes of you kind of way. I stepped out of there into, like, an oven. A hot, wet oven. Started sweating immediately, lugging my little rolly bag out across seven miles of asphalt to get my rental car. Then with the AC on full blast, I followed the printed directions to the hotel. I was expecting some sort of segue into a town-like situation, but this was the middle of nowhere, and the trees and grass and whatnot looked a lot like the surrounds of Cowburg, Texass, where I'm from, so that was nice. I drove along two-lane country roads for awhile before finally finding signs of life -- the places you could just tell were the Good (aka white) Neighborhoods (how you know: They had vaguely British-sounding names, like The Duckston Manors At Whingely Wood). Then, closer in, the usual smaller houses, schools, fast-food joints. Got to the hotel, unloaded all my junk and headed back out for food -- nothing but chains available in any direction (except one intriguing-looking smokehouse joint whose sign piously announced outside that it's "Always closed on Sundays!" because Jesus).

So the next morning, I dress in what would be the thing to wear to an interview at my current place of employment -- a sort of dressy casual, brand-appropriate dark skinny jeans, cute flats (pregnant, couldn't deal with heels), cowl-neck shell top and jacket. I even wore makeup, bought in desperation at The Walmart in town Sunday night (because it's been so long since I wore makeup that I actually could not find any of mine in my house before I left). Bonus, what I'm wearing hides my thickened middle.

First interview of seven is at 7:45 in the goddamned morning (who DOES that?). I get up early -- way early, cause I'm on California time, and sofa king tired I almost bag the whole thing right there. Follow directions ... and twice drive right past the goddamned global headquarters of the corporation that "employs" more people than any other entity on planet Earth except the fucking CHINESE ARMY.* I'm expecting something big, distinctive; what it is is, a low three-story red brick bunker, almost windowless,** with only one small sign indicating what evil lies within.

I go inside, check in and get an ID photo (my kid found it the other day -- I could not possibly look more ghoulish, it's hilarious). Then I sit down and wait in what looks a lot like my junior high's east hallway -- vinyl flooring, fluorescent lighting -- with rows of cheap plastic stackable chairs all facing the same way like at the DMV or county court, "History of Walmart" photos all over the walls, and several televisions blaring -- all tuned to Fox TV. My sense of being dangerously, delusionally out of place increases.

The recruiter gal shows up, and she's as nice as she was on the phone. Her face is on and she appears not to notice Fox TV's histrionics as we chat about how my flights were and how hot it is already. She takes me through into the main building and y'all. Y'ALL.

OK, maybe it's worse for me because the building where I currently work -- in the global HQ of a specialty fashion retailer, in San Francisco -- is so lovely: all huge airy spaces, extremely expensive and famous modern art all over the place, marble and glass and hushed pleasantness, views from all 15 floors of the bay and the city. But I think by any standards, this place is fucking TERRIBLE.

It's a windowless, tube-lit acoustic-tile-ceilinged hangar divided into a warren of cubicles, separated by 7-foot-high walls covered in that awful material that's like a Delta airplane carpet from 1979, all of it a terrible blue that is indescribably disheartening -- it's not even that sad blue the Russians used to use; it's worse. It's like -- Morale-Crusher Blueisssh. Signs (Accounting, Communications, Cafeteria, Department of Paying Women Less Than Men, etc.) hang from the ceiling on chains -- plastic rectangles with the words pressed on them in white, the cheapest crappiest signage it would ever be possible to find in a graphic designer's worst PCP-laced nightmare. And the fucking TVs blaring Fox news were at every "lounge" area all over the goddamned place -- truly amazing cultural programming, inescapable like Orwell's telescreens, teaching everyone how to be goodthinkful and be doubleplusgood workers, I guess. It really set my nerves on edge in the worst way.

So. My first interview is with yet another HR screener, who informs me that actually they want about 25% of time here in Bentonville, and I'm like yeahhhh well we'll see about that, and she says that for a time she actually commuted like that from somewhere else (Chicago?), and it was "kind of nice, because although I missed my family, it was me-time." Mkay. Then I finally meet my direct manager -- a young woman about my age, whom I really hit it off with. We had a great talk, I had great answers to all her questions, a few ideas, some good questions of my own. I'm thinking this one is a winner.

I am escorted by HR Greeter Gal and a clearly junior HR Trainee Gal to some guy who has his own office (exactly like the cubes, but with a door and a ceiling, and still no window). He has some Yankees paraphernalia scattered around, so in the "getting to know you" bit at the end, I work in my own Yankee fandom, mentioning that I got into them in the early 90s when they were awful, and blowin' his mind with my knowledge of players and stats and whatnot. Another winner.

My minders take me to two more people, who are kind of a blur to me, but whom I remember also seemed to like me. Then they escort me -- you notice, I'm being escorted everywhere? Partly because of the Brazil-style warren of utter confusion, and partly because Walmart's corporate ethos seems to include the proviso that everyone is a potential criminal -- to lunch with the lady who would be my grandboss, a woman about 60 whose dress and manner remind one a little of Ann Richards. She's great, and but I can quickly tell that she brooks no nonsense -- as ever, but particularly contrasted with the everlasting roundabout shitshow of my current work environment, I have no problem with that, and could really see working well with her. She sits down first, though, and is the only one of my interviewers whom I catch getting a good look at my midsection -- and as a mother of four, I know she knows and then she knows that I know she knows. Ehhh, well.

But about this lunch -- in the cafeteria, which every one of my interviewers has mentioned as a great boon, a terrific perk of employment: It is a for real, straight up cafeteria, so much like the one in my junior high that I almost have a PTSD episode, wondering where to park my Dooney & Bourke purse before I get in the food line to make sure I get a seat with at least a second-tier group. Long cheap formica-topped picnic tables, fluorescent lighting, industrial tile floor, molded plastic chairs with metal feet. There are several stations -- grill area, salads, sandwiches, etc. But they're all kind of lame early 90s airport type food -- you can tell everything is premade and shipped in, frozen; the salad bar is like the one at K-Bob's where I worked in high school (iceberg lettuce, baco-bits, shredded cheddar, ranch and Thousand Island dressings). And again, maybe it's worse for me because of what I'm used to -- a cafe with a large landscaped terrace on the seventh floor, flooded with natural light, all blond wood and marble and little clusters of wooden tables, with a menu that has to compete with the offerings outside the building in one of the biggest foodie cities in the world; everything's organic, locally-sourced, seasonal, yada yada, and made by culinary school grads and chefs who take their game very, very seriously.

Plus, I hate eating in front of people like that -- where I'm supposed to talk and eat and there's a judgment component, you know what I mean? Also I was FUCKING STARVING, because of the baby and missing my usual second and third breakfasts due to interviews, so I was using all my self-control not to just cram that stupid ham sandwich in my face-hole like it was the last piece of food on New Caprica.

So after that, my minders took me to one more person, whom I do not remember at all, then fail to deliver me to Lucky #7 (the three of us wandered the rat maze of two different floors for nearly half an hour while they try to track down whoever it is, and finally I'm like, ladies: I gotta make like a tree and get outta here). I bail, with many thanks, and drive to that podunk airport like I'm catching the last chopper out of Saigon. My flight is delayed, as is the next one (if I'd've known I'd be at DFW for four and a half goddamned hours I'd've called my family to meet up for some Flamin' Nachos at Frontera Grill or whatever in Terminal D).

And all this -- the late flights, the people who just sat there and let a pregnant gal hoist her own bag into the overhead, the rubbery chicken at the airport TGI Fucknuts that almost made me puke, the weepy phone call to Mr. Gleemonex about the delays and how I would miss putting Kid Gleemonex to bed, the exhaustion, my extremely dangerous falling-asleep, post-midnight 1.5-hour drive home from SFO -- ALL OF THIS I laid squarely at the feet of Walmart as its particular and purposeful fault.

The lesson I learned was that no matter how much they're paying, it's not worth it to work somewhere so deeply, terribly morally wrong and against my own principles. Also I learned that environment can and does reflect and reinforce thought and behavior.

I had danced with the Devil, and felt lucky to have survived it.

------------------------------------
*This is the factual truth.
**Hunter S Thompson describes a hotel a lot like this in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 -- run by penny-pinching anhedonic Germans, with empty mini-bars and every view a wasteland of tarpaper roofs and dirty air vents.

As I skulked around the airport, I realized that I was still wearing my police identification badge.

My sister-in-law posted on the facebooks that she can't bring a balloon kittycat home on the plane from a convention she is attending. I love her, but I think she is just not giving the required level of effort here. And so: 

Things Which I Have Transported With Me In the Coach Cabin of Commercial Aircraft

--My wedding dress, DFW - SFO via Las Vegas (fog-related emergency landing), Burbank (carried by another airline entirely) and a seven-hour drive up California in a rental car with 2 strangers also stranded in Burbank 

--Twelve vegetable samosas from Indian Cafe, EWR - DFW

--Two children under the age of five, solo, SJC - DFW / DFW - SJC

--Forty oz., total, in 5-oz packets, frozen expressed breastmilk, SFO - DFW

--Six packages of Morrison's Corn-Kits (cornbread mix), DFW - SFO

--Eight onion bagels with scallion cream cheese from Columbia Bagels, LGA - DFW

--A set of hot rollers, still hot from the morning's hairdo, which disturbed and alarmed the security peoples but was in the end allowed to travel with me, DFW - LGW

--A tennis racket and the entirety of my CD collection (~125 units), MIA - DFW

All that you can do is watch them play

Yesterday in San Francisco proper, following a divine massage at a spa (gift card I've had since January 2011) and a faaantastic non-chain-restaurant lunch, during which I sat blessedly alone and read two entire New Yorker magazines -- o heaven -- I was doing some wandering around, and on the way to the Powell St. station to begin the long journey back to the ass-end of the Silicon Valley, I found myself  taking a razzoo through Forever 21. 

Now, this is a store that I hate for a lot of reasons -- I haven't been in one in five years at least, because A) believe you me, I am a lot more than 21, B) the very idea of wanting to be Forever 21 is repugnant to me, C) "fast fashion" is cheap, wasteful and built via the bloodied and harassed fingers of the lowest-paid workers in the garment industry at the worst environmental offending factories of same, D) the founding family of the company is a bunch of evangelicals who print bible verses on their bags, and E) the things they sell are awful and the store is a mess. 

But I had like ten minutes to kill, so. 

And y'all ... it is all still true. Forever 21 is like a big, cheap, badly-organized costume shop targeted to your next 80s/90s party. They were playing Blur ("There's No Other Way"). I felt old, and strange, and like I'd taken a weird tumble in the fucked-up wayback machine, ending up in a combination Claire's/Express/Limited/Wet Seal/Slutty Laura Ashley mashup store from the mythical year 199119891994. It was ... disorienting. I did not last long. I am quits with that place, for all time. 

----------------------------------

On another note: San Francisco, goddamn you. You're super pretty and there is good stuff all around you, but you will always be a toy city, not a real city, and you want to know why? You made me (and six hundred other people) wait 27 minutes for a fucking N train, at a transit hub, on a Monday morning during rush hour, for NO REASON AT ALL. Your transit sucks NYC's smelly cocknballs with an extra lick to the taint, and the worst part of it is, you don't even realize that this is what's wrong with you. Plus also your restaurants close at 9:00 p.m. TOY CITY. 

This is like that time we went to see the re-released Star Wars and had to pay a toll to get INTO Oklahoma.

Internets, I feel like I'm being held hostage by the Air-Industrial Complex.

I'm checking flights -- which I do as sort of a hobby, always planning the next or potential next or fantasy next trip -- and I figure I'll check to see what this year's Xmas-to-visit-the-fam-in-Texass trip is gonna run us. Doodly doodly doo, ballpark the dates, yada yada, the usual airline, the usual airports, I know it's gonna be higher than it would be in like April because they gotcha by the short'n'curlies with xmas travel in general but hey I'm doing this in July so maybe I'll get the early ...

HOLY BALLSACK.

Son of a ... what the fuck, did I put in eight travelers or something? This isn't a motherfucking private charter, is it?

Nope. Even if we don't get the baby his own seat, this absolute cockaround -- in nonrefundable internet-only fuck-you steerage class, with no fun little extras like enough room for Mr. Gleemonex's knees, from one heavily-traveled California airport to the airline's goddamned global hub in a state only halfway across Our Great Nation -- is two-and-a-half times the price of our upcoming trip to Hawaii.

And because I like to torture myself, I ran the same dates for Xmas in Paris. Air France, nonstop.

Two hundred and seventy-three dollars less.

STAB STAB STAB STABBITY STAB.

It's after six p.m., Lemon. What am I, a farmer?

Are you guys aware that, unlike my toxic insane pointless fuckaround of a Day Gig, there are people with actual jobs? Like, real jobs, where they work on real things? The gal next to me on Caltrain the other day obviously has one of those. She spent the entire hourlong ride working on a very powerful, tricked-out looking Mac with that personal wireless thingy sticking out of it, manipulating data and charts and huge dense long paragraphs (with footnotes) in a massive document entitled: Tuberculosis epidemiology and novel transmission routes in rural Tanzania. I wrote it down in my iPhone's notes app, I was that impressed. Even though I look at that and all I can think is: "I ... can't. I am all out of can. I am unable to muster any can."

I begin to think that perhaps I am just a fundamentally unserious person ... oh well. So: Are we all agreed that 30 Rock has been on fucking FIRE these last half-dozen eps?

That John Denver's fulla shit!

Possible Originations of the Source of the Ringing of the iPhone at 3:40 a.m. Sunday

--Robocall/spam

--butt-dial

--insomniac or new parent on the East Coast

--the Better Homes and Gardens $25,000 prize winner notification

--my Kansass friends, wanting to settle a bar bet

--someone on vacation in Hawaii, having miscalculated the time difference, wanting to know the name of that awesome fish place because they want to go there tomorrow

--solar flare

--poltergeist

--Steve Jobs, checking things out (he's a detail guy)

Where My Mind Went, With an Intractable Force that Compelled Me to Get Out of Bed to Go Downstairs to Check the Fucking Thing Because I Can't Sleep Until I Do

--My sister, calling with bad tidings of yet another family illness or death

What It Actually Was
--Your flight to Bumblefuck was cancelled. Here's when the next one is: Two days from now. Go fuck yourself.

Big Ben, kids! Parliament!

Meditations Upon a Young Man Wearing a Baseball Cap, Riding a Packed SFO Long-Term Parking Shuttle Bus Quite Late of a Weeknight Evening

1.

"Sick Pig." Well, that is original. Off-putting, yes, but original.

2.

Does he know that is what his hat says? I am thinking of Engrish, which never fails to reduce me to helpless tears of laughter, the slight guilt of which is greatly leavened by my certain knowledge that if I were to attempt to create signage in a foreign language, my efforts would reduce the native-speaking reader to helpless tears of laughter, so. However. To the point. He is a non-white person, possibly of Hispanic or maybe Middle Eastern origin, but almost always and especially in the SF bay area, it is not a safe assumption to make, the assumption as to whether a person knows English, regardless of the person's look or presentation.

3.

Really, that is QUITE off-putting, the more I think about it. "Sick Pig." Why to put such words on your hat?

4.

Generally one would not think of the "Sick Pig" hat-wearers of the world as having the means or motivation to travel by air in a long-term fashion, would one? Are they not more like unto the juggalo type of human subspecies than to the rest of us vacationers, funeral attenders and businesspersons? But this young man -- traveling alone, not with some team of fellow Sick Pigs -- is otherwise dressed fairly unremarkably. Conclusions again refuse to be drawn.

5.

And why does a hat like that immediately set in motion such a complex web of elitist socioeconomic prejudices and assumptions in my head?

6.

The writing. It is off-center, white embroidery on a solid black baseball cap, almost entirely on the right side of the meridian as I regard it. This fact annoys me almost as much as the words themselves do. We cannot be having off-center writing on our hats. It is just Not Done.

7.

CHRIST HOW LONG IS IT TILL WE GET TO THE FUCKING PARKING GARAGE.

Homesteading

Random Thoughts on Our First Few Weeks In the Far Burbs

Feeling guilty about the increase in my carbon footprint. Gotta drive everywhere (and oh wretched SHATNER do I hate driving), the city doesn't do compost (so we're back to throwing out food scraps as garbage, which feels like a terrible step backward, until we can get our own compost thing going), I've had to buy a bunch of new plastic-wrapped stuff to get the house set up. On the plus side, the driving adds up to less than what Mr. Gleemonex alone was doing before, so that's actually a net reduction (just feels like more to me personally).

I fear that we have stumbled into a nest of Republicans. Our neighborhood is beautiful, lots of "mature" (meaning built in the early 70s) houses, extremely well-maintained, with aggressively manicured lawns (my kid calls this one neighbor's topiary'd trees "head trees"). And we like the pretty. But ... instead of four (4) Priuses on one block like our old shambly street, everyone here has Trucks. Big Trucks. Our neighbors across the street have two Suburbans and one shiny pickup. I think two people live there. It's weird. And EVERYTHING was closed on Easter Sunday -- even Banana Republic, which I know for a fact is open on Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving Day. The only store in the metropolis that was open was Gucci (which clearly favors making a buck over honoring the Risen Christ, and bully for them). I just ... I get the feeling our Obama signage next summer may stand alone on our street, dig?

We have so far been invited to church thrice, by three different neighbor persons, and have been brought baked goods by one. (My reactions: No, No, No, and Awesome, thank you!) Everyone has been super nice so far -- that's pretty cool. We lived at our old place for seven years, and only ever spoke to the people from one house. Oh, and Mr. Gleemonex talked cars with the creepy psycho-killer from the other end of the street once. But here, we've already met people.

You can make protected left turns and U-turns ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE here. Now THAT'S being organized for the automobile. I don't like it, the car-orientation, on a philosophical and moral level -- but, you guys: LEGAL U-TURNS. If you gotta drive, best you get to U-turn like a mothafucka, am I right?

I love my commute. I don't love getting up at 6:00 sharp, and it's a bit of an ass-pain to get to the train, but once I get there ... there's this beautiful station, built in 1935, with immense high ceilings, wooden benches golden with age, inlaid floors, old signage and murals, a tiny snack bar nook that smells of fresh coffee in the morning and absolutely heavenly fresh-popped popcorn in the evening. Passing through it is a high, every time (and so much better than that hideous depressing ugly windswept pigeon-shitted Soviet-bloc-looking BART station in the cold that I used to have to use). And my fellow riders -- Caltrain patrons are Commuters, man. No Krazy there. It reminds me of the LIRR, which I will continue to love till the End of Days, and it's an hour each way that I get to sit and write the book that will eventually make me too goddamn rich and famous to need to commute anymore ... but I'll still do it from time to time just for fun.

I love our palm trees, our pool, the view, the space, the feeling that this is ours. It's been exhausting, this move, and there's no end in sight ... but we are home, y'all.

Alison's starting to happen

In honor of Women's History Month, a Selection of:

Things That Are Makin Me Happy Today!

1.) The 80th anniversary of the Earthly manifestation of the Most High Anointed, the Grand Ka-Boom, the One From Whom All Blessings Flow: William His Highness the Shatner.

2.) Mimi Smartypants -- holy Shatner, does she kill me:

4. Speaking of, who on this train could you take in a fight? Pick somebody to hate. Picture yourself standing up and thumping the hell out of that person. Picture the spilled Starbucks, the torn North Face jackets, the general pandemonium. Maybe he would fight back. Maybe other commuters would join in, vigilante-style, to beat the crap out of you. Picture your black-eyed, bloody-nosed self being carried off the train by the police, still thrashing and fighting. Hey, I won’t be in today. I kicked everybody’s ass and got my ass kicked in return. I’ll check email later.

3) These goddamn little triple ginger cookies from Trader Joe's. WHY SHATNER WHY are they so tasty?

"You can get seventy miles to the gallon on this Hog."

So hey, drivers of automobiles, could I ask y'all a favor? Could you please, if you go to the trouble and expense of getting a vanity license plate for your motor vehicle, go to the further trouble of making it something I can read and understand quickly, so that I don't almost rear-end you on the highway, or miss my exit, or get a spike of annoyance-adrenaline straight to the pineal gland because I don't fucking get whatever asininity you decided to scribble on the back of your stupid dumb Dodge Stratus?

Seriously. I get more goddamned annoyed at the ones I can't decipher than at the ones I can and am incensed by (e.g. the giant Suburban I saw at a gas station once with "BPROLIF", ugh, STFU).

But then again, I'm not one for vehicle personalization in general. One, stickers and decals and whatnot degrade quickly and thus look crappy quickly. Two -- and more importantly for me, having read way too much John Douglas -- the entire rest of the automobile-driving universe does not need to know anything about me or my family. Those stickers you can get that show the exact composition of your family? Yikes, really? Political bumper stickers? Way to get keyed, or piss off a cop and get yourself a ticket for going 37 in a 35. Places you've traveled, bands you like, alcohol you favor? Honestly, for once I'm not Judgy McO'Judgerson on this, it's just -- that stuff is just not something Jimmy Joe Jack on the turnpike or Marvin Creeply out in the parking lot needs to know, you get me?

Although I do appreciate the "W" people identifying themselves to me so that I may shun them, so there's that.

Someday my eyes gon' roll right out my head.

Among the things I think that gigantic stupid over-bearded fuck on the BART train last night should not have said to the seven-year-old girl whose mom he appeared to be squiring around: "You have to sit here [indicating a spot between him and the mom] so nobody can reach in and snatch you off the train and run off with you."

Because: What the fuck? What kind of thing is that to say? And no, he wasn't kidding, at all. He was deadly serious. And to my knowledge, there hasn't been a rash of BART child-snatchings lately or anything. Why would you put an idea like that in a kid's head? Why is it in YOUR head, Mister "Can't Be Bothered Wearing A Clean T-Shirt"?

And because also, Mom: Where's your brain? You're a reasonably attractive lady -- who is this assclown, and why are you allowing him to talk to your daughter like that?

And furthermore, you have other evidence of his idiocy: At Embarcadero, he insisted you all get on the Daly City-bound train, which he explained that you all would take three stops, then get off at Powell, cross the platform, and take the train going the other way.

Now, not all of you DK readers know about BART, so I'll tell you why that is the stupidest fucking thing I heard all day yesterday (and this is a day that included someone asking me to "leverage [my] learnings from the [X] meeting and put together a one-pager reporting out on the top-line goals [speaker] articulated going forward"): BART branches off a little once it gets to the East Bay, but for the journey through the city, it's a near-goddamn-useless single track -- no branches, no other lines, no alternative routes -- all trains make all stops in the one single path it takes. It's not like NYC, Paris, London, etc., where you sometimes have to travel the wrong direction to meet up with the train that takes you crosstown or wherever you want to go -- THEY ALL STOP THERE, NO MATTER WHAT THE ENDPOINT IS. You stand in Embarcadero station long enough, the train you want will stop right in front of your face eventually. So all this bearded fuckdongle did was make them spend an extra twenty minutes belowdecks getting Homeless Schmutz on their pants for no goddamn reason.

Well, that and plant nightmare seeds in a little kid's brain.

Ucccch, people -- people are the worst.

I mean -- not you guys. You guys're awesome. :-)

Martha Dumptruck

So what does it say about me that I felt oddly threatened and defensive when a little group of four absolutely lovely 13-year-old girls boarded the train home yesterday? They weren't all done up and hookery like most kids today -- they were dressed in an age-appropriate, cute way; their hair was simple and clean and unfussy; they weren't wearing makeup. And they were all so pretty, and none of them was doing a mean-girl thing, and they all looked like they were just kids livin' life.

So why the instant defensiveness on my part? I thought about it as soon as I realized it was happening, and I was like -- OMS, junior-high flashback whoooooa.

Amazing what shitty baggage we carry around, eh? Those girls are not the popular crowd at Cowburg Junior High in 1987, and I'm not the torqued-up Methodist Youth dorkess of the same time and place -- but every once in awhile a good cold hard flashback works wonders to make you appreciate adulthood (mortgages, grey hair and all).

FUCK YEAH, BEING A GROWNUP!

Not even a thin layer of gabardine!

There’s a guy I know who has a thing about “BART pants,” as in, the pants you wear while riding BART: Any pants you wore on BART cannot also sit on your home furniture. You have to change clothes before you sit on the couch.

Now, this rule, and indeed the very concept of BART pants, came up in conversation at work about five years ago, and this bunch of us who used to have lunch together laughed our fucking FACES off at the time and have continued to bring it up again and again over the years – but no one, and least of all me, could deny the truth and also the practical necessity of the BART pants rule.

Because, people: BART is fucking horrible. The seats are all cloth … unsterilizable, un-wipeable woven cloth that’s been in use for decades. Decades of SHATNER-KNOWS-WHAT getting rubbed into them – general Homeless Person Funk, specific human body emissions material (whether in gas, liquid, or solid form), various cooties and vermin, substances which cling to the bodies and clothing of persons from twelve-cat or ferret/snake households, etc. Cleaning is a joke – there’s not a seat or a seatback untouched by a Mystery Stain, a schmear of something it really doesn’t bear thinking about if you don’t want to turn into some sort of housebound manic phobic who bathes in hand sanitizer and shaves her head to make it easier to do a full decon every hour on the hour.

So this past weekend, you get a bunch of dumbasses think it’s funny to go pantless on BART, as part of a worldwide super-hilare stunt of riding transit sans pantalones.

PANTLESS.

ON BART.

Jesus H. W. SHATNER in a frilly metallic thong with the hairy bits hangin out, y’all!

First of all: Are you people STUPID or something? Do you know what you’re exposing yourselves to? Did you give this any fucking thought at all?

Secondly: Do you numbnuts idiots have any idea what you’re exposing US to? Innocent citizens – working, taxpaying motherfuckers – forced to share airspace with your junkular regions! I don’t live in a nudist colony or goddamn Brazil or wherever for a reason, you exhibitionist fucktards! Find another way to get your jollies. GOD!

Big Ben, kids! Parliament!

Things Mister Chatty Motherfucker Enjoys Pouring Out Of His Chat-Hole Onto Whatever Luckless Bastard Of A Seatmate He Has Cornered For The Duration, In Full Earshot Of Our African-American, Union-Member Regular Bus Driver: A Partial List

1) Unions, and how they’re choking to death not only this particular bus line entity, but all enterprise of any kind anywhere, and how if the companies were allowed to hire contractors everything would be ship-shape. (He actually said ship-shape.)

2) How “this guy” (with a gesture toward our driver) was “only about 10 minutes late today,” which is “better than most of these guys.”

3) How Obama could fix this situation with our bus line (slated for permanent discontinuance in December) if he wanted to, but he won’t.

“And I took my meds this morning!”

Y’all, I was caught in a VORTEX OF CRAZY on the bus this a.m.

Somewhere to the back, Slightly Retarded Tony Gwynn was yammering his face right off his head, asking people’s phone numbers (especially that of the guy I couldn’t see but who sounded like Stanley from The Office, which was awesome) and hollering quotables including the title of this post; the bus driver eventually got on the P.A. to ask him to please simmer down. Just in front of me, the … slightly off little five-year-old was bouncing off the walls, having glommed on to this woman who in recent weeks she’s decided is her best friend, waving her Woody-from-Toy-Story doll around and making her read this fucking book about Pirate Pete, while her mom – hefty, bespectacled and shaven-headed – ignored the rest of humanity as usual and texted the entire ride. Back and to my left, Mister Chatty Motherfucker was turned around in his seat, talking to this couple behind him about Sydney (the city in Australia) and its budget woes (WTFF?). And that was just DURING the ride; when I got on, at the last stop before the bus goes express to the city, we just sat at the curb for 20 minutes; I was busy writing my Sixteen Candles sequel on my new tiny little laptop so I didn’t really notice, but by the time people got seriously restless, a fire truck had pulled up, blocking us, and several of the firemen boarded the bus and removed a man, then stood at a distance talking to him for awhile. We sat there making nervous unfunny bomb-on-the-bus, terrorist-attack jokes while a raven-haired tattooed chick went out to talk to them, then came back; turns out, Removed Guy was in fact Crazy Guy, who from the first stop had been rambling about “Suicide San Francisco,” saying he was on his way to the Golden Gate Bridge to jump off it, and hoping he had enough money to get there – and the chick had spoken to the bus driver, who called … um, I guess the fire department.

You people who drive to work miss all the fun.

Where are the Frog Brothers when you need them?

OK Internets, goddammit, can we please talk about Twilight for a second?

I know, you’re like, “JESUS H. W. SHATNER, not you, too?!” but take it easy. This is not one of those demoralizing confessions I sometimes throw out at y’all, thank the Pompous, Corseted One. This is where I ask you, seriously, what. the. fuck.

Over the year or so since I first heard of it, I’ve gone from “Not interested, thanks, I’m well past fourteen,” to “Huh, it’s that big a deal, eh? Whatever,” to “Guess I should check it out; after all, I scoffed at Harry Potter till I read it, and that shit fucking rules. Besides, I like YA fiction, done well.” So I had half a mind to stand around in a book store reading it when next I had the chance, but a girl next to me on the bus -- a cute 28-ish Asian woman in professional attire -- unwittingly spared me the effort. She was deeply into what I gather is the first of the series – and given the print size, I joined in with barely a need to conceal the fact that I was reading over her shoulder.

You GUYS. Come ON! Leaving out the fact that it’s about vampires*: There’s all this striding down corridors** and sighing and staring and abrupt turning*** and my god with the ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS! It read like fanfic written by a teenage virgin – just leaden and overwrought and cringe-inducing, the kind of stuff a normal person would find buried in a footlocker in the attic of her parents’ house while home for her 20th high school reunion and realize with shocked and terrified glee that she had a GOLDEN GEM to present at the next Sarah Brown joint -- but instead, this Stephenie Meyer person (who can’t even spell her own name properly) is a multi-millionaire off of it. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!


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*Which, for fuck’s sake, ladies, can we give this up as a Thing that’s supposed to be sexy? Didn’t Tom Cruise prove beyond doubt that it isn’t?
**Corridors? Seriously, corridors? In millennial America?
***On one’s heel, naturally. Is there any other way?

What is the frequency, Kenneth?

Madam, you smell of multiple cats and a too-infrequently-changed mega-maxi pad, besides which on the way home I am often treated to your side of a neverending cellular-phone conversation in re: what is or is not in the oven that you may or may not make for dinner for a person or persons who may or may not wait up for you and whether they have or have not given yet a third party his or her medications today. So don’t get all shirty with me, asking if I want to switch seats when Mister Chatty Motherfucker won’t stop his dain-bramaged babbling even after he and I are seated (deliberately on my part) on opposite sides of you and I settle in for what I fondly hope is twenty minutes of swaying, jostling near-sleep on this goddamned crazy-train bus.

sit down / stand up

Quick question for all the fellas, and all the young people (sometimes referred to on this here fine blog as The Kids Today): If you are riding on a very full bus, and at the last stop before the bus goes express into the city, more people get on, and some have to stand, including five women, one of whom is visibly pregnant (NOT ME!), and one of whom is visibly suffering from a leg/foot injury (there is a brace involved) (also NOT ME), would you stand to offer your seat, or sit on your dead ass, letting the two physically compromised ladies grab a seatback and surf the bus all the way into town?

Yes, there is a Right Answer to that, and no, none of the fellas or young people on the bus today knew it. Nor did any of the able-bodied women, I hasten to add.

For the record: I was one of the uninjured, unpregnant healthy young-ish standees; had I been seated, I’d’ve offered my seat to either of the two women in question OR any man with detectable physical issues, as I am wont to do. Courtesy to your fellow humans should not be limited to one gender, especially in this post-feminist age – the rule is, whoever needs the seat more should get it. So sayeth the mighty Shatner, so say we all.

Franks and beans!

Is it wrong – or rather, I suppose I should ask, how wrong is it – that I deftly maneuvered a sweet last-second switcheroo on Mister Chatty Motherfucker this morning on the bus, so that he ended up seated next to an also very talky guy I’ll call Slightly Retarded Tony Gwynn? I hated to sic the King of Verbal Diarrhea on sweet, happy SRTG, but SRTG, a longtime regular on this route who likes to home in on the ladies (ALL the ladies) with his smooth lines (“You’re pretty! Are you married? Will you marry me? What time is it?”) delivered at one-and-a-half-times normal conversational volume, is the only other person on the bus who can handle that type of interpersonal interaction at this hour of the morning. I suppose the really, really wrong part was how bowel-quakingly hilarious it was to witness my relentlessly verbose bus-riding nemesis (may he rot in Shatner’s hairy anus for all eternity) trying to parry with SRTG, as if SRTG is listening to him or cares and isn’t going to answer his stupid questions and comments with “Do you have a sister? Is she pretty? What time is it?” over and over and over and over again.

Thought paella

DRIVE MY CAR INTO THE OCEAN
Waiting for the bus this a.m., I saw a guy go by in a tiny little low-slung, obviously brand-new two-seater Porsche convertible. Riding in the passenger side: a garishly-upholstered carseat, correctly strapped in and clearly well-used (no child in it at the moment of sighting). Who in that life situation (parent of very young child) would buy such a vehicle? Well, I know why (DENIAL), but then why use it as the transpo for said child? Aren't those cars manufactured and marketed specifically as cruising vessels for picking up chicks, and wouldn’t it kind of ruin your chick-gathering mojo to have a Cheerio-covered carseat riding shotgun? I mean … “Hey baby, guess what? My boys can swim! Aww yeah! So, um, I’ll just swing by the house and drop this off, and be back for you in like an hour?”

WHY DON’T YOU MAKE LIKE A TREE
AND GET OUTTA HERE
I read this news feature the other day about Generation Y and what they’re like in the workplace. Apparently, “the kids” are into getting lots of feedback from managers, they don’t want to pay any dues, and they like to be praised and rewarded all the goddamn time. Hey kid – you do get rewarded. It’s called a fucking paycheck. It ain’t your little “everybody wins” soccer league out here, and I don’t give a shit whether you feel validated or not. Now go tell all your Facebook friends what assholes we X-ers are and get the fuck back to work.

MIXIN UP THE MEDICINE
Why is it the law that we have to speak of the American nineteen-sixties as “turbulent”?