You’d think something as mundane as that wouldn’t be fraught with controversy…
You’d be wrong
We live in a mad mad world.
The stylist was talking with another stylist about a customer she’d had the day before.
The customer in question, was apparently transitioning from one gender to the other. “Okay, this is probably going to go off the rails,” I think.
As the story unfolds, apparently the stylist referred to the customer as a “She”. OMG! The horror!
The customer corrected the stylist’s use of pronoun defiantly proclaiming the proper pronoun was “IT”.
At this point in the story I’ve got my “What The Fuck” face on. The other half ignored me and continued the story.
The stylist, of course apologized explaining that she meant no offense. This wasn’t good enough for the mortally aggrieved customer. (He/She/It… whatever) Continued to manufacture outrage over this insignificant incident, turning everyone’s trip to the hair place into a crazed social justice nightmare.
A) How was the stylist to know “It” was the preferred pronoun? B) The Stylist did the professional thing by apologizing. C) The aggrieved customer had all the social decorum of a turd in a punchbowl.
The other half was laughing and said to me, “All I could picture as this story was being told was YOU sitting in a chair during the actual incident.”
Good Point!
I wouldn’t have been able to let it pass. I hate shitty behavior and the shitty people exhibiting it.
The first thing that popped into my head was that since “IT” didn’t have their pronoun tattooed on ITS forehead how was anyone to know? I’m sure that my expressing that thought would have added fuel to the fire.
The second thing that popped into my head is that “IT” usually refers to an object. Then I remembered being a boy in the Deep South.
The first word I ever learned to describe a Black person was the “N-Word”. But the context was that one went to get the “N-Word” to clean up a mess.
For Example: “Bill, please go get the broom to sweep up this mess on the floor.”
My childhood memory has the statement from my Grandfather telling me, “Hey boy, go get the “N-word” to clean up that mess.”
In my experience the “N-Word” was used to reduce a kind thoughtful human being, (Eddie would tell me jokes and ride me around on his shoulders and we’d laugh the whole time,) to nothing more than an object on par with a mop or broom. (For the sake of clarity, Eddie was an employee of my Grandfather, and I probably wasn’t more than 5.)
As I thought about the implications of a human being demanding to be called “IT” I couldn’t help but notice the similarity.
What completely astounds me, is that any human being would willingly demean & diminish their own humanity in this way.
People like the aforementioned customer, would loose their shit if I, a white CIS male, were to refer to an African American as “IT”. They’d be saying I was racist or any number of other ugly things. (Then again, most of the ugly words they’d call me have lost much of their former impact and meanings.)
Then they’d turn around and make a spectacle of themselves in a public place demanding to be called “IT”.
All the while annoying the rest of us “normal” people who use pronouns based in history and languages dating back 5 thousand years or more.
The other half is right…
It’s a good thing I wasn’t there for the incident itself.
Depending on how screeching they were, I could easily see myself leading off with,
“Nobody gives a fuck about your pronouns! Now sit the fuck down and shut the hell up. There are actual humans in this business, trust me they do not consider themselves the equivalent of a dildo or pocket pussy. Both of which, by the way, are ITS.”
No, I don’t think it would have ended well at all…
Recently the local pharmacy informed me that a routine maintenance medication Rx had expired and that I’d have to see my dr. to get it refilled.
Great! Another expense that I didn’t need. Aside from the gas and the time that I’d be sitting in the doctor’s office I was worried about the hassle of getting blood work and all the other annoyances.
I put it off.
It’s not like I’m afraid of doctors, I just hate the inconvenience! I do a lot of self monitoring and do it with higher quality devices. If something seems amiss for a while I’ll typically “Man up” and go subject myself to the hassle of seeing a dr.
Case in point, the ripped open thumb joint of last summer. That’s 6K I needed to spend like another hole in my head.
I’ve got a bit of a cold, I don’t feel like doing too much today so I thought, “I’ll be productive and make the doctor appointment before the day gets away from me.”
Grabbing the phone and dreading the hoops I thought I was going to have to jump through I made the call.
Much to my surprise, they had a Telehealth system. Huh, I was especially surprised when the cheerful girl on the phone said the doctor could see me in half an hour and that he was running on time.
What? I can be seen in half an hour? WTF? That’s one for the record books. Where is my 1 month wait? I’m used to having to sit in a waiting room full of sick, broken people. You mean that I’m not going to have to endure that?
The world has truly gone mad!!!
Sure enough, a link shows up. I click on the link and there’s my doctor. He says he’d like to see me in person for a physical with some bloodwork in hand, whenever that’s convenient. He reminds me that it’s been over 10 years since I had a colonoscopy and that I should probably get that done.
He asks how I’ve been and what my last BP reading was. I tell him this mornings reading. He’s like that’s fine. He asks if I’m running a fever due to the cold. I tell him yes but it’s only low grade. He’s says, “Good, keep an eye on it. Take care of yourself and I’ve renewed your Rx. Call me if you need me, I’m gonna go deal with some really sick people.”
I laugh, we sign off and that was that.
I guess there’s benefit to me doing the self monitoring and having the data on hand. There is also the probability that he knows I’m pretty diligent about keeping data and know my body.
The cost was the same as a regular appointment. So it doesn’t hurt his bottom line. The advantage for him is that he isn’t exposed to a bunch of sick people clogging up his office.
I did the math. He’s knocking down about 1 grand per hour doing Telehealth appointments.
Great gig if you can get it!
I can’t complain too much. I didn’t have to drive an hour to see him for a 10 minute appointment, nor did I have to deal with masks and all the attendant BS of walking into a medical complex. Here I am, unshowered, unshaved, in my sweatpants, and I was able to take care of business from my couch.
It was painless, and convenient.
Next time… I’m taking the call in the nude and scratching my balls. I gotta have some shock value when I see a doctor!
Based on a sample of one time. I’d say if the opportunity arises give the Telehealth option a whirl.
It’s kind of an interesting take on the original house call. Back when doctors where country doctors who often saw their patients into, and out of this world.
The neighbor whose house and cat I’ve been looking after is apparently getting better and may be coming home. His Niece and her Husband came down to clean up his house and make it suitable for someone using a walker.
It meant for me that I didn’t have to look after the cat and for at least a few days had the opportunity to look after my own affairs. That was a relief and my mood was pretty good.
For my assistance, and their using my dump access card, they agreed to save some space in one of their dump runs for various yard trimmings that I’d piled up around the yard. They’d rented a large pickup truck and my yard stuff would fit nicely on top of the other stuff they were tossing from the house.
I was out in my yard bagging the stuff to make it easier to load.
It was a lovely spring day and I was in a good mood. The sun felt great and for the first time in months I was warm and cheerful. Progress, warmth, and getting things done always makes me a happy camper.
Apparently the crazy lady in the neighborhood was enjoying herself wandering up and down the main street that all the residential streets intersect with. Aside from her occasional outbursts I was in my own little serene world.
This all went to shit.
I was almost finished with my chore when the crazy lady starts screaming the name of a dead woman who lived across the street from me. While she’s screaming the dead woman’s name she’s walking toward the gate of the house.
The house in question has been sold, purchased, and renovated entirely by the new owner. Seeing crazy heading toward the house, knowing that the former occupant was dead, and that crazy had previously kicked the door in, terrorizing the former occupant I was left with a choice.
I could watch the fun as she pounded on the door, or kicked it in, setting off the alarm system and summoning the police… Or I could say something.
In future, I’ll keep my mouth shut and enjoy the live police show.
On this occasion I simply said loud enough that she could hear me, “She’s dead. She’s been dead for over a year.”
This simple statement of fact resulted in crazy targeting me. As I’ve mentioned occasionally elsewhere in this blog, Crazy has a mouth on her that could make the entirety of several military forces blush at once. The fury of her insanity spewed forth in a rabid staccato of nonsense and obscenities and she started walking back down the street toward me. She was practically frothing at the mouth.
This sort of thing has happened before and she usually sputtered out then wanders off.
Wednesday, she didn’t sputter out.
She demanded to know who I thought I was telling her that the neighbor was dead. She further said I was a liar because she’d just spoken to the neighbor.
I replied, “As you wish,” and went back to my work. This enraged her further, she picks up her pace assuming what I suspect she felt was an appropriately intimidating and aggressive walk. Were she a 4 year old and not spewing foul obscenities every step of the way, it would have been funny.
I still didn’t take her as a threat, in part due to her size and in part due to the comical walk. That being said, I was monitoring her approach. She demanded I produce ID as she stomped onto my property. I asked her what good that would so since our ID has our post office address, not our actual physical address printed on it. ID tells her nothing.
This seemed to cause a momentary pause in her diatribe. Perhaps some logic process attempted to engage, and was promptly choked to death by the crazy raging in her brain. She then told me that she owned my house and that I needed to get off her property.
This annoyed me a lot. Her rage and aggression directed at me in close quarters was starting to really piss me off. Not to mention her yappy ill behaved Chihuahua that has on more than one occasion tried to bite me while I was doing yard work, by sneaking up on me from behind.
One of these days that little piece of shit is going to tangle with my weed whacker!
I said, “If this is your goddamned house show me the cancelled checks!” I know this was the wrong thing to say, I knew it the minute it left my lips.
Some part of me recognized that I was being drawn into her crazy and that wasn’t the way to go. That part of my brain gave me a disdainful “Tut tut tut” and called me a dumbass.
This internal dialog stopped me from peppering Crazy with a bunch of followup questions like, “What’s the mortgage payment? Who holds the mortgage? What was the sale amount of the house? Is there a second?” I think in my growing anger I was still considering the possibility that I could somehow win.
When she said, “The checks aren’t canceled,” I realized that you can’t win with reason against this kind of crazy.
At around this point she punched me…
I registered impact and minor damage on my right upper chest. Now I was facing a crisis.
Let me explain, and please remember all of the following happens in two or three heartbeats.
When someone hits me, I tend to instantly lose control. The world narrows to the person who hit me and I’m looking for openings and weaknesses. I start looking for ways to break bones, dislocate joints, and I’m not thinking about things like fair fight or Queensberry rules. I’m thinking about how to efficiently terminate the threat while looking around for potential weapons at hand.
In the past, this has resulted in epic rage and coming dangerously close to killing. In those instances it was only friends being present, dragging me bodily away that stopped me. Even so, whoever hit me from then on would literally crawl out a second floor bathroom window to avoid me.
That rage scares me more than anything else in my life. During the rage, I’m not there, when it’s over I have little to no memory of what I’ve done. At most, I’ll retain images or almost sexual gratification, but no clear timeline of events. It’s a monster that I keep chained in my head and never let out because I fear that the monster would overwhelm me then I’d lose myself in it.
This time I was completely alone, and that part of me that I fear most, was breaking free.
It also didn’t help that every bit of psychological, emotional, and most physical abuse perpetrated on me throughout my entire life has been inflicted by women.
Women who were bullies and knew they’d get away with it because when no one was looking they could. They knew they had the upper hand, if I responded, they’d immediately revert to the victim and poor defenseless girl roles.
Then as I was taking whatever punishment for raising my voice, or responding to their aggression they’d smile slyly through their fake tears, knowing that they’d won, because they’d baited me, or goaded me into exactly the situation they wanted. Far too often they’d do it just for fun, or a promotion, or just because they didn’t like that their obvious crocodile tears didn’t elicit sympathy from me.
Hey bitches, you say you’re equal. If a man cried you’d humiliate him about it, why should your tears get people falling all over themselves to make you stop? Fair is fair.
Here was yet another woman striking me, assuming that she’d get away with it.
Some of the chains holding the beast, snapped.
“After all it’s only the two of us standing in my driveway… Who would know?”
Crazy is a threat to my peace and quiet, a disturbance to the neighborhood, an ever present worry. She’s defective. A waste of DNA. She at one time may have been simply mentally ill but over the 20 years she’s lived in this neighborhood she’s gotten much worse and may now be using drugs other than those prescribed.
I do my level best to ignore her and shut her out of my consciousness. Going so far as to close my house up and run the A/C with the windows and doors locked even on beautiful breezy spring and summer days while she screams horrific obscenities at the top of her lungs .
Questions I rarely consider are, “Why are her rights more important that all the rest of the people in this neighborhood? Why does she have the ability to imprison us in our homes with her insanity?”
More of the Beasts chains snapped.
“Her neck is thin as a chicken’s… Who would know?”
My narrowing vision was increasingly tinted red. The Beast was awake, the rage was growing uncontrollable. Blood pumping warm adrenaline felt like life and youth returning to my old bones. Life around me slowed, I could see the fly hoping for a meal suspended in front of her face. Dust motes froze mid air reflecting the sunlight.
More chains snapped.
“That fly looks hungry, why not feed it and 1000 generations of it’s line… Free me, let me serve you, some of those branches would make excellent clubs… Who would know?”
The rational part of me had been busy processing that I’d just been hit with no provocation came back. That part of me just couldn’t understand why she’d hit me at all, it made no sense and was therefore an unresolvable question. The answer that came back was, “this bitch is crazy,” then the rational part screamed in my head, “you don’t have to be crazy too!”
The Beast snapped its jaws at the rational part of my brain but began retreating to sulk in his dark dungeon.
Tenuous control of my anger and rage began to reassert itself. Rationality rebooted fully.
If I responded to her attack she’d win. I’d go to jail, and she’d smile. I’d lose my freedom and complicate my life in endless ways. I live in California. Women always win here, they’re always right, even when they’re not. Women who commit brutal murders get much lighter sentences than men, those who commit assault are lightly punished if at all.
The police would have no choice but to take me away. At the time, I thought California had some stupid law in place that said I, the victim, had to retreat and let the criminal take whatever they wanted.
My internal dialog said, “Choose a better option.” The part of me that is the Beast, accepted this proposition but added if she hits me again all bets are off.
I looked Crazy in the eyes and quietly said, “I don’t want to do this today.”
I knew the rage still burned in my eyes. The very few people who’ve seen my like that, described it as seeing Death looking at them, out of my eyes.
By some miracle, Crazy decided to leave. Her expression was one of confusion. She walked away without looking back, swearing and calling me names. Two that stick out were “misogynistic bastard” and “fucking fag”.
It cracks me up that when a woman is jonesing for a fight with a man, if he refuses to fight her, the woman always calls him a fag. Jesus! The deck is stacked against men!
Her one last parting shot was this, “You’ve always looked down on me since I moved here.”
As I stood there feeling the sun on my skin. I though, “Yep, you’re right about that because you’re trash, and always have been.”
The rational part of my mind acknowledged the defusing of the situation without additional violence as a win.
But the masculine, male, proud part of me, and the Beast were both wounded. By not responding as she so richly deserved, the bitch still caused me injury. She emasculated me. Not in front of the neighborhood but in front of the one person that I can’t ignore.
Myself.
It’s not about wounded pride, that heals.
This is about my fundamental right to defend myself. Am I now too old to fight? Am I weak and feeble? Am I not a man anymore? Have I caved into the bullshit and now too afraid of legal shit or consequences to even defend myself?
I was a proud apex predator, what am I now? Old? Used up? Useless? Should I just wander into the forest and die?
Will I forever hide behind the police and the law, will I forever be a victim?
The police were called. They dutifully took statements. They advised me that I could have her arrested for assault but that she’d be out in 8 hours or less. They suggested a better legal approach was to file a restraining order against her.
Either way, I know she’ll retaliate. She’s a vindictive bitch. I know of at least two other assaults she’s committed against neighbors which were unreported because the victims feared her retaliation.
I know that I must file a restraining order. Not just for me, but because it puts Crazy on the radar of the legal system. Long term, that benefits all the neighborhood. Unfortunately it also puts me on the same radar. Worse though, this feels like I’m hiding under my mother’s skirt.
The rational part of me is trying to convince the Beast that using the legal system against Crazy is satisfying because it’s using her own tools against her.
The Beast isn’t buying it. The legal system is long and drawn out and requires lots of energy to be expended. The Beast is about instant gratification and the almost erotic joy of vanquishing an enemy definitively in the moment.
The Beast is pissed off, that yet again a woman fucked him over with self inflicted wounds.
One good thing came out of my conversation with the police. They told me that I absolutely had the right to defend myself on my own property. They suggested that I get a security camera with recording ability so that in the future, once the restraining order is issued I’ll have a record of whatever transpires.
The Beast is happy about that. “If she comes at me again… Who cares who will know?”
Another bright spot is that the visitors cleaning up the neighbors house were video taping the exchange from his property.
That will make the legal process a bit easier. But it will still take time and effort and trips to the court house on my part. All of which costs me money while Crazy incurs no expense, no punishment, no inconvenience, basically… she gets to win again.
