Some giggles

Here, my darlings, are some things that have made me giggle recently. Because we could all use a bit of that these days, couldn't we? 💜💜💜

Credit: r/meirl

Credit: aborteddreams

Credit: u/Gwensaur

Once...

Once upon a time there was an angry, chompy beastie that lived in an old Cheerio box behind a 7-11. Every couple of days, the person who owned the 7-11 tried to throw the Cheerio box away because it was cluttering up the alley.

Every couple of days, the person who owned the 7-11 lost a lot of blood.

This went on for months. The 7-11 owner would try to get rid of the Cheerio box, and the angry, chompy beastie would be angry and chompy, and the owner would have to go to the Red Cross for a transfusion. The Cheerio box being, as it was, made of cardboard, got more and more dilapidated as time passed. When it rained, the box got squishy. When it was windy, little bits of the box flew away. When it was hot, the box went all crispy and wrinkly. And, as if the box wasn’t enough of an eyesore, the angry chompy beastie was more of a one. It had one eye, was missing a big chunk of one ear, had a big, mean, snaggletoothed grin, and its body was gnarled like a swamp tree in a Saturday morning kid’s cartoon about a group of nosy teenagers and their talking dog.

The longer the war between the 7-11 owner and the beastie went on, the more the 7-11 owner realized that they were shit out of luck on the winning front. That beastie and its scraggly Cheerio box weren’t-a goin’ nowhere, no-how. Eventually, the 7-11 owner simply threw up their hands, chalked it up to experience, and left the beastie and its box to its gnarly, angry, chompy self. This solution worked for a while. The beastie would only snarl at the 7-11 owner when they came out to throw something in the dumpster, the 7-11 owner would give the beastie some serious side-eye, and the people at the Red Cross got so concerned that the 7-11 owner wasn’t coming in regularly anymore that they sent someone to check on them--and bring Slurpees back for the office, of course. It was a 7-11, after all.

So, there was a silent agreement, a tenuous cease-fire, an uneasy peace. All was quiet in the Convenience Store Kingdom.

At least it was until the beastie’s Cheerio box got so old and weatherbeaten that the beastie was reduced to wearing the last, sad cardboard box flap as a hat to try to protect itself from the elements.

One stormy afternoon, the 7-11 owner dropped a sack of garbage outside the back door of the store with the intention of walking it to the dumpster when the rain let up, but stopped at the sight of the beastie and its sad box-flap hat, standing where the Cheerio box once stood, soaking wet and shivering.

The beastie snarled, as was the custom.

The 7-11 owner threw shade at the beastie, as was the custom.

But once the owner was back inside, the timer went off on the hot dogs on the rollers, indicating that it was time to throw the current batch out and start a fresh one, and the 7-11 owner felt a pang of guilt. The beastie was their neighbor, regardless of its violent nature and sour attitude. The beastie--their neighbor--was wet. And probably cold. And maybe hungry as well. So the 7-11 owner put the old hot dogs in a cardboard nacho tray and walked back out the back door.

The beastie snarled, as was the custom.

The 7-11 owner then did something different. Defying custom, they put the tray on the ground and pushed it toward the beastie with a broom.

The beastie attacked the broom on principle, but the owner could tell that the beastie’s heart wasn’t in it. Then the beastie snarfed down all the hot dogs, gave the owner a slow blink, adjusted its box-flap hat, and went back to its spot on the pavement.

That night, the owner collapsed all the cardboard boxes from the day’s deliveries but one, which they left outside the back door.

The next morning, the beastie had moved the box to its favored spot, and there was a pile of very dead cockroaches--a pest the 7-11 owner struggled with on a regular basis-- neatly stacked next to the dumpster, ready to be discarded.

The beastie still snarled at the 7-11 owner.

The 7-11 owner still glowered right back at it.

But the too-old hot dogs, and every so often a new box, were always offered up. It was as if the 7-11 owner was saying, “We’re different, but you are my neighbor, and even though we don’t get along, I will not allow you to suffer unnecessarily.”

The piles of dead roaches continued to appear every morning. It was as if the beastie was saying, “We’re different, but you are my neighbor, and even though we don’t get along, I will not allow you to suffer unnecessarily.”

Moral: You can’t change others, or how they behave toward you, but you can change how you behave toward them, and that might make a world of difference.

Maybe it’s time to give your beasties a fresh box.

Pick your poison

I'm going to go with [Unidentifiable].

How 'bout you?

...and think about what you’ve done.

Last Saturday was July 4th. Independence Day in the U.S. A day traditionally set aside for parades, barbecues, John Philip Sousa, patriotic bunting, and fireworks.

It has never been my favorite holiday. It’s hot, there’s too many wasps, the potato salad gets warm, and then to top it off you have to watch things blow up before you’re allowed to go to bed and write it off as a bad job until the next year. Not my idea of a good time, especially as I’ve suffered moderate to severe pyrophobia my whole life which makes any occasion culminating in gratuitous explosions rather a nerve-wracking experience. No, thank you. Hard pass.

And let’s face it, it’s not exactly like we have much to celebrate if you really break down current events. Hell, if you break down our entire history. We wriggled out from underneath Crazy George III’s thumb because we didn’t like the way we were being treated, and then turned right around and did the same--and worse--to anyone we didn’t like the look of. We’re living on stolen land, and we swept the original occupants as far under the rug as we could. We perpetrated the theft and imprisonment of people we deemed to be lesser than ourselves, and sold them like livestock to tend to our every whim. We’ve treated anyone we deemed inferior (which at this point is really anyone who doesn’t fill the WASP profile within a very slim margin) like garbage. We’ve treated our neighbors like garbage. We’ve treated the land we decided we just had to have like garbage.

We’re garbage human beings. Every single one of us. We descended from garbage human beings, and we seem intent on breeding more garbage human beings. And we celebrate this why? Because we somehow, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still believe we’re God’s gift to the world.

Personally, I think it’s humanity as a whole that is the root of the world’s problems, and if we could just get rid of people the world would be better off. Yeah, I’m actually kind of rooting for Coronavirus in that sense. I mean, maybe it will at least get rid of some of the most garbagey humans and leave some moderate-to-completely decent folks behind who can try to sort things out and improve going forward?

I’m not holding my breath, though, because if we’ve learned anything from history it’s that no matter how good the intentions, everything eventually turns into a raging shitstorm anyway.

So maybe instead of celebrating our inflated opinion of our own importance, we ought to take stock of how we can at least attempt to improve as a species--with particular emphasis on the über-patriot, ‘Murica-drawling, bigoted-as-fuck, pig-ignorant set.

I think slipping a little cyanide into their warm potato salad ought to do it.*

Here’s some programs and organizations doing good work in an attempt to balance out the bullshit:

RAICES: To get children out of cages. (Yeah, they’re still in there.)
https://www.raicestexas.org/

NDN Collective: To empower Indigenous People.
https://ndncollective.org/

The Black Infant Health Program (this one is CA-only, see your local authorities for something similar):
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DMCAH/BIH/Pages/default.aspx

Black Mamas Matter Alliance:
https://blackmamasmatter.org/

NAACP Legal Defense Fund:
https://www.naacpldf.org/

Center for Policing Equity:
https://policingequity.org/

Cesar Chavez Foundation:
https://chavezfoundation.org/

Do with this information what you will.


*No, I’m not actually advocating murder. Much as it might help. DON’T KILL PEOPLE. EVEN GARBAGE PEOPLE. IT’S NOT NICE, AND IT MAKES YOU GARBAGE PEOPLE.

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