A person wearing a mask with cheetos on it

Bitch, bitch, bitch, and other complaints

By Randall Jobe

Gloom, despair, and agony on me. Deep, dark depression, excessive misery. If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. Gloom, despair, and agony on me.

—Hee Haw’s Buck Owens and Roy Clark

Other than having strong commentary when encountering ineptitude, lack of etiquette, bad hygiene, bad driving, bad grammar, and bad taste in fashion, I like to believe that I am not one who constantly complains. A whiner. A titty baby. Nor am I a giddy princess traipsing through the forest making verbal love to the flora and fauna. I fall somewhere in the middle. I do get annoyed on a daily basis, but I also find great joy in the entire, complicated task of being an inhabitant of a society that tests you at every turn. Then the pandemic hit. The Pandora’s box of crazy-ass behaviors began and there became plenty to abhor about people. Isolation bred stupidity and complete dissolve of many behaviors considered inappropriate, socially acceptable, and, as my dear mother would say, “Just downright tacky.â€

I also have a colloquialism that sums it up nicely: “As common as pig tracks!â€

Not to point fingers, but four years of a certain so-called president who spouted verbal rants and racial slurs in an equal opportunity no-holds-barred and no-intellectual-filters tirade opened the floodgates of moral decency and good southern manners. It was enough to make Gone with the Wind’s Melanie Wilkes drop her fan, clutch her cameo and drop the F-bomb! Who would blame her?

Everything and everyone suddenly had hate-spewing targets on their backs. The vicious, homebound trolls crawled from the dark recesses of geniality and lashed out. If they held back before, now it was a free-for-all, no doubt spurred by their own miserable existence. They sat around their hoarder homes in Cheetos-stained bathrobes, unbathed and equally unfiltered.

The news was a hoax, COVID a master plot by a foreign country, Democrats were Satan’s playthings and life-saving vaccines come with a tracking chip and the ability to change your DNA. When the idiots decided to make masks the new Roe v. Wade debate and drag their small children to the streets to chant, “We won’t comply!†Under my breath, I added, “We’d rather die!â€

Slowly, but surely, the misinformation snaked from dark basements into the harsh daylight where verbal and physical assaults were rampant. Like aliens, swamp creatures, and bigots before them, we suddenly had plenty to legitimately complain about. It became a type of defense against the irrational. I found myself dreading the nightly news and Meghan McCain on The View. More than once I dreamed of dragging her by her hair to wash her mouth (and mind) out with hot soapy water.

But, to the nameless losers, hidden in the recesses of soda cans, fast food containers, and Snickers wrappers, I complained. But I also dug up my own sense of the values embedded in me from an early age and that I pray I still possess in strong measure. And again, my mother’s guiding words: “God don’t like ugly (and he’s not crazy about pretty either). The last part always baffled me. Don’t we want to be internally “pretty†in our words and actions towards others? Maybe it’s meant as a caution against vanity, which may be a portion of complaining. Being so sure that we know more than those who disagree with — and are disagreeable to — us.

For today, I vow to set aside strong complaints against so many things, remain positive, and focus on something constructive. But first, where are the Cheetos?

Related Posts

About author

Related Posts

Comments are closed.

Do not miss