So the week STARTED great. My Chinese sister-in-law fixed a big post-holiday meal for the family but really for me because yours truly is a mild-mannered newspaperman who had to work both Christmas AND New Year’s Day so I missed the family holiday meals.
It was genuine Chinese food, y’all. Not that greasy stuff we get in America, but the kind of home cooking I might get in a northern city of the Asian continent.
It was the best meal I’ve EVER had.
I had Monday off, so I went off to pay a bill before taking my 12-year-old car into the shop to get these “Service Engine Soon” and “battery issue” and “brake fluid” warning lights checked out (I suspected the first was just a gas cap issue and the other two a malfunction of the lights themselves because the brakes were working perfectly and the fluid was topped off).
But as one of my favorite 1990s rap songs goes: “from that very moment oh my day got worse”
After getting cash from the drive-thru ATM for the auto insurance bill, I pulled out into the thankfully clear street and found that my car would barely move. Got about a half block before pulling into a nearby lot.
Turns out that battery light was NOT malfunctioning.
Fortunately, I was only a half block from the auto insurance office and had roadside assistance as a benefit.
Within the hour, the tow truck arrived. The driver was a young dreadlocked fella who, in order to get my car on the flatbed, decided to block the road (the parking lot was very small and I GUESS he needed more room / non-sloping terrain) to get my vehicle aboard.
As he was beginning to strap my car down, he yelled out some choice words to frustrated motorists waiting for him:
“Y’all just gonna have to wait!”
But then came a dude who wouldn’t wait: a police deputy, who pulled up and ordered Tow Dude to move the truck.
Now, Tow Dude was still in the process of securing my car for travel and he was PISSED, shouting at the officer and all but getting in his face. Meanwhile, I was sitting in the truck cab, just wanting to get my car to the shop and telling the deputy so, hoping neither I nor Tow Dude would become a hashtag, gunned down by a cop.
But Deputy McSquintface (he literally looks like this actor in a recent commercial) wasn’t listening to either me or Tow Dude, instead yapping about “obeying a lawful order” and for the truck to be moved and for us to NOT leave the scene (hollup, Deputy McSquintface, we can’t do both). But Tow Dude opted to back up enough for McSquintface to drive off and then he left, with my car barely secured. It may have been a small miracle that I didn’t lose my car on the freeway.
Soooo … I’m not a hashtag. But that was unpleasant.
Tuesday morning, I caught an Uber to the garage. The alternator has died, and a new one’s not cheap. My mechanic suggested a used one to shave $200 from the fix, but it would take a day. So I opted to Uber to a car rental office, figuring $50-60 would be small price to pay for a compact for a 24-hour period
Only to learn that all the cars were rented out and the only one left was a minivan and it was gonna cost $100 all told. But I had to get to work, soooo
Wednesday, I got to the garage at 11 a.m. like my mechanic said the car would be ready. But for some reason it is more like 1 p.m. before the car was actually ready. So no time for those errands I needed to run but only time to get to work, soooo
Wednesday night, I was planning to join in my friend’s inaugural writer chat online. But my phone did not patch in for some reason so I missed that
On Thursday, I saw that on Facebook, my friend Myron’s video titled “The Myth of the Fake Geek Girl” was getting some pushback in the Black Geeks of DragonCon group. Some dude came in with the worst gatekeeping philosophy I’ve ever seen. Eventually I decided to engage and got called:
- a simp
- immature
- bad at reading comprehension
It was really kind of hilarious, actually, because this fella somehow thought he had the right to determine if women (who he would ONLY EVER refer to as “females”) belonged in a black geek community. That these women only got into the cosplay community to impress whatever white dude they were dating at the time or to gain “clout” from black geeks or on Instagram and that they weren’t -REAL- fans.
That’s why I engaged, because I know a number of these female geeks and they are deep in the black geek culture whether they’ve been in it for 10 months or 10 years. But ol’ boy’s (badly made) argument is that “these females” are always fake and that any man who doesn’t think so must be a “white knight” or “simp” — both terms for a man who just agrees and submits to women’s opinions in hopes of I guess gaining positive attention from said women.
An example of our conversation:
There was definitely a need to learn to read this toxic jerk’s terribly written text.
Because I was at work, I really could not go in on ol’ boy. But he was about to get roasted like an unrepentant pedophile in a fiery pit of hell — if I thought he could actually comprehend what I’d actually write.
See, I don’t just toss in expletives (with intentional misspellings to, I don’t know, seem cooler and less basic). I’d eviscerate him with logic and sense and kindness.
Well, as kind as one can be when reading someone like a riot act — especially after he tried to act like an OG nerd because he was there when it started in the 1980s when he was a kindergartner.
Bruh, I was already in high school.
He chose to be loud and wrong.
I continued a good while longer, just being curious how deep this rabbit hole of misogynoir (a term for misogyny focused against black women) and toxic masculinity (he repeatedly equated male agreement with women as weakness in men) and related insults against my maturity and intelligence went.
It went DEEP, friends.
There was an Oscar-winning thriller a few years ago called “Get Out,” which coined the term “Sunken Place” (in the film, a state of hypnosis) to refer to African Americans who have mentally adopted the mindstate of America’s white supremacist culture so completely that they no longer can be trusted by their fellow black people. (I will not name names.)
After this little episode spanning Thursday and Friday, I want director Jordan Peele to write/direct/produce another black-themed horror film that deals with misogynoir and can give it a Black Twitter-ready term analogous to “Sunken Place.”
And that was my week. God was good all through it, ensuring I never got stranded or shot or with a wrecked car or unable to pay or unable to get to work for the ability to pay or lose my salvation when dealing with this toxic dude.
How was yours?
Bridge Over Troubled Opinions 