Surlitude
"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits." — Mark Twain
You’re in your car, leaving a parking lot headed out to the rest of your day when it happens. You’re turning right from the exit. You’re waiting patiently for oncoming traffic to clear. Your signal is blinking. Your blood pressure is normal. A partial break approaches, the near lane clear, other vehicles safely in the far one. Your foot moves to the gas and then ...
Then some jackass decides that Right Damn Now is the perfect time to just roll on into the right lane. The closest lane. Your lane.
This is what we in the business call “being a prick.”
Of the ruling idiocies in our idiocracy, two of the most aggressively irritating are:
Being oblivious.
Pretending to be oblivious.
I despise both, though maybe the second thing, popularly described as “pretending not to understand” among us complainers on X, that is the most pervasive and intentional. Being actually oblivious may speak to moral turpitude, or maybe narcissism, or to actual outright dumb cluelessness. But the pretense? As a means of argument?
That’s what we in the business call “being an absolute bag of dicks.”
You see it in TV news all the time. Or rather half the time, I should say. And just guess which political party is always the target when “playing dumb” is deployed. Give you two guesses, and both of them are cable news networks.
Yep.
But the lane changer is a special kind of irritant, too. They’re the person who stops just inside the door when they enter a store or restaurant. The person who has a loud speakerphone conversation in public or, worse, on public transportation. The “listening to music or watching videos with no headphones” performers. The movie theater talkers, the open mouth chewers, the social media goodbye cruel world-ers, the “leave the grocery cart in the middle of the parking lot” shoppers. The airline seat recliners. Yeah, I said it.
The sheer obstinate will of humanity to irritate and enrage is a force that gives jerks their power. It’s a malignant energy field created by all living assholes. It’s a bad attitude that surrounds us and infuriates us; it binds the galaxy together in wanting to be torn asunder. It makes some long for solitude.
We are the irritated. The grouches. The curmudgeons. I mention this not to teach but to complain. It’s what I do. What we do. It’s a lifestyle, if not a living. It may not be a philosophy, but it’s not not one. It’s a surly state of mind. Surlitude.
And it’s going to come up a lot around here.