A few days ago, I had a bizarre run-in with a stranger. I was at a cheap big-box store I don’t usually go to because of how crowded and sad and dirty it is, and I was leaning on an empty shopping cart I had gotten from the front of the store where they keep about five thousand empty shopping carts. I was in an aisle full of large, heavy lamps because I intended to use my empty shopping cart to move a large, heavy lamp. My right buttock rested jauntily on the edge of the cart as I stood with my hip popped out, contemplating what heavy lamp I was going to pick up and put in my cart. It was probably a good thing that I pulled an additional couple of inches away from the cart to actually pick up one of those heavy lamps, because what happened next would have startled my buttock something terrible.
A fifty-something white man in a camouflage hunting coat stomped briskly over to my cart, slammed a boxed vacuum cleaner into it with an aggressive, rattling thud, scowled at me, and whipped the cart away from the skinny-teenager-looking girl who was standing next to it with a large lamp in her hands. His leathery wife gazed hilariously up at the ceiling, desperate to look like she hadn’t noticed anything as I squatted there with my lamp in my hands and cartoon question marks popping out of my head. He was long gone by the time my brain could come to terms with the fact that two grown human beings had just swept up to a smaller, younger, lamp-buying human and taken away the resource she had gathered for herself to move a lamp. A resource they could have walked one hundred paces to get while carrying a handy vac much more light and hollow than a large lamp.
I set the lamp down at the end of a tissue display near the store entrance and went to gather myself another empty cart. Even though all I wanted to do was go home and spoon the lamp I had endured such confusion to get, I still had to get groceries in this huge, overwhelming store I had not been in for months and which apparently had gone through so much reorganization that I found my spirit animal while looking for a can of spicy Pringles. Tired from a long day, abuse by strangers and the enlightenment of having just completed a spirit quest in a Walmart, I then got in the one line with a screwed up card-reader and the only cashier in the world lazy enough to not try any of her training and instead subject everyone to wait in line for a manager for fifteen unnecessary minutes. An older woman in line behind me was intrigued by my lamp and wanted to talk with me about it excitedly, and I did my best to be friendly and bubbly like I want to be perceived. Of course she had to ask how much my lamp was, and when I told her, she seemed to scoff and turned to whisper what I had just said to her family. I assumed by her whispering that she disapproved of me and my highfaluting lamp.
Anyway, after I got home and had time to chill out and put away my hard-won groceries, I texted about the Hunting Coat Cart Wrangler to one of my guy friends who is usually good for a chuckle after such incidents. When I told him about the Jackoff Bandit, his response was something along the lines of “These things only happen to you.” Many months back he used to jokingly call my run-ins with sexual harassers and idiot men “hot girl problems,” but apparently over time it became clear that it is a much more specific issue. An issue quite specific to me. He said something like this again, only I think he abbreviated it even further to “only you”. To which I said:
“fuck my life and its many dicks”
He responded:
“FMLAIMD”
I decided this acronym needed writing about, and was reminded again today when I was contacted by a woman who had recently broken up with an ex of mine. She wanted to know if his harassment got violent, since I still occasionally get eerie calls and texts from him a couple of years after the fact. And again, I thought of the times he would call and how it made me feel very much like saying “FMLAIMD”.
As someone who tries to be an eternal optimist, I want to break down why I am endorsing this phrase. If I may:
“Fuck my life.” Those are some strong fucking words, particularly since they start with “fuck,” that hardest of the hard swears. But in a world where tragedy makes me hear a mental recording of Louis CK saying, “Do I even want to be alive any more?” it feels like a comedic hyperbole, void of suicidal implications or true despair. It’s like repeatedly trying to do a simple task and failing, but punctuating the last failure with an arm-flapping gesture and an unwarranted hard swear. It’s no longer an issue, it’s now a slapstick bit.
“and its many dicks.” Okay, as a grammar stickler, it’s going to drive me crazy when this catches on and people will inevitably try to spell it as “it’s many dicks”. No. I T S with no apostrophe is possessive, and for better or for worse, my life owns those dicks in this phrase. My life is not dicks, it has dicks about it. There is much more to my life than dicks, quite luckily, but the dicks are certainly there. And while I have been trying really hard to eliminate gender-based swears from my vocabulary, “dick” is just too good a word for what it is. In this case, a jerk. A special brand of jerk that just screws everybody. It’s like the difference between “guys” and “men”; all guys are men, but not all men are guys. All dicks have penises, but not all penis-wielders are dicks. Dick is a crude slang word, not an organ on a sacred body. I have many wonderful men in my life, and they are not dicks. But if they want to call their penises dicks, such is their prerogative.
So I’m inviting you to rally around FMLAIMD. May it remind us all not be dicks, so as not to bog each other down with endless dickery. Let us remember that dicks come in all shapes and sized, and many don’t even have dicks. Let us not discriminate and know that even we ourselves are often the dick, and that we can have much higher aspirations and be more to each other than just another of the many dicks Fing up one’s life.
Sorry, I just couldn’t handle publishing that much swearing. Here: puppy. I think that balanced some of that out.
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