Try to be nice ...

I have a nasty little post in my mind, but it will have to wait notwithstanding that it will be dated by the time I choke it out. Besides, wouldn't it be so much nicer if everyone were just nice. Now that would be nice.

Being congenitally nice requires a native blindness or, failing that, an ability to fake it at least sufficiently not to tip off the congenitally blind that they are being mocked. Now I am nice enough ... congenitally ... sufficiently nice to say a cheery hello to all and sundry, and to keep 'em all laughing. At work, of course, I suppress the filthy side of my ribaldry, and I think that is wholly appropriate. Most funny people, it has been my experience, have utterly filthy minds but have the good sense to drop the dirty bombs only in those intimate circumstances where other perverts are present and lurking. Perverts always lurk, even in plain view.

All that aside, and rambling on, it is precious difficult to be nice when one is surrounded by morons, and if you have been out of the house even once in the last year or so, you will no doubt have noticed the startling prevalence of morons and their complete lack of shame. Cell phones seem to be like marking devices for morons ... a sort of walking chemical test. Get a moron and a cell phone in the same ecosphere and you are bound to have an explosion. Like the dribbling moron female with a baby papoosed to her who blocked the narrow sidewalk where I was attempting to pass as she shouted something unintelligible into her moron marker. She had a friend with a child also ... the be-childed travel in clumps, as we know. The friend, cast adrift by her cell-phone addled papoose mama, vainly essayed to control her meandering offspring who was wont to wander in the road. When I was a child, a simple "don't do that" was sufficient. But the cell phone mamas, once weaned from their electronic teats, beg and moan at their children lest a simple command ruin them for life. Of course, spending an entire childhood with a cell-phone besotted mother would drive anyone to Bedlam.

Another child moment ... some child in arms squalling in the Caltrain station at Palo Alto while mama wiped its tears and talked to someone else. I remarked to RL that when I was a child, tears in a public place were greeted with the standard, "Keep crying and I'll give you something to cry for." I felt terribly hard done by, but I stopped crying. I like the old way.

Wait a second, I thought I was trying to be nice. So let me recount the joys of walking my dog. Well there was the idiot woman with a giggly smile and a large dog offleash who forced me and my tightly leashed Loki into the street. When I protested, she berated me ... I responded with a pithy remark which reflected poorly upon her overall intelligence. She, in fact, did not have the intelligence for an appropriate rejoinder that might have melted me ... so now I get to glower at her should I see her again. Hopefully she is just an interloper who walks her dog monthly. Too bad for the dog who looked to be only mildly less intelligent than she.

Also on the dog walk, the proud new probably liberal owner of some giganto-black-darkened-window-SUV parks the thing with more care than they take in docking the space shuttle ... it is nearly the size of the space shuttle. It has dealer plates which means that this perky proud liberal bought the damned thing within a few days or weeks. As he stands all chino-bedecked at Starbucks and gorges on his triple fat vanilla chai latte with ground cinnamon harvested by virgins in the forests of Nepal above the tree line ... does he not read the New York Times stories on global warning? Does he think that reality and its torments stops at the door of his 3.5 million dollar condo with hot tub and conjugal slavery and drooling spoiled spawn. He looked awfully content, even glowing. He had one of those surfer board holder thinggies on the roof ... probably just aerodynamic, since he and his wife spend their evenings eating beef at some local eatery where they can laugh gaily with their friends and ignore the blight they leave wherever they trod.

I gave him a withering look, as best I could muster, but he was playing with some electronic control in his new planet killer. Masturbating without release. If only global warming differentially drowned SUV owners ... how sweet would that be.

But it would not be nice.