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The Asshole Epidemic
Mar. 12th, 2015 10:34 amFor some reason, Alison Dubois’s little high-pitched plea at the Oscars – Equal Pay for Equal Work – has inspired all sorts of backlash.
There are the women of various colors who feel like blondes don’t have the right to talk about discrimination.
And then there are the garden variety misogynists.
Ran across one of those on Facebook yesterday. Someone who’s always been a bit of an iconoclast but had a brain. I thought. At least, he knows where the commas are supposed to go in a sentence.
I told him he was clueless, which he is. Really. You can argue all you want about whether women are oppressed by men, societal norms of beauty and cat-calling construction workers, but you can’t argue with Census studies that show that women make 77 cents for every buck men make doing equivalent work. You can only criticize the methodology.
Knowing about those commas carries a lot of weight with me, though. So I didn’t tell Mister Iconoclast he was an asshole.
Then one of his pals decided to spin it to the next level: Just like gay rights, these fuckers feel that just because they decided to suck dick, and take it up the ass, they should somehow be entitled to rights above and beyond those of straight people...
I mean, seriously?
My jaw fell open.
What is there to say?
Oh, now you’re quiet........ writes this asshole.
Frankly, your homophobia is so completely horrifying, I'm struck dumb, I respond.
Then Mister Iconoclast himself writes: Clueless! Feel free to write me off as an asshole. And, Darren as a homophobe. Anyone who isn't a homosexual is a homophobe and all men hate women. I get it. CLUELESS! Boy, am I fucked up.
And I’m thinking. Yep. You are fucked up.
And write him off as an asshole. I mean, now that I have his permission.
###
Okay, okay. In his defense, he was probably drunk.
But why defend him?
###
Knowing someone online is kind of a funny way to know someone, no? I was kind of an early adaptor on that one, having been on the Well for so long before social media exploded.
You take it on faith that the biographical details floating like swamp mist above the surface of opinions on gun control, immigration, Bibi’s recent speech to Congress, violations of the Logan Act, and endless repostings of YouTube videos and pix from Humans of New York are somehow authentic, reflect a real human center underneath a social media candy coating. But, of course, you don’t know.
What do I think I know about Mister Iconoclast’s life?
Let’s see.
1. He reads a lot of Charles Bukowski
2. He kind of looks like Charles Bukowski with longer hair
3. He lives on a rather interesting frontier
4. His schtick is cooking
What do I deduce about Mister Iconoclast’s life?
1. He was in a sexless marriage for most of his adult life.
2. It was his second or maybe third marriage
3. His earlier marriage(s) resulted in offspring whom he more-or-less abandoned when he walked out and who are now either in the military, doing time or dealing with the consequences of getting knocked up.
4. His most recent marriage, the sexless one, ended when he encountered – by chance or by design? Dunno – a girl he had a crush on in high school
5. He and the girl, now a woman in her 50s, live together these days in a series of shit-bag motels on that interesting frontier where they watch a lot of TV and drink. And have sex. Because this is LOVE, people. Not the weak, adulterated love juice beverage you and your pals have been sipping all your lives but LOVE NECTAR, the perfect fusion of two souls expressed through well-lubricated action of pussy and piston!
As a woman whose X-husband ended a 17-year marriage by hooking up with an old high school girlfriend, of course I’m skeptical about the LOVE portion of the deduced bio. I say this in the interests of full disclosure.
But maybe I’m just jealous! I went to an all-girls high school myself. While my earliest sexual experimentations were all with girls and I’ve always enjoyed women sexually, it seems highly unlikely that I’m gonna find pulse-pounding LOVE with Terri or Debbi or Lauri.
###
Mister Iconoclast was actually my second asshole of the day. The first was a guy who dragged this thick portfolio of completed forms into our appointment late in the afternoon.
He smiled at me challengingly.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you’ve already done your taxes, why are you coming to me?”
“I want to see if you come up with the same answer,” he said.
If it had been up to me, I would have sent him home on the spot, but of course, it was not up to me. So I took his thick trove of W2s, 1099-Rs, 1099-ints, 1099-divs et al and began sorting through them.
He kept snatching them back, disarranging my piles.
Which vexed me no end.
It was like he was deliberately trying to throw me off balance.
Finally I just gave up and began entering his various income streams.
He snatched up a form. “Not that one. I already talked to the IRS. That one doesn’t need to be reported.”
“It does need to be reported if you got a 1099 for it,” I said pleasantly. “It’s a rollover on a qualified plan, right? You won’t have to pay taxes on it, but I do need to report it.”
He waved the form in his hand right over my head and sneered at me. In another second, he was going to start fanning himself with it.
I sighed. Time for backup.
“Har-ry!” I screeched.
Harry is my partner in Adventures in Tax Preparation. Retired IBM engineer about my age. Deeply repressed, I’d say. I did a tax return for a married couple who were Harry’s neighbors, and I made a joke: “So. Have you gone to a lot of wild parties at Harry’s over the years?”
“Are you kidding?” said the woman. “Thirty-two years and they’ve never had a party.”
“Best manicured lawn in Hyde Park, though,” said the man. “You could bounce golf balls off it. And the shrubs? They look plastic, they’re so perfect.”
I did manage to have a conversation with Harry once that lasted a whole 10 minutes. It was about how when Harry was 21, he weighed 150 pounds. And now that he’s [Your Educated Guess Goes Here], he weighs 170 pounds. And how annoying that was.
Anyway, I call Harry over and Harry tells Mister Jerk exactly the same thing that I just told him.
So reluctantly, Mister Jerk surrenders the disputed 1099.
“I get it,” I coo to Mister Jerk with a big, sappy smile plastered all over my face. “You didn’t believe what I was saying to you because I’m a woman so what could I possibly know about taxes, huh?”
I find myself doing that rather a lot. Being sarcastic, but being sarcastic in a way that disguises my intent so that the other person in the conversational exchange doesn’t pick up on it. Is this a copout? It's such a useful strategy for me because really, my only other recourse would be to fall on such persons in a Harpy-like wrath and roll them toward the nearest concrete wall so I could beat their heads into it. I call it my “Yess-suh Mistah Bossman!” strategy.
Took me about an hour to finish entering all Mister Jerk’s income data.
“Whew! Well. I think we’re about done here!” I say encouragingly.
And he gets this big shit-eating grin on his face. “Not quite.”
And pulls out a K-1 form!
K-1 forms are limited partnership forms. “Flow-through entities” in the quaint patois of the IRS.
And we’re not allowed to do returns with K-1 forms.
You fucking piece of shit, I’m thinking. Why didn't you give me that form at the beginning when I asked you for all your forms? That’s an hour of my life I’m never going to get back.
I got rid of him quickly.
###
Generally, I’m able to live my silly little life without too much intrusion from assholes. So what was going on with yesterday? I don't know. Is an asshole epidemic going on, kind of like the measles epidemic? Are people refusing to be vaccinated against assholery?
Dunno.
I only know my tolerance for assholes is growing very, very thin.
There are the women of various colors who feel like blondes don’t have the right to talk about discrimination.
And then there are the garden variety misogynists.
Ran across one of those on Facebook yesterday. Someone who’s always been a bit of an iconoclast but had a brain. I thought. At least, he knows where the commas are supposed to go in a sentence.
I told him he was clueless, which he is. Really. You can argue all you want about whether women are oppressed by men, societal norms of beauty and cat-calling construction workers, but you can’t argue with Census studies that show that women make 77 cents for every buck men make doing equivalent work. You can only criticize the methodology.
Knowing about those commas carries a lot of weight with me, though. So I didn’t tell Mister Iconoclast he was an asshole.
Then one of his pals decided to spin it to the next level: Just like gay rights, these fuckers feel that just because they decided to suck dick, and take it up the ass, they should somehow be entitled to rights above and beyond those of straight people...
I mean, seriously?
My jaw fell open.
What is there to say?
Oh, now you’re quiet........ writes this asshole.
Frankly, your homophobia is so completely horrifying, I'm struck dumb, I respond.
Then Mister Iconoclast himself writes: Clueless! Feel free to write me off as an asshole. And, Darren as a homophobe. Anyone who isn't a homosexual is a homophobe and all men hate women. I get it. CLUELESS! Boy, am I fucked up.
And I’m thinking. Yep. You are fucked up.
And write him off as an asshole. I mean, now that I have his permission.
###
Okay, okay. In his defense, he was probably drunk.
But why defend him?
###
Knowing someone online is kind of a funny way to know someone, no? I was kind of an early adaptor on that one, having been on the Well for so long before social media exploded.
You take it on faith that the biographical details floating like swamp mist above the surface of opinions on gun control, immigration, Bibi’s recent speech to Congress, violations of the Logan Act, and endless repostings of YouTube videos and pix from Humans of New York are somehow authentic, reflect a real human center underneath a social media candy coating. But, of course, you don’t know.
What do I think I know about Mister Iconoclast’s life?
Let’s see.
1. He reads a lot of Charles Bukowski
2. He kind of looks like Charles Bukowski with longer hair
3. He lives on a rather interesting frontier
4. His schtick is cooking
What do I deduce about Mister Iconoclast’s life?
1. He was in a sexless marriage for most of his adult life.
2. It was his second or maybe third marriage
3. His earlier marriage(s) resulted in offspring whom he more-or-less abandoned when he walked out and who are now either in the military, doing time or dealing with the consequences of getting knocked up.
4. His most recent marriage, the sexless one, ended when he encountered – by chance or by design? Dunno – a girl he had a crush on in high school
5. He and the girl, now a woman in her 50s, live together these days in a series of shit-bag motels on that interesting frontier where they watch a lot of TV and drink. And have sex. Because this is LOVE, people. Not the weak, adulterated love juice beverage you and your pals have been sipping all your lives but LOVE NECTAR, the perfect fusion of two souls expressed through well-lubricated action of pussy and piston!
As a woman whose X-husband ended a 17-year marriage by hooking up with an old high school girlfriend, of course I’m skeptical about the LOVE portion of the deduced bio. I say this in the interests of full disclosure.
But maybe I’m just jealous! I went to an all-girls high school myself. While my earliest sexual experimentations were all with girls and I’ve always enjoyed women sexually, it seems highly unlikely that I’m gonna find pulse-pounding LOVE with Terri or Debbi or Lauri.
###
Mister Iconoclast was actually my second asshole of the day. The first was a guy who dragged this thick portfolio of completed forms into our appointment late in the afternoon.
He smiled at me challengingly.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you’ve already done your taxes, why are you coming to me?”
“I want to see if you come up with the same answer,” he said.
If it had been up to me, I would have sent him home on the spot, but of course, it was not up to me. So I took his thick trove of W2s, 1099-Rs, 1099-ints, 1099-divs et al and began sorting through them.
He kept snatching them back, disarranging my piles.
Which vexed me no end.
It was like he was deliberately trying to throw me off balance.
Finally I just gave up and began entering his various income streams.
He snatched up a form. “Not that one. I already talked to the IRS. That one doesn’t need to be reported.”
“It does need to be reported if you got a 1099 for it,” I said pleasantly. “It’s a rollover on a qualified plan, right? You won’t have to pay taxes on it, but I do need to report it.”
He waved the form in his hand right over my head and sneered at me. In another second, he was going to start fanning himself with it.
I sighed. Time for backup.
“Har-ry!” I screeched.
Harry is my partner in Adventures in Tax Preparation. Retired IBM engineer about my age. Deeply repressed, I’d say. I did a tax return for a married couple who were Harry’s neighbors, and I made a joke: “So. Have you gone to a lot of wild parties at Harry’s over the years?”
“Are you kidding?” said the woman. “Thirty-two years and they’ve never had a party.”
“Best manicured lawn in Hyde Park, though,” said the man. “You could bounce golf balls off it. And the shrubs? They look plastic, they’re so perfect.”
I did manage to have a conversation with Harry once that lasted a whole 10 minutes. It was about how when Harry was 21, he weighed 150 pounds. And now that he’s [Your Educated Guess Goes Here], he weighs 170 pounds. And how annoying that was.
Anyway, I call Harry over and Harry tells Mister Jerk exactly the same thing that I just told him.
So reluctantly, Mister Jerk surrenders the disputed 1099.
“I get it,” I coo to Mister Jerk with a big, sappy smile plastered all over my face. “You didn’t believe what I was saying to you because I’m a woman so what could I possibly know about taxes, huh?”
I find myself doing that rather a lot. Being sarcastic, but being sarcastic in a way that disguises my intent so that the other person in the conversational exchange doesn’t pick up on it. Is this a copout? It's such a useful strategy for me because really, my only other recourse would be to fall on such persons in a Harpy-like wrath and roll them toward the nearest concrete wall so I could beat their heads into it. I call it my “Yess-suh Mistah Bossman!” strategy.
Took me about an hour to finish entering all Mister Jerk’s income data.
“Whew! Well. I think we’re about done here!” I say encouragingly.
And he gets this big shit-eating grin on his face. “Not quite.”
And pulls out a K-1 form!
K-1 forms are limited partnership forms. “Flow-through entities” in the quaint patois of the IRS.
And we’re not allowed to do returns with K-1 forms.
You fucking piece of shit, I’m thinking. Why didn't you give me that form at the beginning when I asked you for all your forms? That’s an hour of my life I’m never going to get back.
I got rid of him quickly.
###
Generally, I’m able to live my silly little life without too much intrusion from assholes. So what was going on with yesterday? I don't know. Is an asshole epidemic going on, kind of like the measles epidemic? Are people refusing to be vaccinated against assholery?
Dunno.
I only know my tolerance for assholes is growing very, very thin.
