The Region Between

 Those readers who follow have followed me a while know that I cook at an assisted living facility for people with dementia, and that while I love the residents, I am pretty much sick of my co-workers.  The accompanying image is of an actual note left for me by so-called boss, one of the rudest and most self-serving creatures that I have ever had met in my life. Don’t worry about trying to read it in that little image; I intend to go through it line-by-line below.

But first, a digression. Before this relatively low point in my working life, this final or perhaps next-to-final day job that I will ever have (because either freelance success or suicide will intervene soon), I actually had a respectable career. Years back I was real chef. I worked for some years in a high profile venue. I got interviewed by newspapers and had write-ups in culinary magazines. If I would have been motivated enough to really try hard—if I had believed that food was really my destiny—I would have had a better chance than most at parlaying my early success into some sort of celeb chef situation. I’ve written a cookbook and culinary memoir (unpublished).  But I fucked away all my potential on a failed attempt to be an independent restaurant owner. I burnt myself out, bankrupted myself, and also turned myself into a person who can’t figure out how to thrive working as someone else’s employee. I am completely unsuited to it. Being self-employed for a couple of years, as hard as that was, has made me virtually unemployable in the usual douchebag situations. I don’t work well in groups (of idiots) and I don’t accept being bossed around (by idiots). I know there probably are places where I would fit, but I doubt I’ll swing an invitation into one, since I am such a ruined and damaged thing now.

So let’s go line-by-line through this stupid note. The first line is, at first glance, simply my name, “Chris.” Not knowing the context, you might think that this is just a harmless header, like the first line of an email or a simple note between humans. But in fact, even this simple statement of my name grates on me like the worst insult. Because I when I see it written by this person, I hear it spoken. All phone calls around here begin not with a pleasant greeting, a light “hi-how-are-you” or the like, but with a crabby statement of a first name in a harsh twang followed by nonsensical bitching: “Chriiis…blah blah blah blah.”

“Please dont [sic] make any more green soup.” I assume this is a reference to the fact that I made a passable rendition of split pea/ham soup a couple weeks ago. Oddly, it was actually what that day’s menu called for. Normally we violate company policy and really never make anything that the corporate menu calls for, favoring an in-house designed cuisine made of convenience products and garbage. So, of course, when I actually make one of the prescribed items I get in trouble for it. How the creep even knew about it, I have no idea. I assume it was reported by one of my other co-workers. Actually, I assume she grills them when I am not there to find out what crimes I committed. [We don’t work together: when I am there, she is generally not].

“Please dont [sic] put gravy over meat.” This is perennial complaint against me. Evidently all meats are to be plain, unseasoned and wrung dry of even the saline solution that leaks out of the fake turkey and faux Salisbury steak that we use as “meat.” No rationale has been offered for this, but I have been mostly complying with the instruction for months. I assume that it has been reiterated because I still refuse to serve dried-out shredded beef stew meat without seasoning it up with some beef broth and tightening the broth with a bit of corn starch (and I add some onion and bell pepper and black pepper and thyme to it, too—all forbidden, but fuck it).

“Watch how much dressing your [sic] putting on salad.” No fucking idea what this means. It gets the dressing it needs to get. Period. Not too much, not too little. I know how much dressing a fucking salad gets better than anyone else in all Dumbfuckistan. And when she is working, she doesn’t even serve the salad at all. I know this because I can count (also a rare skill around here). When I leave work and there are three bags of salad mix in the cooler, and then I come back after three days off, and there are still three bags of salad mix, then it is obvious that no salad has been served in my absence.

“If a puree is to have Potatoe Chips [sic] Make them mashed potatoes.” This instruction applies to the evening meal, which generally consists of soup and sandwiches and sometimes other sides like potato chips.  It also applies to food prepared for a couple of residents who need their food in pureed form. But it is based on a maddeningly stupid, completely unfounded idea that I have at some point in history prepared pureed potato chips! Just think about that for second. How the fuck would you puree potato chips?  I am not anywhere near stupid enough to think that would be a feasible idea and attempt it, and it pisses me off that week after week I get accused of this when I have. Never. Done. It. Once!

“For the Resident [sic] that cant [sic] eat corn make [was previously “mix”] a different vegetable.”  No clue here. Who is the resident who can’t eat corn? I have never heard of one. Also, I can’t remember the last time I served corn as a vegetable with any meal. I don’t think it’s happened once in the last year.

“When Changing Meal Write it on the Right Form [sic].” This refers to some of fraudulent paperwork that we do, devised to lie to the company about what goes on there. When I actually do write something on the substitution form, she leaves a nasty reply on it. So fuck that. I refuse to do it. And if I were to do it accurately, it would take all day since every single thing we cook is a substitution. We were supposed to have had coq au vin for lunch yesterday when she was there. Well, I don’t know what the hell she made, but it sure as shit was not that, and she wrote nothing on the substitution form.

“Make sure your [sic] using Big Bowls for soup.”  We have twenty of what she calls “big bowls.”  We have thirty residents currently. So I don’t know what the hell. I end up using ten of the “small bowls.”  In fluid ounce capacity, the big bowls and the small ones are identical…but the shape of the so-called big ones makes them look bigger, because they have a big wide lip around them. Perceiving spatial things is another skill that doesn’t exist around there.

“*Change Dish Machine Water Daily Please.” Die in a fire. I do that every fucking day and have done so every fucking day that I have worked there. The whole place—dish machine included—is cleaner when I leave at the end of the day than it is when I arrive in the morning.

“If it say [sic] Fried Chicken fry it.” No clue what this is about. Die. Die in a fucking pan of fried chicken.

“If it say [sic] Pie make some kind of pie.” Like we make the specified desserts. I don’t even look at the damned desserts on the menu because we never ever are able to make what’s called for. I know that yesterday she did not make cappuccino crème brulee (nor even know what that might be nor how to pronounce it).

“The soup is to [sic] watery they said.”  Bullshit.  But it brings forth an important question: who are “they?” Unless she is just making it all up and there is no “they,” then it must be that some other jerk in my midst is making up this shit. I will find out who that is.

That’s all I have on this topic for this week…Oh, one other thing: she leaves Dr. Pepper cans all over the place. And yes, this is a part of the country where Dr. Pepper is a major soft drink, on par with Coca-Cola.  Where I grew up, it existed but it was a niche beverage, something one might get in the mood for once in a while, but certainly not a daily habit for any significant part of the population. She leaves those cans sit around and they attract flies. It’s gross.

 “Love affairs with corpses, small children, and farm animals will also be on display in a natural nonchalant fashion in the new raft of progressive shows, titles such as I DREAM OF STINKY, PEDERASTY JUNCTION, and OLD MACDONALD HAD A SHEEP.” 

--From John C. Wright’s screed, complete text here

Why do I bring that up again? Because a New Unpleasantness has arisen that I am not at liberty to discuss in detail right now, another ugliness that will hide behind the scenes of genre fiction publishing for now. If and when it comes to full public light, I’ll report on it here. But for now, I will confine my comments to one particular aspect, the one also stated so crudely in Wright’s asinine remarks. I speak of the persistent, disgusting and wholly evil tactic of homophobes to associate gay male sexuality with pedophilia.  Again and again these people make statements that either state directly or imply that m/m love is tantamount to raping kids. It’s a psychotic obsession with them. Sometimes, as in the case of the New Unpleasantness, they couch it in phony-baloney Christian piety and condescension. In other cases, as with Wright, they are just plain foul and vomitous in their hate.

Just in case any fundies, teabaggers, birthers, Death Panelists, Palin-lickers or other dain-bramaged nitwits are reading this, here’s a sweet and irrefutable fact for you to suck on, fuckers: Child molesters are, as a species, overwhelmingly straight dudes, regardless of the sex of their victims. Regardless. Of. The. Sex. The compulsion to abuse kids doesn’t have its basis in “normal” sexual orientation and it sure as hell has nothing in particular to do with being gay. If it did, then mobs of gay child molesters would be a reality rather than just a homophobic delusion. So suck it on it, jerks. Isn’t it sweet? Its statistical irrefutability should make it go down so smoothly. You want to believe that straight men are “normal” because they outnumber the fags? Fine. But you also need to wholly own the fact that straight child molesters are the “normal” breed of child molesters, too. Statistics.

(Though I know, of course, the I-Got-Faith crowd Don’t-Need-Facts, so I don’t know why I bother.)

Science fiction and the other speculative genres are, in my view of them, places for expansive imagination, artistic honesty and intellectual integrity. This does not mean you have to be a “liberal,” but associating a whole class of people with child rapists based on a wholly delusional understanding of their sexuality is the kind of ugliness that just plain doesn’t fit into the genre fiction-publishing world anymore, and should be repelled whenever it is encountered. It is a hate tactic through and through.

Talking about molesting kids and about homosexuals in the same sentence is obviously designed from the ground up to both insult and horrify. Few things, if anything at all, sound more appalling to most people than raping a kid. Add to this the fact that everyone is indoctrinated to believe that gay sex is just plain gross, and there you have the perfect formula to attack gays.  This is just the worst example of a whole host of ways that homophobic fuckwits try to gin up the “yuck” factor to turn on more primordial reptile-brain hate against the fags. When they’re not suggesting we rape kids, then they are making wild, psychotic assertions about how we generally have sex. You’ve heard it all. In their fantasy-land, 1) we fuck each others asses literally every day; 2) As a group, we have many, many sex partners, also on a daily basis; 3) We also—and this is Sean Hannity’s fave—we routinely engage in the practice of “fisting.” (Look it up if you don’t know—I don’t have time to describe it here); and 4) Indeed, our sexual proclivities are so predatory in nature that all straight men need to fear that we may look at or touch them in an icky manner. This may be entirely more information than any reader of this post wants, but I can tell you that around my house…1) No, almost never; 2) I wish! but no; 3) Never!; and 4) Most str8 dudes just aren’t hot enough for us. Sorry y’all.

When I was in high school, I worked on the student newspaper, and we covered the horrifying case of a teacher at another school was run out of his job and hounded out of town for being gay. I won’t rehash the whole story, and I won’t mention names, because I hope this guy has a decent life now and would probably not want people from those days bringing all this up again. Long story short, the persecution went like this: 1) Rumor spread somehow that he was gay; 2) Someone “confirmed” the rumor by claiming to have seen him at a park that was supposedly a notorious gay cruising area (it wasn’t); 3) Oh my God! The children! Boo hoo hoo! Will someone think of the children!; 4) Allegation from the shadows that he was also a pot-smoker; 5) Police raid on his home where they discovered gay porn, confirming the gay rumor; 6) Teacher tarred as a pedophile.  Wait! What the fuck? Where did that come from? Well, yeah, being gay and working in a school…well, duh! But there’s more: a physician, who was supposedly some kind of “expert” in human physiology, examined some of the porn that was raided from this guy’s home and gave his opinion that one of the performers in one of the videos was “probably” only seventeen years of age. Child molester, ipso facto.  Even back in the late 1980s when all this happened, it wasn’t possible to fire the guy just for being gay (like it would be where I live now). This was in Wisconsin, which has generally been fairly progressive on these matters, and even back then there was protection under employment discrimination law for sexual orientation. So the fact that he was a proven fag wasn’t enough: they had to suggest that he was also a pedophile. That’s how they do it.

My recent involvement with the founding and propagation of the Outer Alliance has caused me to ponder more deeply matters of gender identity. Not that I would say I am ever insensitive to it, but I sometimes ignore the complexity of it. The "T" in LGBT doesn't tell the whole story, and the thoughtful comments from members of the Outer Alliance have reminded me of that fact.

Today I heard writer Dave Zirin on Talk of the Nation (NPR) discuss his article in The Nation in which he blasts the concept of sex testing of female athletes and decries in particular  the treatment of South African athlete Caster Semenya. Go read the article. It will horrify and educate you if this is a new topic for you. 

During the discussion on the radio, Zirin made the excellent and correct point that this sort of stuff happens only when women raise the bar on something. He also suggested that the whole gender binary in these sporting events needs to be looked at more closely. Does it make sense? Does biological sex or gender identity matter as much people think? Maybe there should be categories of competition based on muscle density or weight or other measurable criteria. Generally, I don't care about sports stories. I'm not a fan. Every four years when the summer Olympics happens, I watch the boys in the swimming pools, and that's the extent of it. And even that (as you may imagine) has little to nothing to do with my interest in the sport itself.  (Ahem.) This scandal, however, really caught my attention and made me think about some things that don't normally weigh on my mind.

Also, I am goggle-eyed at the sheer of dumbassity of this poor young woman's coach, who said:

"We understand that people will ask questions because she looks like a man. It's a natural reaction and it's only human to be curious. People probably have the right to ask such questions if they are in doubt. But I can give you the telephone numbers of her roommates in Berlin. They have already seen her naked in the showers and she has nothing to hide." 

With friends like that...Jeeeezus!  "I can give you the telephone numbers of her roommates in Berlin..."  WTF? They've already seen her naked! Just ask them what they saw! Holy crap. That should become some kind of new acme of dumbassedness. Somebody would say or do something really stupid, and one could respond thus: "Dude! That's, like, I-can-give-you-the-phone-numbers-of-her-roommates-in-Berlin dumb!"  

I was half-listening to NPR this afternoon at work, sort of semi-consciously taking in today’s slate of craptacularly crappy news: Suu Kyi convicted again in Myanmar [check!]; seventy percent of women in the eastern Congo may have been victims of rape by their army so far [nice work, crazy assholes]; the whole world’s coral reefs may be dead within our lifetimes [just terrific…next?]; teabaggers and brownshirts continue to disrupt attempts at having town halls on health care [of course they do, let’s move on, please…]; and then I heard something that momentarily stopped me in my tracks. It was this statement, recorded at an anti-Obama rally outside his town hall meeting today in New Hampshire and aired on All Things Considered: “If I want socialism, then I’ll go back to pre-World War II Germany!”

Now I have never been accused of over-estimating the intelligence and reasoning faculties of these kinds of rabid nutjobs. I do not believe I am on record anywhere as averring that they may hold anything inside their skulls any more lively and sapient than a moldy dishtowel. So such a piece of dumbassity as that statement should have come as nothing remarkable to me, but I found myself playing it back in my head and parsing its possible meanings and implications.

“If I want socialism, then I’ll go back to pre-World War II Germany!”

I thought to myself, “Hoh. Lee. Shit. That’s bloody brilliant! I would have been happy enough if the dude had just said he might as well leave the country (and good riddance! And don’t let the door slam your ass on the way out!). But he’s suggesting leaving our time entirely!” I started wishing that he could possibly be literally serious about it. If things became so socialistic here—and presumably worse, in his view, than conditions in Nazi Germany—and he decided to get out, then how would he do it? Is he like the Time Traveller from the Wells story? Or would he jump through the Guardian of Forever? Try to hitch a ride in the TARDIS?”

“If I want socialism, then I’ll go back to pre-World War II Germany!”

So, obviously, this fine exemplar of that species of American that I usually call The Indignant White Douche—you know the type: all insecure and self-righteously mad and quivery-lipped and quavery-voiced about all the perceived attacks on his douchy middle class assumptions of privelege and entitlement—was saying in his dimwitted way something like: “If Obama is going to turn America into a totalitarian socialist dictatorship, then we might as well be living in Nazi Germany. Because that would better than what Obama has in store for us. Better: Nazi Germany was better than what Obamamerica will be. I’m totally fine with the fascism and the Holocaust and the other excesses of the Nazi regime. Totally cool with all that. That was much better than what this furreign-born President is planning to do to me.”

But I’m going to focus more on the literal words he said. The word “back” in this statement can, of course, be taken as “back in time to the days of Nazi Germany.” But it could also be read as “back to Nazi Germany, where I came from in the first place.” Considering the political tactics that these people have decided that they must employ—since they can never win by debating the facts or letting their opponents speak—it seems to me that the time-travel solution is perfect win/win outcome for everyone: this man and his buddies can all go back to Nazi Germany where they will be right at home in Hitler’s Reich where everything is black and white (well, more white, really) while the rest of us who stay on in the twenty-first century can resume a sane process of arriving at a sensible and fair reform of health insurance.

But before seeing these creeps off on their time travel trip back to their proper home and era, I would be tempted to ask this guy exactly how many fewer years that he figures that J and I deserve to live as compared to himself and his family members. I’d like an honest answer, if he could give one. What would he say? Five years? Ten years? You see, J and I do not have health insurance nor any affordable means of getting any. I have not myself been examined medically one single time in my life since I was admitted to the hospital after a seizure when I was 18 years old (I’m almost 38 now). I wonder if I am developing any chronic diseases? Maybe some cancer somewhere that I can’t feel yet. But I won’t be finding out until it’s too late because I won’t be going to the doctor.  When I get sick enough, and it gets really serious, I will go to an emergency room.

 J was admitted at the emergency room a couple years ago for what they think was an acute attack of pancreatitis. They stabilized him as they must do by law even for people without insurance, but no further examination or treatment was offered. But he accumulated thirty thousand dollars of medical bills during this episode anyway, and all the “Keep Your Hands of My Health Care” douchebags are living in a fuckin’ fantasy land even trippier and nuttier than their visions of Obama’s Soviet conquest of Amurrrica if they think that those bills are ever going to get paid by us. Scenarios like ours play out all over the country every day. So when people say that the health care system is just fine the way it is (with their “I got mine” attitude), they are basically saying that they deserve to be healthier and also probably live longer than me and mine. Which means I will feel little sympathy for them when they get their way this year, torpedo national health insurance reform, and the system continues to degrade until eventually they themselves lose their jobs and their health insurance, or their employers quit offering coverage. Since it’s only fifty million Americans who don’t have insurance right now (out of over 300 million), maybe it’s easy to ignore us. I wonder what will happen, though, when that swells to 100 million, or 150 million.  Afraid of “socialism” now?  Just wait, assholes.