Church of Hell

I may sound like a grumpy, cynical bastard but I’m not. I’m a grumpy, cynical misanthrope. My parents were married, and I’m more sociopath than you may have thought.
I may complain a lot, but I am a genuinely happy person in real life much of the time, usually when I’m complaining. I would be slightly frightened by the amount of raving that I do if it weren’t for the support I get from apparently sane people and the amount of similar complaints that spew from others who seem more stable and publicly accepted than me.
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So, Aurora bought some interesting coffee yesterday which she made this morning. Sipping and thinking about the flavor and packaging on the way to work, I felt very chock full o’ rant.

Let’s start with the packaging. The way a country packages their foodstuffs says a lot about their culture.

If you’ve ever shopped in an Asian market, you’ve no doubt seen Japanese packaged food. There’s usually some kind of overly-cute comic character which has no relation to the product (think Hello Kitty laxatives). There’s the obligatory poorly translated, philosophical poetic blurb. For some reason, every package, sign and t-shirt in Japan has some kind of hokey, incomprehensible English saying on it. There’s entire websites devoted to pictures of these things. I think it’s a law there, designed to confuse other nations into believing that the Japanese are deep and poignant.
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I am almost, nearly, completely ashamed to call myself an American.

Part of that comes from the fact that, in the U.S., we’ve completely co-opted a term that covers two continents and many diverse countries for our own selfish use. There are literally over 30 countries in the Americas and most of them are filled with smiling, happy, indigenous people who share the right to call themselves American, although, since this term has forever been tainted worldwide by countless Bermuda shorts wearing, loud, annoying, rude, socially inappropriate, xenophobic and asinine tourists from the U.S. who have been so downright embarrassing as to make your stereotypical German tourists look downright pleasant, I don’t think anyone will be fighting too damn hard to reclaim the already irrevocably smeared name ‘American’.

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This is the view from my car this morning as I shoveled the heavy, gods-forsaken white evil from my poor little car.

I am pretty tired of this shit.

What makes it extra-special funny it that I spent half a decade or so in Los Angeles, a city where snow is only used to discuss drugs or as an epithet for a person afflicted with a too-dry scalp or eczema. After years of perfectly warm weather, where the worst weather you could hope for in the winter was a little extra wind and two days of rain, I realized that I missed the midwest and its seasonal changes. I wholeheartedly missed the fall with its glorious changing colors and delicious smells. I remembered fondly the fun of building snowmen and tobogganing of winter.

“What the hell was wrong with me?” I think now.

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My disdain for over large vehicles and my firm belief in their owner’s lack of mental capacity isn’t a secret. There are some people who could generally profit from owning an SUV. Most owners, on the other hand, want large, flashy billboards that cry out “Look at me! I am important and wealthy and have a large penis!” even if they are women, which scares me.

If you have an eight child family and an hour commute, you might need an SUV.

If your job requires you to tote three hundred-odd pounds of scientific testing apparatus into the swampy heart of a peat bog to study the intricate mating rituals of the Great Crested Newt, you might need an SUV.

If you are a balding, middle aged ass-bag who’s toting nothing but a set of golf clubs, a laptop stolen from your last job and your wedding ring (in a cup holder next to some Binaca and a condom) to the local coffee shop to pretend you’re day-trade while sipping your whipped-creamy mocha and casually stalking the hot, pink haired barista with the tongue ring who’s two decades younger than you, you most definitely do not need an SUV.

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