Signpost up ahead: you are entering the land of irkdom…
Every once and a while I make a mental list of what has recently irked me. Today I thought I’d share the most recent list with you. Who knows? Maybe these things irk you too. And maybe I’ll make this a regular feature.
Item 1: Gum-smacking waitress in a restaurant. I suppose I should be PC and say waitperson? Somehow this smacks me as unhygienic. What’s the problem? Does she need to keep the saliva going so she can spit in my food? I hadn’t even tipped her yet!
Item 2: Young gen-Xer passing me on the right to turn left in front of me. Twenty feet into that next intersection, he’s waiting for a red light as I come up behind him, hoping he sees in the rearview mirror that I think he’s number one.
Item 3: Popcorn and soda at the movies adding up to more than the tickets. That’s tickets in plural. We go to matinees. And we don’t buy any of their crap anymore. 90% of the movies are crap; we don’t need to be fed more crap while we’re watching.
Item 4: Movie with gratuitous action and zero plot. Hollywood makes a lot of them. Why are critics wowed by car chases, space battles, and other special effects? There are plenty of good books out there with real plots. I guess most movie goers don’t read much and wouldn’t recognize a good plot if it bit them on the butt. Or, maybe everyone plays video games now and focuses on the visual?
Item 5: Lines at the mall in off-hours for sales that aren’t sales. I usually avoid anything that even resembles a mall (NJ invented the mall, so there’s too many here). But sometimes I need something, so I go in off-hours, only to find a feeding frenzy because some store is having a one-day sale. Don’t these people work? (I’m a full-time writer, so I work at home. But it’s work—don’t ever think otherwise.)
Item 6: Jackson Pollack. Well, not Mr. Pollack per se, just everything he painted. And, if you don’t know who he is, lucky you. You’re better for it.
Item 7: Jane Austen. Same irk, basically. And, if you’re a Jane Austen fan, you have my condolences.
Item 8: Any celeb who writes a book. Now we have Robin Roberts…if you don’t know…. The only positive here is that it keeps ghostwriters employed. Who buys these stupid books anyway? People’s Magazine is a lot cheaper and you don’t need to buy it—your see everything important on the rack in the supermarket express lane.
Item 9: News programs with next to no local, state, or national news. What serves for news nowadays is Prince George visiting New Zealand. The Kiwis and Aussies can have him…and his parents. You know we’re in trouble when they or Robin Roberts’ new book gets a longer segment than the crisis in the Ukraine.
Item 10: Dave Letterman’s list of ten anythings. Why not fifteen? Twenty? I wrote an article a while ago titled “The Eightfold Way” about eight things a writer shouldn’t do when writing a fiction novel. I got some mileage out of that, and it was only eight! That’s the cube of two and a better number than ten, which is the product of two measly primes. The only Ten that works is in Ten Commandants, but that list is far too short now—it belonged to that Old Testament God. We need a New Testament Version 2.0 for all the peccadillos human beings have invented since Moses brought the original Ten down from the mountain—for example, high-frequency trading on Wall Street!
Item 11: Supermarkets that mishandle groceries. Milk sitting in the sun, bruised fruit, cracker packages with broken contents…clerks don’t seem to give a damn as long as they get the stuff on the shelf. And their bosses don’t bother checking up on them. They know customers don’t have the time to complain.
Item 12: Almost any TV car commercial. Especially the ones with babies or pets. Most seem like something from Animal House. If they’d spend this money on quality control, maybe the car companies wouldn’t have to make so many recalls. Of course, these comments apply to many commercials, not just car commercials.
Item 13: Anyone who believes 13 is unlucky. I’ll also file you here if you believe in the power of crystals, magnets, astrology, or ETs and UFOs. You’re better off going to a mall than spending time on this nonsense. Or, read a book, preferably one of mine. (They’ll never be made into movies because they do have plots.)
And so it goes…
