Spango Dips

Not the actual Bill O’Reilly, but a guy who, in retrospect, seemed to look up to Bill O’Reilly as an ethical model, was in front of me in line at the gas station food mart today. This guy—a paunchy little homonculus with beard and sunglasses, the kind of guy you just know owns or has owned or intends someday to own a pitbull—was buying a 44oz fountain soda, which at this particular establishment will set you back $1.59. The 44oz is the value-incentive size, being that the next size down is a 24oz-er that goes for $1.49. I discovered this when I went to investigate the soda cup sizes myself, which investigation I thought to undertake after personally witnessing the exchange between Paunchy Homonculus and the rangy, cheerful Vietnamese register clerk, which went like this:

CLERK: One dollar fifty-nine.
PAUNCHY HOMONCULUS (very brusquely): One forty-nine.
CLERK: You buy forty-four ounce soda, it one fifty-nine.
PH (actually, seriously eager to fight): Thirty-two ounce. One forty-nine.

PH (exiting): Thirty-two ounce.

So, if you’ll indulge me, let’s tally up every offense that this astonishing asshole perpetrated in this thirty-second exchange.

1. He lied when he said he had a 32oz drink. It said “44oz” right on the side. I could see it from my place in line, three feet behind him.
2. He lied by implying that the store even sold drinks in a 32oz size.
3. He made up an imaginary price for his imaginary drink size.
4. In defending his lies, he became hostile with an honest employee of the establishment he was patronizing who was trying to do his job, taking advantage of his (the employee’s) tenuous work status and difficulties with the English language.
5. He deliberately stole ten cents from this gas station, which was his intended objective all along and the final end served by offenses 1-4.
6. This isn’t really a separate offense, but it’s absolutely worth noting the capital-C Crime in all its fullness: he concocted this plot the moment he stepped into that food mart. I’m pretty sure of this. This suggests that he sizes up every store he goes into in this way, seeing what strings he can pull, finding people he can lie to and threaten and bully so that he can effectively simulate stealing from the store since he’s too fat to do it the traditional way (by running). This is the same impulse that might lead someone to place one of his own pubic hairs in a bowl of soup and then demand the restaurant compensate him the cost of the bowl and interrogate the waitstaff. OK, maybe I’ve gotten a little paranoid by implying it’s habitual, but he really seemed proud of himself today. Anyway, what underlies behavior like this is, at best, an impish refusal to play by the rules, and at worst, a total lack of social conscience; a committment to taking whatever you can get by whatever means necessary, as long as you don’t get caught. This is frequently termed sociopathy.

I only have so much rancor and loathing within me, and there are oh so many worthy targets hovering about from day to day, vying for a taste. Most days it all goes to the Bush administration and its organized media-apparatus (which counts among its minions A1 shithooks like Bill O’Reilly), on the grounds that this cadre does damage to the earth on a scale totally unmatched by any other machine currently in operation. But on days like this, when I run into a mini-O’Reilly—someone employing all the same tactics for far pettier prizes; in this case ten fucking cents off a fucking Pepsi—I lose the larger picture entirely, and I just want to hit this person with a flying elbow off the top turnbuckle. He becomes, for one brief shining moment, solely responsible for all the world’s ills.

So then. Why didn’t I do something? Why didn’t I call this guy out? I guess because I was raised to stay out of other people’s business unless the stakes are a lot higher. I’m not one to lecture people on their behavior. But, so… does that make me polite, or chickenshit? Does one imply the other?

More to the point, if I rant and rave about the Bush administration’s ethical transgressions, and the overall declining standards of decency in this world, and then can’t find the nerve to stand up to an asshole like this, am I not just full of hot air?

The new Dinosaur album is about 1,000 times better than I was expecting. In fact, it’s what you hope every comeback album will be (and what so few actually are): simply the next album on the band’s continuum, with neither self-conscious fanfare nor any sense of weariness or age. This is the album that follows Bug. Go ahead and forget about the other ones.

Their lead single is the rollicking “Been There All the Time,” the video for which features another erstwhile SST heavyweight. It’s quite droll and totally captures the song’s teenage spirit (even though the boys themselves have turned into fat old creeps).