lunchtime hate machine

If I'd run for it, right there in public, sprinted from the door of my Town Car to the front door of DiBella's, I'd have beaten her there. If I'd run, like Napoleon Dynamite or something. Grown men don't run in public. This is something I've learned. When you see a man running in public, he'd better be waving a gun. Otherwise he is a loooooooooo-zer. Still. If I'd run. I'd be ahead of her. Now I'm behind her, and the bitch won't stop talking about sriracha.

"Of course," she was bleating, "I loooove sriracha. I mean, it goes with everything. Now when Bob has it, he just puts soooo much on. Sriracha here, sriracha there, sriracha on everything. Of course he gets all poopy, you know." I've decided not to count the number of times she says "sriracha", because if I count, then I will have to determine the number of times at which I will reach forward and twist her double-chinned head right off her linebacker's shoulders. Initially, the lunch crowd at DiBella's will be shocked. Appalled. Then I'll yell,

"IT'S OKAY, SHE WOULDN'T STOP SAYING 'SRIRACHA'" and some deep-voiced champion of a fellow American man will yell back

"WELL, FUCKIN' KILL HER TWICE THEN!" and the crowd will erupt into relieved laughter and I'll throw the head into the corner that the lonely-looking early-twenties blonde who handles the dining area is always mopping up anyway. This line is very slow, and I've already listened to all of "The Rain Song" in my head, but the conversation up ahead is still sriracha-oriented. At one point, the guy with her says, grinning in a sort of terrified I-hope-you-like-me way,

"Sriracha! I know, right?" She barely condescends to nod back at him. This woman just on the wrong side of thirty, with a BMI somewhere in the range of the fat girl who played a fat girl lawyer on the Dylan McDermott Show who was always involved in very special episodes where she confronted size-ism. Barely gives this poor son-of-a-bitch a nod. There's nothing wrong with him that two years in the Israeli military wouldn't cure, but he's terrified of her and he's desperately interested in fucking her, probably because she's the best prospect in his department, and if he has to buy her a hundred lunches in which the primary topic of conversation is the way in which her husband blows the toilet in their Pickerington* home off the hinges every time he has sriracha, well, he's in it for the long haul. This woman is going to go home to a guy who primarily exists in her anecdotes as a driver of full-sized trucks and a destroyer of residential plumbing, and my man there in the Eddie Bauer 50/50 business casual buttondown wants to replace that guy. He's totally turned towards her. She is looking straight ahead. The body language is not promising.

"So then I'm like, if you use all the sriracha, you'll have to buy more." This last bit sing-songy like she's Audrey Hepburn looking at diamonds. In her mind she is Audrey Hepburn, even though she looks like she could pin Audrey Hepburn in 1.3 seconds before sprinkling said Hepburn with sriracha and eating her heart out. She knows she's beautiful.

Facebook female reinforcement, I think, is partly to blame here. There is no woman so ugly that she cannot put a photo of herself in front of a mirror or sitting at a bar or eating a double cheeseburger on Facebook and immediately have ten comments about how beautiful she is from her girlfriends. That is the only possible comment on any woman's photo. She could be standing next to an authentic alien from Sagittarius and holding a working miniaturized cold-fusion reactor in her pudgy fingers and the first comment would be "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL!" One of my Facebook friends is a woman I went to high school with. In a dress she looks like she is playing Ursula in a live-action version of "The Little Mermaid" and she puts ten selfies a week up and is told she is beautiful. Another woman looks like a cross-eyed grouper inflated to 100psi and every time she posts a picture of herself about to dig into a seven-layer fudge cake someone will post "STUNNING!" As in set phasers to stun, stunning, I suppose.

The media is part of it, too. Dove has this campaign now that is basically begging chunky women to simply wash themselves in order to be beautiful, to get some scented soap in all the creases before heading in to the office, and I think the message some of these beasts are getting is that "I'm beautiful even without the soap." I accidentally went to dinner once with a 44-year-old size 24 who stripped in the evenings. She called it "burlesque". When I told V. McB about it she was approximately as outraged as you'd expect Babe Ruth to be about Barry Bonds' record.

"I, I, I," she spat, almost choking in her own rage, "went to aerobics three hours a day so I could dance in Los Angeles and make my rent, and she's how heavy again?" The mystery was solved for me when the burlesque artist in question told me tickets to her show were free, in order to promote size-positive stripping. Another mystery was solved for me when I realized that "rent", to strippers in Los Angeles, really means "rent and cocaine".

But it's not all Dove's fault, or Camryn Manheim's, (thanks, Bing search!) or Leonard Nimoy's. It's mostly the fault of these guys who are so desperate to get laid they will click "like" on anything. I realize I'm channeling DeliciousTacos here but the man is right as rain about this. The Internet has changed the way men and women interact. It's r-selection via TCP/IP. You click "like" on every photo of a living human female in your News Feed and say something nice. It costs you nothing at all and it might get you laid. You have a Nigerian 419 scammer's percentage chance of success but that doesn't matter because you make it up in volume. If I told you, the average office worker in Dublin, Ohio, that you could obtain no-strings-attached sex from a frumpy, frustrated have-it-all working mom simply by leaving one thousand carefully-worded comments on random FB pages, would you do it? Don't answer. You're already doing it.

But this is some John Nash shit right herr, because the combined effect of you doing this, the millions of you, is that you raise the self-esteem of these women above your grasp. When ten decent, lonely Camry-driving men say something complimentary about the woman in Accounting who loosely resembles Jabba the Hutt, she dates and/or sleeps with none of them. Instead, she stuffs her self-esteem into a set of Spanx and tries to get the bartender at Applebee's to come home and bang her while her children pretend to be asleep.

You all need to stop it. And I might as well call out the profession of automotive "journalism" as being some of the worst perpetrators. Women in this business are the constant recipients of the most bizarre behavior from guys who are even older and lamer than I am. We have one she-journo who looks enough like the Joker to make Heath Ledger's parents a little teary-eyed and yet is never at an open-bar event without two Rascal scooters facing her barstool on each side and four adoring newspaper journalists hanging on her every word. There's one who hit menopause around the time the Citation started setting its brakes on fire and there are still men working in print who actually write her into car reviews like she was Katy Perry. "I made sure to show my F-Type loaner to [REDACTED] and ask her if she'd consent to have dinner with me. She agreed because on her salary she's only eating one meal a day."

The online guys are even worse, even more beta. There's a woman working in his business who just had a birthday and I'd like to wish her Happy Birthday because she's come through for me with a few invites but I will be fucked to tears if I put my name on a Facebook wall that stretches to infinity with the most pathetic protestations of birthday affection from the most desperate men ever observed in post-agricultural human society. The levels to which these guys are willing to degrade themselves to get even a microsecond of her attention. She must feel like Anubis, weighing a thousand hearts and finding them all unable to budge the scales. I don't even want to sleep with her, is the sad part. I just kind of like her as a person. Middle age will do that to you. You acquire a laser-like focus on precisely the type of woman you will accept just as your body starts working 24/7 to betray you. Happy birthday, kid. May every one of your desperate suitors accidentally receive an iPhone video of you crying over the bartender with tribal tattoos who thinks your name is Brenda, and may they all slit their wrists, thus freeing up a Chrysler 300C SRT-8 into the press fleet for my next trip to Kentucky.

Where was I? Yes, the sriracha woman. Still going on about the miracle condiment. The lengths to which these women can go to describe food. When, as a society, did we become re-obsessed with food? There is no pleasure more transitory than food. It's gluttony, plain and simple. If you screw three times a day you'll at least have some aerobic endurance and a healthy prostate to show for it but if you spend your life chasing after food you will wind up the same idiot you are now, only with an inability to enjoy anything that isn't raised on one particular farm in Yolo County. Art and music and craftsmanship are human things but even a rat can have a preference in meals. I repeat: there is nothing as stultifying and contemptible as people who are obsessed with what they're going to eat next. If you love to cook, I can understand that, it's a creative endeavor, but if your self-image revolves around your imaginary ability to distinguish different kinds of rotten grape juice then you are free to put your face in the woodchipper now and save society the time of doing it later when China invades and we need the sulfur in your blood to make blackpowder.

We're on this planet for a limited time, each of us. There's time to do something memorable. Build, design, write. You don't need to be beautiful to be interesting. Look at me. I'm the ugliest fucking guy in central Ohio, which is saying a lot. No woman has ever sincerely called me handsome. When they say it, they mean "interesting". Sometimes interesting is good enough. Look: you're reading this and it isn't because I have pretty eyes. It's not too late to be somebody, to do something. I'd like to write a great book before I die. Maybe it won't be great. But I'll try. I will rage against the dying of the light, I promise. I will create and I will put forth effort in genuinely human areas like music and I encourage you to do the same thing, to be more than somebody who eats and talks about eating and floats in a blithe bubble of meaningless self-esteem. I'm going to keep trying, no matter how discouraging the results are.

And the next time I see that woman in the parking lot at DiBella's, I'm going to run for the door like Ronnie Lott.

* Pickerington: a rural suburb on the East side of Columbus, typically inhabited by people who attended community college and/or think furniture should be extra-puffy