The Honesty Of Self-Denial.

 The shouts of petulant homophobic bigotry ran out on the otherwise quiet streets of Capitol Hill yesterday as I was coming back from an otherwise blissful walk to, through, and back from Volunteer Park.  

Really quite pleased with myself.  Made good time, which is to say my usual time.  Refreshingly few people out. Not enough dogs.  Wore the boots which aren’t great for the hills, but proper for the muddy park.  First time doing the walk since the day I left for London back in October I figured.  The pottery statues at the pottery store absolutely delicious. I will have to pop in there one day and snatch one of their enticing bibelots, but the morning walk can’t all be about absent homo sapiens and enchanting gewgaws it would seem.

I crossed Broadway easy enough.  No gunfire this time, but I reminded myself I needed to go into the pet store and get Alfie a toy.  Alfie has many toys from my many travels.

All the way down to my street and turned the corner and down a few blocks to the coffee shop with the line that always seems to make my head shake in quiet and unambiguous judgment when I saw it right in front of me.  A Cyber truck.  This one the third I had seen on my walk.  Quite a lot really, but the only thing I thought at the time was how fortunate this lad was to find the parking spot he did because parallel parking one of those unsightly beasts must be too, too much.

Just as my thoughts were about to traipse onto some other irrelevancy I heard it.

‘You like to suck Elon’s dick! Get that mothereffing (only she/it didn’t say effing) thing out of this neighborhood!’ or something to that effect.

Oh my gracious. I was taken aback.  The vulgarity.  The crassness.  The unnecessary volume. The implication of violence in the messaging ‘Get that mothereffing thing out of this neighborhood’  What if they/them didn’t?  But above all I just thought, quite naturally, What the fuck does this bike-riding toad have against cock suckers?  Oh wait.  I know the type.

And it isn’t the bike.  Obviously riding a bike in a neighborhood where every sane person without a disability has been walking for decades takes a kind of small-dick, alpha-grasping energy most of us can only get out of the way of as they careen toward their destiny of door-dashed Korean barbecue. 

A little to do with the bullying, the name calling, not quite disguising the person they used to be, the person they are trying to run away from in whatever small town they ‘escaped’, the bold cowardice of shouting homophobic slurs at someone while running away in what you’ve convinced yourself is a cape of liberal tolerance. 

I obviously understood what hackneyed leftist-projecting political sentiment they were trying to express toward an inanimate object and the driver who remained obscured by tinted windows the entire time. 

The loud, nasty, clumsy self-owning, bigotry of it almost made me want to shout back, but what happens when you lower yourself to angry bike-riding street urchin? I’m not here to set simpletons right.

So many costumes.  Before, you only had to fret about yoga pants.  Some time ago it became socially unacceptable to be even tongue-in cheek racist or sexist, and some people not being able to adapt to the new order of acting normally in polite society decided to put on a costume and direct their energies in what they’ve decided is an altogether more healthy way.  The problem is that so many of them haven’t researched the role thoroughly enough.  I mean they know the basic contours of how to behave, but in execution it comes out like late season X-Files Mulder and Skully.  Phoned in performances with the glint of big-Hollywood film deals in their eyes. 

And while on my walk no less.