Kittensnake’s Vaycay: the intro
NOTE: For all you loyal readers who aren’t just here by accident as a result of googling bareback interracial group sex, sorry for the long dry spell. I’ve been away from the ‘puter and well, more or less in Hawaii. This next bit of idiocy is a week old, from the day I flew out…
As I waited in the A line for a Southwest flight to Burbank today, valiantly trying to ignore the strangling constraints of new liquid-free baggage restrictions and a puzzling resurgence of hardcore Golden Girls pastel as an acceptable color palate for individuals above the age of eighteen months, I witnessed an unexpected reunion. A tanned, bubbly, drugstore-perfume-scented family left our plane, running into a similar-looking and –smelling family waiting to board on our flight. The two families chatted with each other animatedly for a moment, giving me cause to immediately admire the effectiveness of selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors. Upon moving on, the matron of the newly arrived family squeezed the arm of her about-to-take-off counterpart, loudly bidding her farewell with the following phrase:
“Have a blessed time.”
A blessed time? That used to be the sort of saying you could only hear from the old ladies sitting on the benches in front of Fort Tryon Park, passing out copies of the Watchtower. A blessed time? It’s the sort of thing the parishioners at St. Barnabas used to say to our flaming professional choristers on loan from Oberlin, who’d respond by squeezing one of the perpetrator’s sagging buttcheeks, responding “I could show you a blessed time”, just to shake things up.
I should also mention that the two possible destinations for my flight was Las Vegas and Los Angeles, two places where I believe most people, save rabid Mormons, would prefer to remain relatively unblessed, if not totally absent from any form of godly radar for a few days.
After standing, stunned, for a few moments after the offending phrase was spoken, it dawned on me that the nearly-unbearable, well-meaning-yet-sassy, cuteness of middle-class American parlance would easily condone the use of syntactical abortions like “Have a blessed time.” I felt sickened, but decided to put down my NYTimes magazine to more fully absorb this near-religious-seeming quest set forth by middle America to sound, well, sort of retarded.
Man in a wheelchair, about sixty. Going to Vegas with wife/girlfriend and another couple. Used the phrase “Don’t go there” at least six times while describing a recent altercation with his auto mechanic. Other overheard favorites during the preboard wait includied such gems as:
“We were, like, good to go.” (Fat suburban spinster, in what appeared to be attempted flirtation with a gentleman passenger.)
“She needs to learn to hear with her heart.” (Teenaged boy, genus: emo. Talking to vigorously nodding compatriot of identical classification)
“I’m really a people person.” (From a tall, doughy, businessman in an unforgiveable shirt, justifying his recent blowup at the check-in desk to a short, sweet-faced lady behind him in line, who really didn’t seem to understand English.)
“Talk to the hand…” (spoken by an early teenage girt to her similarly-aged sister—followed by) “Snap” (contributed admiringly by their middle aged mother.)
Sometimes, it’s true, I do find European demureness to be infuriating and cold, but at least most Europeans don’t feel that what they want to say, however inane, inappropriate or unnecessary deserves to be transmitted at all times, loudly—and certainly not with the aid of nauseating ghetto-girl-on-Ricki-Lake-ca.-1992 samples. Sometimes you just want to tell these smug, round, pastel-clad twats to just sit the fuck down, read a few books (without pictures) about the lives and experiences of people outside of their own digital-cable and Target frame-of-reference, and not utter another peep until they come up with something more useful to say than “Have a blessed time.”
April 29th, 2009 at 4:05 am
Very nice post.