Although, in truth, a number of you may never have been exposed to the overwhelming cavalcade of sweetness that was The Weekly Curmudgeon the first time around, so this is brand new to you. For those of you who may have experienced this before, just treat it like either a bad case of deja vu or a refresher course on the hilarity that is/was TWC. Enjoy!
My Weekly Rant Against a Societal Norm (or, The Weekly Curmudgeon)
Original post date: April 05, 2006
As I get older, I find myself becoming irritated by what I view as the continual descent of our society into lawlessness, disorder and all-around poor taste. Much like an elder statesman sliding merrily into senility (kind of like a modern day Paul von Hindenburg -- shout out to all my WWII-philes!), I'm noticing the myriad ways our very culture is crumbling beneath our collective feet.
I'm beginning The Weekly Curmudgeon (or TWC, as I hope it will become known) with a topic as old as time itself, as complex as any Gordian Knot and as incomprehensible to me as the female psyche. Of course, most of you have guessed by now that I'm talking about large women who bring small dogs into public buildings where they (the dogs) shouldn't be allowed in the first place.
This rant stems from an incident this past weekend when I went on my merry way to a video and video game rental store to acquire a means for delivering pixellated carnage directly into my skull (aka a First Person Shooter for the PS2). Whilst perusing the shelves of gory, gaudy goodness, I spied a large woman of indeterminate cultural heritage walking down the new release aisle, clutching what looked like part of a blanket to her ample (unattractive, overly-visible) bosom. Her short shorts, rat's nest hair and thousand yard stare led me to believe she was a person of middling mental ability, or, as I call them, a Crazy.
Thinking perhaps she had a weapon of some sort hidden under said blanket (or, more likely, a source of food), I skirted around her while keeping an eye on her every move. It was sometime around the "N"s on the new release wall that I first saw the reason for the Crazy -- er, woman's body tarp: it was concealing a small, bug-eyed, completely useless hairless rat, also known as a chihuahua.
The poor thing, obviously over-stimulated by the lights, sounds and ungodly smells associated with video rental stores, was vibrating like a TV screen that hasn't been properly calibrated to handle the NTSC color spectrum. None of this was particularly remarkable, however, as we all know chihuahuas are useless dogs whose only saving grace is its aptitude for being heartless fast food pitchcreatures.
What really got my goat was a combination of three things:
1) What compels a person to think they can't even RENT A MOVIE without taking their dog with them? Especially a chihuahua, the breed of dog least likely to wander off if you left it alone, based simply on its perpetual fear of EVERYTHING.
2) Why didn't someone tell her to leave the dog in the car? Did I miss a memo somewhere that said one of our new Constitutional freedoms is the right to bring your pet into any store you want?
This phenomenon is not new, as I'm sure you've all seen. I've even seen people bring their lap/rat/teacup dogs into the grocery store, for God's sake. I know nothing makes me more eager to buy food than seeing some slack-jawed idiot carrying her "Taco," "Tinkerbelle," "Gigi" or "Trixie" through the produce section, how about you?
