For the Local Person(s) Who Bought the Coffee...

...No, not the curse, for them. (This is the utterly impersonal "them," as translated by on in French, meaning "Who cares whether they're male, female, singular, or plural.") For them, the friendly advice, which is not funny, and appears here above the curse contest story, which is funny:

The taco soup at the Family Bakery is delicious and gluten-free. The coffee is good. I like eating and drinking in the cafe where I blog. I like blogging about it, even. But, but...when you merely buy me $6 worth of stuff, as distinct from handing me $5 in cash, you don't qualify for a whole post.

I've avoided posting these thoughts in the past because some people who've wanted to buy me coffee are in fact addicts whose "program" allows them to handle giftcards not cash, and I want very much to help addicts stay sober. And others have wanted to support the places from which I've gone online as well as me, and I respect that idea too. This morning I encountered a person, or persons, who didn't want to bother buying something for cash, but nipped ahead and paid for my coffee with some sort of disgusting card...and that does annoy me: the idea of anybody being such a pawn of such an inherently unethical industry as to pay for one or even two cups of coffee with a card.



Yes, the burgeoning money-handling industry just loves to sell people that line of garbage about how everybody is using plastic now, and paying with actual cash is oldfashioned, and the banks don't like to cash your paycheck or handout check, and if a business isn't "big enough" to run on plastic you probably shouldn't trust the person with cash anyway but just take it upon yourself to buy stuff (with plastic) and give it to the person.

No, none of that is actually true in the real world...although the money-handling industry are working hard to make it true, and if they ever succeed, Gentle Readers, The Handmaid's Tale is going to read like a utopian fantasy. In the real world it won't be only women who are enslaved, nor will the process of enslavement take place without bloodshed. The Handmaid's Tale used the sex motif mainly to get readers' attention.

$5 in cash goes further than $6 in stuff.

$5 in cash nonverbally communicates that you appreciate what something is worth. $6 in stuff nonverbally communicates that you're claiming a right to dole out what you think I might want or "need."

$5 in cash is legitimate and respectable. $6 in stuff could in theory mean that you're a close friend and were thinking about me, but let's just say that I know that that's not the case; what it does mean is that (a) you didn't want to bother going to the bank, or (b) you didn't want to lower yourself to say "I'd like this, please, and thank you" to someone who has less money than you have, or (c) you wanted to tell people you did a big favor for some awful person who is obviously an alcoholic derelict because what other kind of person would ever walk to work on a cold morning like this one, or (d) all of the above.

And "paying" with plastic is fascist: it's a way to bloat bigger businesses at the expense of smaller ones, to "bundle" a few big businesses together with big government into a functional monopoly (which is what fascism means). Public-spirited people make the large payments to small local businesses, and peel off those one-dollar bills when they do, unavoidably, step into a big-chain store, where the store owners don't bother going to the cash register until people are waiting in line, and nobody who has either public spirit or common sense would ever use their identity to "pay" when others are waiting in line.

NICE PEOPLE LEAVE THE PLASTIC TO THE ADDICTS AND THE WELFARE CHEATS. 

NICE PEOPLE ALWAYS CARRY CASH.

So the one(s?) I have in mind get half a post, and since I have other things to write and am feeling hurried, I'll refer them to the nation's leading source of short, funny, pungent writing: the Washington Post's Style Invitational Contest.

To read the coffee-snorting post to which they sent me the link, click here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/conversations/style-conversational-week-1272-do-not-congratulate/2018/03/22/

Last summer I was feeling sufficiently upset, in more ways than three, to compose a full-length Irish Curse. An Irish Curse is a poetic (at least in Gaelic it's supposed to sound poetic) form that goes on at some length, using parallel structures, which makes it recognizable as "formed" writing in any language. It can be goofy or ghoulish. Since I was writing about the way glyphosate reactions, if prolonged and multiplied long enough, would strangely resemble the horrors of kidney cancer, which many believe can be caused (partly) by repeated exposure to glyphosate, I went for ghoulish: this is the real stuff of which screaming nightmares are made. I'm not going to link to it; you can search this site if you really want to read a serious, horrible curse.

The Style Invitational was not asking for that; Irish Curses are long and frequently not funny. What they're asking for is a related form, Yiddish Curses, which are traditionally one-liners. If taken literally, some Yiddish Curses would not be funny, but their actual effect is usually to defuse anger by at least sounding funny if you don't think about them too long.

And here's mine, suitable for use in hatemail (not that this web site recommends actually sending hatemail) to any woman for whom "old, sick, and rich" have obviously displaced "tall, dark, and handsome":

"You should marry a 95-year-old sick patient, and he should live another 50 years, and you should live another 45."