like we didn't do it to ourselves


[click image]


...

Nobody but me seems to blame us for patronizing these pieces of shit. How can we be blamed when money is such a literally life-and-death matter to all of us? We can be blamed because it was patronizing these pieces of shit to blame for having no local economies in which to flourish anymore.

Last night I found a bandeau to solve the ever worsening problem of keeping my tits out of your face without hurting myself. Eight dollars. Essentially, a tube top to keep my knockers strapped down under my sweater in public. If I bought something like it at Fred Meyer in Brookings, a box store only marginally less perfidious than Walmart, it would be more than three times as expensive. I had to abort the purchase however, because the shipping was going to be 150% of the item price.

Not wanting to give up completely, I got the idea to look at the original label's website. Ten cents cheaper! And shipping a buck cheaper. So, at least that's down to half the local price. I decided to buy one.

My bank refused to approve the sale. Even though it looked like a British company, evidently it was a Turkish company, and they for some reason, they say, thought this was a fraudulent attempt on my credit card.

So I had juuuust fallen, finally, into a deep sleep, as the sun was coming up and the motherfucking phone rang. It felt like steel beams ripping my flesh as I was being hauled up from too deep beneath the sea. It was a goddam computer calling me and ordering me around. I hit about seven different phone pad keys and, sort of, went back to sleep.

It didn't hold. I had to get up and I was an unhappy camper. The phone rang again. The bank's fraud department computer again. This time I was awake enough to get a human on the line. It was a non-native English speaker who sounded unsure about the bank for whom she was supposedly working. Grilling me like I am some kind of criminal. Grilling me like a cop who thinks this is a perp or we'd not be talking with each other. I just kept checking her in her shtick and hollered about trying to buy an item online and the card not being approved for no known reason and then a goddam nazi computer demanding horse shit from me when I was dead asleep, and THEN having the gall to ask me if charges I have made every month for decades are fraudulent or not.

I was NOT nice to this woman. She at least had the decency to sound contrite at the end. Fat lot of good that did. And then, of course, that left me sleeping from one to six instead of six to one.

I mention all this by way of expressing how rural people using box stores that put local businesses to sleep put us having to pay three times more for everything at the box stores than the two times more it was when they first set about killing off the locals. It was easily foreseeable, but nobody seemed able to stop themselves. Not the vampires, not their victims. And, NOW, when one of us gets the initiative to not buckle to the out-of-control inflationary trend, the bank thinks it's fraud?

It would be endearing of me to blame this on a plot to send me to a lunatic asylum, an indication I don't believe my fellow shoppers are homicidally suicidally genocidal. Forget even how stupid/lazy they've been to go along with this. They're NOT stupid OR lazy. They're COWARDS... go along to get along cowards who herd up behind psychopaths instead of natural leaders of merit and spiritual excellence.

How many of you EVEN moved your money out of a big bank? Don't answer that. I know too many who simply shrugged and said they had to keep their money with psychopath vampires because their business or personal finances were too entangled to get out. No. No they were not. And all of us moving our money to local credit unions or small banks would have given the power back to locals who could have supported local business people instead of box stores.

...

The old teaching device story about the vicissitudes of karma must apply here. It so happens that going after the image of the bandeau in question gave rise to the news that shipping is free today. So. Eight dollars.

Of course, this will not be the end of it. The item will arrive and it will not fit correctly, or my boobs will overcome its constraints as they do all constraints, or it will make my tits sweat too much. It cannot be that the buddhas are cutting me an ounce of slack. It's just a short respite for bothering to holler at all sentient beings.


pipe up any time....