Skulldrinker
No bio...
User ID: 1874
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
I could have put this in Wellness Wednesday, but I'll phrase this as a question:
When am I allowed to mace a hobo?
The story: I'm working at a food stand at a winter market festival downtown for a month. It's over $25/hr after the copious tips, and short 6-hour shifts, but my ulterior motive is about getting an In with the bar running it, and just to network amongst the Hospitality Folk.
But, this means I'm taking the CTA for a change, and thus keep seeing things that can't be unseen. The other day, there's a ranting man on the opposite platform, wandering up and down it, shouting nonsense. Not old, bent, or decrepit, cheap clothes that are still in one piece. I'm waiting for my train, and see him eventually fixate on a woman and start leaning in to her and gabbling. She stands there frozen and ignores him as he shuffles around her like a giant annoying pigeon. There's a bunch of back-and-forth of this guy wandering away, coming back, going down the stairs, then back up, then looming over her and gabbling at her. I'm staring the whole time with what must have been a thunderous expression, the woman meets my gaze a few times and mouths something once. Both of them are black, incidentally; she looks like a nurse or something adjacent: South-Side Respectable. I'm trying very very hard to control my temper and not escalate the situation, actual physical harm in these situations is pretty rare, this is just emotionally harrowing for the poor woman.
He wanders away a bit and she makes a move for the stairs, I see him start to follow, and I've finally had e-fucking-nough. I go down the stairs and meet her sheltering by the turnstyles. He sees me and stops on the stairs, starts going up and down them, in that attempt to be nonchalant that the mentally ill always fail at. My train is a minute away, she's crying, I say it's okay, and shout to the attendant "Hey, there's a ranty hobo that isn't leaving this woman alone. She needs help."
With my train arriving and my shift starting soon, I go back up to my platform, get on the train, and see though the window that same woman, standing on the platform, crying, while the hobo stands behind her gabbling. She's got her own train to catch. This is what I'm left with as my train leaves the station.
After, of course, I realize the optimal move would have been to being her up to my platform, get on my train til the next hobo-free platform, then continue on her way. My presence alone would probably have dissuaded him. But I didn't want to be late, I didn't want to escalate the situation, and I didn't want to be tempted to beat up a brain-rotted hobo.
Cut to work.
Background: One of my fellow döner-kabob-slingers is a early-30s woman that I was initially a bit taken with; she introduced herself to me as recently-divorced, asked me if I had a partner or not, and just generally paid way more attention to me than I'm accustomed to (which felt good, because it doesn't happen much, which made me sad. But also made me uncomfortable, because of the unfamiliarity of it, which also made me sad.) There's a bit more incidental physical contact from her than necessary. She's skinny and wide-faced and granola-y, we talk about nature and wildlife stuff; she's involved with urban ecology project planning and...equity. Dang. Also, I later overhear her talking about Polyamory or some shit (Polyamory as practiced by women is just laundered Friendzoning/Cucking, Polyamory as practiced my men is just laundered Playa-ing. She wants to fuck around but needs a buzzword for it). So my interest is...reduced. The woman who mutilated my heart in 2019 was also a recently-separated devorcé, fool me once and all that.
Anyways, I arrive at work all bent out of shape and want to talk about it. So I ask my not-crush, as someone who's lived in Chicago for a while, and as a woman, if stuff like that ever happens to her and what bystanders can do to help without making the situation worse. I narrarate the story pretty much as I do here. (I leave out the part about them both being black, it isn't relevant). I'm genuinely looking for advice, but I also want to untangle my feelings, and, yeah, I want to convey to her that I'm the sort of person that struggles to not White Knight.
The first thing she says?
"I think you're trivializing that poor man's mental illness by calling him a gabbling hobo."
The walls go up inside me. She's Orthodox Woke. "Yes, I should have been more technical: Bum, Gabbling Stalker Variant, Able-Bodied."
"You don't understand, access to mental health services has been reduced because Republicans-
"I'll go tell that woman to not cry, then, it's Ronald Reagan's fault for kicking him out of his mental hospital."
So that's the story of how I stopped being attracted to someone.
Just to quickly double-check, I ran this story past a close female friend who moved here from Nebraska, and an apolitical Chicago native bartender, and both had different flavors of "What the actual fuck?" Reactions. She was speechless, he laughed.
Because of stuff that's happened to me, I carry a can of mace on my keys. But I notice my hand going for it in situations like this, where I'm almost looking for an excuse to use it, and I'm worried I'm eventually going to spray a particularly-annoying panhandler in the face.
Skulldrinker
9mo ago
I recently had a pretty negative experience with a woman who genuinely WAS neurodivergent, moreso than my awkward ass. I found it incredibly disheartening to find out that she didn't have the same "resents normies but desperately wants to be accepted by them" complex as me, almost as if despite her awkwardness the world had still welcomed and cherished her.
Me and neurodivergent women:
"Oh, what I thought was eye-fucking this whole time was just you being slightly autistic."
Jesus was also preaching under the assumption that the end of the world was right around the corner; give away all your shit and give no thought to the morrow, love your neighbor and turn the other cheek are all way more reasonable if worldly things like providing for your family, planning for the future, taking care of yourself, and not being punched on both sides of your face are about to not matter. Early Christians also thought that the apocalypse was right around the corner, until the world kept inconveniently persistently existing and they had to re-think their expectations.
Then the protestant reformation happened and some people started taking literalist readings of the original text, and came to the same conclusion of early Christians; the end of the world is right around the corner. And thus we have that marvelous work of human literature, Left Behind.
IIRC, some of the Great Awakening utopian cults were explicitly abstinent; not "no sex before marriage" abstinent, absolute abstinence. Sex is sinful, and the end of the world is right around the corner, so having children isn't important compared to being right with Jesus. They aren't around anymore, for mysterious reasons.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
There's not enough density in those cheaper areas to survive as a homeless person. Less traffic to beg at, fewer dumpsters to go through, fewer bikes to steal.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
It's not necissarily funded by Disney, these days you can have grassroots astroturfing. There are people who comport their entire lives ideologically and will go to bat for anything they think has progressive values in it, and an overlapping group of people who will go to bat for anything they think toxic incel cis white male haters will hate. Tranny Jannies do it for free, and so do these people.
Skulldrinker
2yr ago
Circumcision makes sex less pleasant for men. No idea why being uncircumcised would be a problem for women; sounds like they've been watching too much porn.
The structure and content sounds terrible, but the actress you're talking about seems...fine? It's Piglet from Derry Girls. The quality of guys chasing her is probably fantastical/farcical, but you're really catastrophising a chubby woman existing on TV.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
I don't think they realized he was simping. He was just presenting them with everything it was trendy for them to want. Yes, lots. During COVID. While privately being a complete piece of shit. It made me hate the world.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
The being stood up part or the Infinite Rescheduling part? If either only ever happened once to you, then I'm even sadder now than I was before.
Skulldrinker
2yr ago
it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left.
I'm not sure this is the case anymore. They've been pulling the "There are starving trans people of color being hunted by Republicans while the ocean is rising, and you want to spend money on SPACE that could have gone to my non-profit for hunted trans POCs?" card for a while, and demonizing space travel as a way for rich (white) people to escape earth. I don't hear much futurism from them anymore.
Buuuut, I was surrounded by particularly-inconsistent leftists for way too long.
Skulldrinker
3mo ago
I was going to ask a related question:
How much of the market drop and the apparent crisis(es) are the result of negative media coverage? Anything and everything the administration does is seen as a violation of something or other.
"News Today: Fascist still in White House doing things, when will the carnage end? Breaking Update: during a vital meeting, trump used the bathroom and delayed lifesaving aid to [minority]>."
I'm still convinced that this happened during COVID. With any other administration, the media wouldn't have been motivated to keep hammering on the fear, the vaccines would have been an excuse to end the lockdowns, and you wouldn't see masked-up leftists to this day. Being deathly afraid of COVID was bound up with being a good little resistance member.
That said, I didn't even vote in this election and don't personally like Trump; he melted my dad's brain, among other wrongs. I'm disappointed at the Musk lying and tomfoolery; this isn't even good trolling. It feels like someone somewhere made a monkey-paw wish to defeat wokeness and this is what they got. I worry it might have been me.
I really just wanted the crypto market to go up, thanks to fair/reasonable/clear regulation and institutional buy-in. A Bitcoin reserve is fundamentally a good idea. I want a future where putting 5-10% of your assets/investments in crypto is boring safe, conventional wisdom that it'd be irresponsible not to follow, like bonds or whatever. Trumpcoin doesn't further that goal.
Skulldrinker
4mo ago
Likes the Infinite Jest?
Odd, literally the first time I even heard of Infinite Jest, it was a talking point of the Perfect Organism in his demented efforts to become maximally appealing to college-educated women. Since 2020, has Infinite Jest become badwrong, along with Teslas?
Skulldrinker
7mo ago
He's charitably describing even the best-case scenario of someone who was at least functional before going to prison, something blue-collar or menial, had a wife he slapped around occasionally and kids he'd over-discipline when drunk. Not a great human being, but a step or two above the functional scum they are now.
Skulldrinker
7mo ago
Height is something that everyone has that you can't change. So anything mentioning height will get rage-engagement in the Internet attention economy. Race-bait, gender-bait, height-bait, they can all be taken as personally as a generic "your mom" insult.
It's not that great to be tall; I still spent most of my life painfully alone, with women often being performatively afraid of me.
Skulldrinker
11mo ago
Most credit cards have a 6 or even 12-month zero-interest financing period. Amazon store cards have this.
I sold carrier phones for years. I'm on Mint and buy my phone outright and pay it off over 6 to 12 months, usually buying a ~$500 A-series pixel or Oneplus something-or-other. This is what I tell other people to do. Just about no one does. Instead they buy carrier phones.
I still can't get a woman to turn up for a date. This happens with women I meet in real life, who flirt back, and hug me unprompted.
Not long ago someone tried to aggressively hook me, but rodeos, fool me twenty times, et cetera.
Wellness Wednesday aint gonna do much for that.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Hard disagree, it's older neurotic urban hypochondriacs of either gender still wearing masks, and a few demented 20something women with goofy hair and pantsuitaloons. That's bluest of the blue.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
I know too many women who seek out and stay in relationships with shitty men that already do this stuff to them. For people so afraid of sexual assault and abuse, they're really, really bad at avoiding it.
Skulldrinker
2yr ago
If she does agree, try to exchange phone numbers and move off the app. Set up the date in the next couple days and then don't text until you are headed out.
This is the point of failure for me. Women say yes to a date, then turn out to apparently have zero availability for a date since they're busy every single day you propose, don't propose their own day, and when you ask them what day works best for them, they say "let me get back to you on that, not sure", and this process continues until I get the hint and go away. Or they say yes, then cancel on the day of. Or they say yes, then abruptly vanish. 95% of the matches that say "yes" do not result in an actual date happening.
Skulldrinker
2yr ago
Ive always preferred Dwarves as the fantasy-jews, myself.
Skulldrinker
28d ago
I assume she was convinced I was up to no good, as an unattended male.
I was new to the city and was at the event precisely because I hadn't made friends yet.
I've been specifically trying to to be more outgoing lately, I just keep getting anxious flashbacks to shit from almost a decade ago.
Skulldrinker
1mo ago
...does canoodling mean something other than what I think it means?
This chick is talking about sexual preferences and how handsome I am and the sorts of shit she gets up to, yet I'm scary for talking about sitting next to eachother with our heads together chatting?
Skulldrinker
7mo ago
No, openly flirting gets you a lecture about straight guys always assuming they're not queer, or rates of sexual assault, and engaging with a "Men, Amirite?" quip with anything other than soy appeasement immediately labels you as an anti-feminist chud trump-voting something-or-other, with a possible reference to internet bogeymen from 2016.
Skulldrinker
8mo ago
It's a bit spooky how much he's being glazed up-thread.
How do you get people to turn up? Back when I could bring myself to bother with Hinge, I'd follow all of this, get the date set up, and with a horrific inevitability she'd cancel the day of the date. Then I'd ask to re-schedule, she'd say yes, then bail on the day of the re-scheduled date. Was, rinse, repeat until I get the message and stop talking to her. This happened with 95% reliability on Hinge. The last two times I got tinder dates, I got stood up both times, so I perma-deleted everything I could on there. I no longer have any trust in matches and haven't been able to bring myself to message anyone in months. I just look at the profile, see the inevitable outcome, and skip to the end where I don't go on a date. It's as if asking someone out on Hinge is some sort of disappointment to them "Gee, I really liked this guy I was talking to on this dating app, everything was going so well, I was really into him, until he asked me on a date, ugh, who does that?"
So I dispute 12.
More options
Context Copy link