Watching Trump People
Just observing, in the zoo.
I spend about half an hour a day recovering passwords. My process is as follows: I reset my password on my bank account three days ago. When I did this, the browser on my computer asked me if I wanted to remember the new password. I chose “Yes,” of course. When I click the pre-filled login box I am informed that this is the incorrect password. Sometimes I hammer the “Submit” button a few times in primitive frustration and am locked out of my account for two hours, but on the occasions I’m lucky enough, I involuntarily agree to reset my password. This is usually when I am emailed a six-digit confirmation code which doesn’t ever arrive. Without the code I’m tasked with validating myself through trivia questions such as “What was your favorite type of artificial sweetener in the 11th grade?” Sometimes I’m able to take a wild guess and get my own biography correct, and I can’t think of anyone who’d be more likely to know these intimate details so it seems concerning that I’d be unconfident. Then I go to reset my password again, when I am informed, depending on what I’m trying to login to, that I either must include a special character in my password, or under no circumstances should I include a special character in my password. This ensures that I will never truly know my password to anything. I would have a pretty good idea, except I’ve just been informed that I cannot create the same password that I’ve used in the past several months, so I must invent something obscure enough to immediately forget. Finally, I reset the password. Instead of simply logging me in, the bank website now directs me to the main login page, where I’m forced to enter my new password. It usually doesn’t recognize the new password right away and I’m then forced to tackle a puzzle which asks the eternal philosophical question: If you have to click on the tiles that contain traffic lights, do the traffic light poles count as traffic lights since they are actually part of the entire traffic light structure, or is a traffic light a matter of partiality and we’re talking about just the actual illuminating part? I don’t know, so why don’t you give me another four tries at it? I now save my new password on my browser, knowing that it will be deemed incorrect the next time I try and login. Then I’m asked to take a brief survey summing up my experience. Then I’m given an error message and have to start over.
I repeat this process any time I need to do anything. When I was a teenager, I had no phone or computer, now I have a program that can write a very bad poem, although barely noticeably less bad than most poems. Soon the AI will be able to write as bad as the poems in The New Yorker. I might be able to use the program in the middle of the Amazon, by accessing it through Star Link, which has seven thousand satellites hovering in the atmosphere, which the company never was granted approval to launch. I can google the results of the 1972 Olympic javelin bronze medalist on my phone. I just ordered a blender while sitting in traffic. Soon it will arrive by drone. I would like to go back, I feel as though all of this was foisted upon me. None of us ever asked for this. We jumped on it, not realizing we’re the guinea pigs. I saw a woman scan her palm to pay for groceries at Whole Foods. If the current trend continues, we’re not going to recognize our society in twenty years. This isn’t the advent of the automobile. It’s science fiction finally being realized, and it’s so much more protracted and boring than any of us would have thought.
Sometimes I’ll still do normal things, though. I like to watch people watching things. You can tell a lot about someone by how they watch things. I might pop into a Jersey Mike’s sandwich shop, or even a Qdoba. These are the rich man’s Subway and Chipotle. Chains eking out a fairly pathetic existence, their brand being that they’re slightly less disgusting than the more successful guys, like the frighteningly decayed ninety-year-old man among us whose sole point of pride is that he never went on the dole during one of the many economic depressions he lived through, the southern-bred neo-Nazi, glowing over his 23 and Me results, 93 percent German.
There are the little bins in the Subway sandwich bar behind the domed glass. Lettuce, tomatoes, bell peppers, olives, spinach leaves, avocado, many cheeses stuck together, pickles, banana peppers, jalapeños.
A cool guy tells the sandwich maker what he wants: Footlong. Ham. Lettuce, tomatoes, cheddar, some olives. This isn’t a situation where he needs to oversee the operation like a general contractor who just got his first F-150. He can delegate this job without incurring much stress. It’s just a sandwich. It will work out. He looks out the window at a very attractive woman pushing a stroller and the thoughts cancel themselves out.
The retentive MAGA guy, the man barely clinging onto his self-appointed sense of masculinity, will micromanage the situation. He will stare, hard, at the worker’s hands, sweating out every strand of lettuce being piled atop their piece-of-shit sandwich. Is it too much? Not enough? I don’t know man, I’m barely keeping it together, after all, I did used to consistently watch questionable pornography with my college roommate almost nightly, then we took that trip to Thailand, time to make amends. We’re going to start with the perfect sandwich. The self-help audio books are really paying dividends. If you take things step by step, you’re definitely not a weird bicurious guy who only does biceps at the gym and is the owner of a mauve padded toilet seat.
It’s like making your bed every morning. Structure, discipline. The Few, The Proud, The Marines. Yeah, there are 200,000 of them, so what. There are 20,000 Subway locations in this country. That’s 10 Marines per Subway. I think there are like 500 NBA players. That would mean they could each have their pick of forty Subways that not one other person was allowed to set foot in. Man, the military is serious business. Too bad you had those bone spurs, but, really, it’s not that exclusive of a club. You’re in the private sector. This is what you tell people when they ask your profession, because you are an insufferable asshole.
Focus! Don’t take your eyes off of the sandwich. Piercing, laser projecting pupils. Disaster could be impending. If there are a few extra olives it could lead to a domino effect where you end up slouched over in the passenger seat of your truck suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound with Jelly Roll blasting on the premium stereo (six-hundred-dollar upgrade fee.)
If you don’t take the reins and supervise what’s going on here the worker might be tempted to put a dirty syringe in your sandwich. It happens all of the time. You don’t read Facebook? Take a tiny little baby side-step, shuffle an inch at a time at the same pace as the sandwich artist. She just asked you if you wanted any condiment squirted on there. Damn. You hadn’t accounted for this. There are so many choices. Just breathe.
“Mayonnaise,” you respond tersely. A beat. Then, “not too much, there. That’s good!” There. Right there. The perfect amount of mayonnaise. You have accomplished the mission. Good thing you backed your truck into your parking spot, too, so you can pull right out with the fruits of your diligence and move onto your next mission: Pumping gas at Costco. You might need your gloves for this one!
I see these guys among us. Once I had to go to the police station because I was in a relationship with a woman named Rebecca who had borderline personality disorder, and I had to file a police report just to document the harassment that was going on.
Point being, I was in the police station. This was a palatial, expansive building, with about three people filling the five-thousand square foot lobby. I was sitting on a bench waiting to speak to someone. In the corner of the lobby sat an ATM machine. It was affiliated with the bank that issued the police employees their paychecks. Pretty convenient for them, they can deposit their checks or pull out some cash in the same building they work. This stocky cop was about sixty feet away from me, the rest of the cold bare floor was empty. He had his back to me as he inserted his bank card. He was far away enough that I could offer a pedestrian description of him, but I couldn’t make out any details of his face. Just that he was a stocky guy with short hair, wearing khakis and a jacket. After he inserted his card, he looked deliberately over both shoulders. Then, as he went to enter his PIN, he cuffed his hand over the keypad to shield this precious code from all of the potential maleficent masterminds in the entirely vacant surroundings.
Uptight. Self-important. Certainly compartmentalized. Regimented. But I don’t think these are bad guys. They’re just uncool. That’s not a sin and being cool isn’t really something you can learn. But these guys don’t think about the big picture. They don’t acknowledge that being in a Subway is a tacit admission of failure on a quotidian level. They’re not cool like that. What they might do is tell you about a bit from a comedian they saw on YouTube but they can’t remember what he said. He’s really funny though, trust me. Also they’ll start a sentence with, “So I says…” What the hell is that about?
They’re thinking, please, don’t ruin this sandwich, it’s really all I have in this moment. I’m hungry. My blood pressure is dropping and the neurons in my small intestine are now signaling to my brain that something is wrong.
This is when it’s the most enlightening to watch the animal, when they’re at their most base.
But something happens in this faintly vulnerable arrangement. The power dynamic is distorted. You’ve worked hard. You have a wife and two children. Two girls, four and seven. Apparently they made a fucking thing on your fridge which consists of a piece of construction paper with cotton balls glued to it and some scribbling. You must be very proud. You have purchased a home. Everything is going swell. And now, this person has not put enough pickles on your sandwich and is threatening to tear it all down. Don’t listen to the bad voices, everything is fine.
“More pickles,” you involuntarily ejaculate. The worker looks at you and puts three more pickles on your American tragedy of a sandwich. Is she giving you attitude? They’re all the same. All of these illegals. Anyway, it looks better now. Crisis averted, and you really showed her what’s up. Put your foot down. Also, you’re so sick of these tipping suggestions on the touch screen. Take this opportunity to take a stand. No Tip. This has gone too far. You’re a modern-day Randy Weaver. The entitlement of some people in this country is becoming too much to deal with.
You can tell a lot from watching people watch things. Like the expression on their face when Fox News is on. It’s going to be one of myopic concerned oblivious determination just how they look when someone’s making them a sandwich.