I Am Officially Lowering My Expectations
Shutterstock Images.If you guys will humor meet for a couple of minutes, I’m about to get some shit off of my chest.
First off, I love movies.
If I’m watching a good one at home, it’s fantastic. But if I go to the movie theater and see an excellent movie, it’s better than fantastic… It’s a perfect afternoon for me, much like your ideal afternoon might be spent watching a favorite athlete win some game, championship, or award.
Bettmann. Getty Images.In the same way you might hit the couch every Sunday during football season, I try to go to a movie just about every Sunday afternoon. And the reason I go on Sunday afternoons is because I live in a faraway land called Bergen County, New Jersey. There, they have something called "blue laws" which keep nonessential retail closed on Sundays.
Businesses that fall under the category of "non-essential" are most of your big chains, so shopping malls are closed except for their movie theaters and some of their restaurants, which, for reasons unbeknownst to me, are somehow considered "essential."
Blue laws have been in place since the 1700s, adopted initially for religious reasons to promote the observance of the Christian day of worship. Since then, they have also come to serve secular purposes, including the promotion of small businesses, which makes sense… If you need a light bulb on a Sunday and you live near me, you are forced to visit your local hardware store, rather than giving more money to behemoths like Home Depot or Lowe's.
Some people argue that the blue laws are racist because people tend to find racism in just about every aspect of our daily life, but that is for another blog, I suppose.
Our blue laws are likely why we have so many Chick-fil-A‘s around my town, as they are also closed on Sundays for religious reasons. And, again, those religious reasons inevitably give people something to complain about ("Religion is racist!") even though it is none of their fucking business.
Anyhoo, last week I went to see The Accountant 2.
Image Press Agency. Shutterstock Images.The reason I went to see this movie is that I enjoyed The Accountant. Anna Kendrick was awful, and I'm not a massive fan of Ben Affleck, but he did a pretty good job in the first one. I also enjoy the guy who plays his brother, John Bernthal, who plays The Punisher in the MCU.
It’s Sunday morning, around 10 o’clock, and I make myself a poppyseed bagel with cream cheese and prosciutto that I had crisped up in the oven for about 10 minutes, making it like shards of porky glass. Texturally, the prosciutto was a perfect complement to the smooth cream cheese and the pillowy bagel, but I won't make this into another food review.
Advertisement
I snuck that into the theatre, bought myself a fountain Coke, and slid into my assigned seat, J5, for a movie that I found to be better than the original. I thoroughly enjoyed myself throughout the whole thing… The action was constant, and the jokes all hit as far as I’m concerned. The story wasn't perfect, but it was certainly captivating enough to keep my attention for the two hours or so I spent in a very comfortable, air-conditioned theater.
I always shut my phone down before the movie starts. When the film had ended, I turned my phone back on and saw that I had three or four text messages. One of them needed my immediate attention, so I sat there quietly and texted back whoever was trying to communicate with me while the credits ran.
Once I was done, I picked up all my garbage, including the tinfoil from my contraband bagel sandwich, a couple of used napkins, the straw wrapper, and, of course, my empty cup, and began to walk out of the theater, which was now empty, but had only about 10-15 other people in it.
Since I was the last person to leave, the house lights came back on, allowing me to see the empty seats of the people who had been enjoying the movie with me. And those empty seats were all covered in garbage.
Why the fuck do people do that?
Why the fuck do people come to public places where they expect cleanliness and comfort, but purposely leave that place of cleanliness and comfort less clean and less comfortable for others?
I know there’s an argument that these places charge enough for you to expect them to clean up after you, and I can’t say I disagree wholly, except cleaning up after you should entail an errant candy wrapper that fell between the seats or something equally minor and inadvertent. But when you are in there having popcorn, candy, snuck-in bagels, drinks, and everything else, I think that as a human being, you should have enough self-respect to clean up after yourself.
"Always clean up after yourself" is a rule of thumb that everyone should have heard from their parents, but for some reason we’ve all seem to have just thrown that idea out the fucking window when it comes to places like movie theaters and restaurants.
When you’re in a restaurant with a handful of young children and you get up from that table leaving the rug underneath looking like a Rorschach test you should be fucking ashamed of yourself. But that’s the thing… Nobody has shame anymore. Nobody has fucking self-respect. So people walk out of these establishments with their heads held high, as if some entitlement allowed them just to skip over common decency.
I don’t know why it annoys me because it never surprises me, so I’m about to make a promise to everyone right now…
I am going to stop expecting anything from anybody.
It's been a long time coming, but, as of today, I will not expect any of the fucking animals I share this mortal coil with to do the right thing… EVER.
I'm talking about pushing your seat in after you get up from a table, returning your shopping cart after you unload your groceries, or cleaning up after yourself when leaving a movie theater… I won't expect ANYONE to do it ever again.
Alexander Pope once said, "Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed." That’s precisely what I'm going to do. I am going to expect nothing from people, and at some point, I am gonna give them nothing in return.
You know what, scratch that last part, because I will continue to do the right thing, even as others do not, because that makes me feel better. And on the off occasions when I have people doing the right thing back to me, I’m going to light those fucking people up with whatever type of generosity I can find… And that generosity will typically take the form of a monetary reward… A tip.
Advertisement
So, when you turn the touchpad towards me and it says leave a tip when all I got was an overpriced coffee and a scowl, then don’t expect me to hit anything other than 0%.
I realize the frustration and dissappointemt that I am experiencing daily is what turns people like me into the cliché "grumpy old men" because every generation loses a certain degree of decorum, and the generation that preceded them notices it and feels like their world is being infested by people who just don’t give a fuck… That’s precisely what is happening with me every time I open my fucking door.
I don’t expect people ever to get better, and I don’t expect someone to read this blog and say, "Oh shit, I didn’t realize I was being such a fucking myopic douchebag… I’ll tighten my shit up right away."
People dislike being told they’re wrong and struggle to accept criticism because…
- Everybody is fucking perfect in their own eyes.
- People value getting away with something more than they value doing the right thing.
So on a random Monday afternoon, if you guys don’t mind, I would just like to wish a hardy "GO FUCK YOURSELF" to just about everybody else that I share a restaurant, movie, train, or fucking oxygen with because, in general, you’re all a bunch of filthy fucking scumbags.
See you at the movies next week, I hear the Thunderbolts is a banger.
Take a report, you fucking worthless slobs.
-Large
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna smoke a cigar someplace that will bother everyone around me…
TAR
-L