People are always so polite.  Sometimes, if you are impolite, polite people look at one another and slowly, gently, and disappovingly, shake their head.  They slightly and politely pucker their lips and slightly and politely sneer-up their nostrils.  They glance at eachother so slowly, so politely, and with such brevity, that the shared message is “the fellow is so impolite that I’m giving you the bare minimum response needed to acknowledge what we both know: that this urchin is despicable.”

I contend, however, that their politeness is false; is a travesty.  That below the large scale artifice of politeness is a whirlwind of nasty.

A rare candid shot of Queen Victoria during a lacrosse match

Take, for example, the Queen.  Who politer?  Why, she must define polititude.  Indeed.  However, politeness cannot run through the depths.

In fact, this queen sits uncomfortably on a chair.  Her queen blood is likely collecting in pools in her ass-cheeks.  Nothing polite about that.

As she sits stiffly, breathing measuredly in and out through her most noble of noses, the mucus membraine within dries to a crisp, forming large crusty snotballs that sit steadfast in an ocean of slime.

As she listens to the instructions of her handlers and the photographer, the inner walls of her ear canal become smudged in a sludge of yellow, fetid wax.

While waiting for the shutter to snap, the queen’s noble anus is clenched firmly shut by muscles largely outside her conscious control.  These muscles prevent the massive landslide of feces from sliding from her regal intestine.  If it weren’t for that one involuntary muscle, she’d be as malodorous and depraved as the most thoroughly alcohol’d reprobate.

Certainly the porcelain queen wouldn’t have armpits where odors fester and hairs slither out with reproachful  slowness– certainly, so polite is she, that a massive pubic bush is not straining against itself to levitate her regnant underpanties?  Certainly not.

While gripping her mighty staff, a raging orgy of bacteria is staged on every square inch of her body.  Her hands, her lips, her gums; all are ceaselessly engaged as host for a saturnalian fuckfest of microbes of all race, colour, and creed.

And yet, as her bowels churn and her anus grips and her viscera moan and her mucus dries and her earwax thickens and her bush explodes and her armpits fester and her microbes fuck, we still think her the paragon of politeness.

True politeness would have these foul bodily diseases under wraps.  True politeness isn’t merely engaging in behaviours that hide the unpleasant, it’s about eradicating such.  Yet modern politeness is little more than a collection of banal deceptions; legerdemain for a crusty upper-class to appear dignified over the savages.

I’d ask the Queen myself how she came to be so duplicitous: but I wouldn’t want to break up the orgy.

When one goes into, say, your Starbucks, or even, dare I say, your Timothy’s, one is greeted with a brand phalanx.  Everything from the music you hear to the layout of the tables to the presentation of the napkins is a fastidiously orchestrated fugue that belabours the brand ethos.  When you order a drink– a mixture of  water, sugar, and cream, with some flavour additives — you specify many of its characteristics in a way that is characteristically Starbucks, a delivery so cliché that jokes about it are more so– says the Ironic GenX Commentarian: “I’ll have a double-tall no-foam extra-hot milk-from-teets starburst lemonshower eggnog candycane merangue-whipped triple-dipped chocolate cappucino.”  Why, that’s as unique as you are!

I, on the other hand, drink tea.  Without sugar.  A bag of leaves dunked in a bucket of hot water.  If you go into a forest, many puddles satisfy this criteria.  So, I’m understandably crestfallen to make my order at an SBucks.  I’m belittled.  Everyone else orders a wonderworld: I order a dustbin.  This is fine.

The problem, is at Tim Hortons.  They are by no means a SBucks-grade brand machine.  However, I must make this point: when I arrive at the counter, and place my order for an Earl Grey Tea– a black tea flavoured with Bergamot, an amazing substance all its own, far more so than sugar or cream–the attendant always, always, responds to my dismissal of milk and sugar by referring to my tea as plain.  The order recap: “Okay, you’d like a breakfast sandwich and a plain tea.” (”breakfast sandwich” added only for rhetorical cadence).

A plain tea?  Notwithstanding this being my unique morning beverage, the same one that SBucks presents with blazing fanfare, Tim Hortons, this is your beverage too.  Reminding me how plain this $1.50 tea is — when I can buy a bag of it for 9 cents — is not just the branding equivalent of smelling like urine, it’s tasting like it too.

And is about a 5% reduction in Morning Quality.

There is probably, and I say “probably” half-heartedly (but that whole-heartedly), probably nothing more frustrating than people and their bizarre elevator behaviour.  Sometimes someone will get off, become confused, get back on, and then explain to everyone who just witnessed their unassailable asininity that “that wasn’t my floor” or “oh I guess that wasn’t the eighth”, as though now their behaviour is permissible because they acknowledged it with a wry half-smile.  Think again.

It was quite obvious when you stepped out of the elevator for but three seconds before returning that you hadn’t conducted your business– and how presumptuous of you to insist that I perhaps thought so.  Unless the business you had to carry out was to pass wind in the general area of HR before moving on upstairs, this fact is clear.

Sometimes people refuse to properly spread themselves out: there is an unspoken rule in an elevator: like particles of gas that expand their territories to fill their container with a uniform density, so too do humans spread themselves about an elevator.  Imagine walking into an elevator where three people were clustered awkwardly in the south-western quadrant?  Such a thing is highly unlikely.

Sometimes when there is a mass exodus, you will occassionally be left in a corner, with a single companion.  And somehow, this single companion is not “filling the void,” as it were: he still stands strangely close to you, despite the market flood of property in the area previously owned by those who exited on the sixth.  He is not spreading himself out.  He is not respecting the principle of uniform density.  And this is intolerable.

But the very worst infraction, the most unforgivable, is the senseless time spent shortly after getting on to a “down” elevator.  Many elevators do not have parking garages and find their lowest floor to be the concourse level.  And this is the level the vast majority of people will get off at.  Yet, for some reason, for some unknown goddamn reason, people getting on to the down elevator immediately run to number panel– is it not obvious at once that you are in an elevator with others?  Dear complete fucking idiot, is it not equally obvious that, so long as there is someone else in the elevator, and that elevator is going down, and your destination is the bottom floor, there is absolutely no logical, no rational, no excusable reason for you to be standing around staring at the panel of numbers?  What could you possibly conclude?  For fuck sake, stop embarrassing yourself and retarding the uniform density principle by stuffing yourself where you don’t belong.  Indeed, if you’re getting off at the bottom floor, you will never have to push a button if you are in the presence of someone else: you must only start thinking when you are alone.  Shame on you.

How often do you see someone get on the down elevator, mosey on over, all curious, all interested, all ready-for-action, over to the number pad, and see, as though it was unexpected, that someone had already set the elevator’s course to the desired coordinate?  Oh, well, excuse me, hey everyone!, gather around: a new captain has boarded the ship.  Well then, everyone, let’s take a moment to christen Lord Captain Elevator Fucking Moron the III.  At this point, the asshat will usually start smashing the door-close button — despite the fact that everyone is aware that it doesn’t speed anything up — in an attempt to wrench out some sort of reason supporting why they approached the control system to begin with.  Oh, we’re not to believe you’re an incoherent fuckwit, no sir, we’re to believe that you’re so important because you’re in a hurry, and in such a hurry that 1.5 seconds shaved off this elevator ride is worth the effort you’re putting into pressing that non-functioning button not once or twice, but several times, in rapid succession?  Is such urgency required when, really, and we all know it, you’re actually just making a non-verbal argument to all those watching about why it’s excusable that you have fucked up our uniform density and shanghai’d the navigation system?

Thankfully, we know better.

A fascinating paradigm shift has occurred, and I would be remiss if not to comment.

Indeed, so important it is, that I decided to make the very first post about it.

Stochastic processes, in particular, those involved in the political econo– ahh, fuck it, here’s a bunch of pictures of pineapples with sunglasses on!!!