You should probably wait for the laughter of your inner teenaged boy to die down before moving on…

No me pises translates from Spanish to English as something familiar.

Even if you aren’t a Proud Boy.

Or a gun nut.

And I’ll tell ya, this American is taking it back this week like The Gays took back the Proud Boys hashtag last week. Seriously, what were those bigoted idiots thinking trying to usurp pride from The Gays?

Buncha dopes.

What a wonderful time to be re-watching Ally McBeal…

Not such a wonderful time to get a late night Messenger notice from Black Sheep Bro. I mean, surrealiously I’m on the West Coast and he’s in friggin’ Texas. Why he’s sending me messages at 11 PM my time?

I don’t know.

Nor do I know what brotherly charm he was hoping to evoke with this out of nowhere crap. But it didn’t do much to improve my disposition in the Xtopher vs Black Sheep Bro arena.

But I do know that while he makes me scratch my head – and delete Snapchat – and ponder whether he’s heckling me from a path I want to venture down, several others have tried calling me down similarly unappealing paths that I think they can just travel alone. Or at least without the pleasure of my company…

Take this joker on the Twitter.

Not to bury the lede, but I reported the rat bastard.

Suck on that sweaty dick, Jimbo.

If only all instances of intolerable bullshit were handled as expeditiously as Twitter handled this.

Actually, sometimes they are handled thusly, these petty bullshit things. They just are not always the matters of import that draw attention.

Lucky for all of you, dear readers, I’m not shy about holding up the lumps from my life for your appreciation.

For instance, the situation that prompted this response from Lyft.

Good old Marcy from Lyft.

Here’s the story:

I was out driving last weekend – Friday. It was after I possibly stressed myself into being ill two days last week, which is another blog post on its own. Needless to say, I was driving to play catch up on my self-imposed weekly goals. Fortunately for me, my hypochondriac episode malady occurred just prior to the first rainy Fall weekend of the season.

Unfortunately for me, I ran into a rider who seemed conflicted about a lot of things.

The first of which was the difference between a driver and a bartender therapist.

He gets in and tells me he’s going to a friend’s house to have a few drinks and hang out. Because, as it turns out, his live-in girlfriend is giving him hell at home.

For what it’s worth, I have a cat at home who prefers I not be at home.

Seemed safe enough.

Banal, one might even think if they didn’t know the feline that is Mistress Myrtle…no matter how angelic she may pretend to be for the ‘Gram.

So this passenger manages to cram a lot into this ride that didn’t even beat the minimum fare! This particular swine was absolutely rolling in his own pearls of wisdom.

I’m not sure whether it was my lacking in a certain luster enthusiasm for the quicksand caliber topics he was therapeutically trundling into.

It was.

Men have needs.

Ugh. So absolutely rapey.

At least there’s porn. Hey…what kind of porn do you like?!?

Gay.

Oh, sweet! That actually just made me a little hard. Do you want to touch it?

This gem he drops as he’s getting out of the car.

No. No, I do not.

For so many, many reasons.

Do I want to Bobbit you? Yes, yes…perhaps I do.

Maybe it was something else that got me going. Maybe it was the overwhelming cumulative effect of his closeted and misogynistic monologue in such a short period of time. Or that I didn’t have a beer to wash the figurative taste of his words out of my being.

But some things I do know.

I got into my 50s being single by absolutely wasting my time on idiots like this clown – not you, Rib, you’re a dear. Certainly, I wanted to head right back to where I picked him up from and tell any angry looking women I met to dump their boyfriends.

Most definitely, I’m no longer flattered by fuckbois who think copping a feel is a reward worthy of my effort and pursuit. Had I been him, I’d have for sure known that my attached stiffy did not afford me the right to stiff my service provider.

Quite the opposite – I’d think I have enough shame to overtip if I made such a social blunder. Lucky me, running into someone with this joker’s uncommon knowledge.

Maybe I’ll understand his entitlement someday.

And then there was the whole…I just don’t know what to feel about-ness of his offer to be a side piece.

A fling…at my age.

An unsolicited pinch hitter for his main piece, who I’m sure was unaware that her boyfriend was out haphazardly recruiting.

Probably, knowing me and my penchant for being rulesy, it was more that first thing than anything else. I got to be single in my 50s by defining my own acceptable standards of behavior. One of those standards is being alone instead of being in a relational situation simply because it’s not being alone.

This fucker wanted it all. Most upsetting to me was probably that he and I disagreed on whether he was entitled to any.

Anyway, unlike with the Twitter guy, I didn’t even report this guy. I simply one-starred him – and any passenger I rate as three out of five stars or lower, the app will never pair me with again.

Personally, I think three or below is a pretty harsh scale, so I use my Star Hammer judiciously. Most of my rides – and I’m talking all but about five out of ~2500 rides – have been great.

That being the case, I break it down like this:

Regular great ride – four stars.

Regular great ride with a tip – five stars.

If you’re just a meh, I might three star you. The very infrequent individual that finds and inhabits the ass in “passenger” gets a one star. As you can tell, I don’t really find the relevance in that whole two star business…what’s that, the ass that tips?

When I was young, like my early 20s, there was a thing going around. This was before memes but after email. Sure, it was like in the days of AOL email addresses, but still. We would print them out and hold onto them to share with friends.

Now that I think about it, memes are really to young people what recipe cards used to be to 50s housewives – something to share with peers.

The pre-meme that I wanted to share?

Every day, I am forced to deal with someone who ends up on the ever growing list of people who can kiss my ass.

But that Marcy from Lyft? She ain’t on it, for sure. But she’s certainly on it…meaning, when I one starred this passenger, I selected “inappropriate rider behavior” and made a note about the indecentident on the ride but didn’t file anything formal with Lyft. Hell, I was pretty sure no one but me ever saw those notes.

But Marcy found my flag and followed up – just to tell me that she’d seen it and suspended the pig-fucker. On my mental scales of justice, I figured Marcy’s intervention balanced that poor girlfriend’s ledger.

So don’t tread on others might be the better tag line here. I think trampling in America would be a lot less frequent if we watched out for these unknown others, even when the tramplers themselves don’t seem to even care enough to look over their shoulders for witnesses before trampling.

Here’s my parting shot of Chrisism wisdom:

Do the right thing, even when no one is watching.

Hi, my name is Grumpy, Old Xtopher…and you can believe that I’m fucking watching. It’s not like I have much else to do in these End Times.