FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

So over at Metroblogging Portland they point out the new list from Forbes magazine of the best cities for singles.

I’ll leave it to other people to dissect the point of the list. Me, I just want to mention that the list says Portland is #27, but their Portland page says it’s #26.

Worse yet, they include someone saying that “Bueller Land, which is in Southeast” is the best pickup spot. Now, I have utterly no connection to any of Portland’s social scenes, but presumably they mean Beulahland, which also isn’t even in Southeast, but in Northeast.

So, where do we rank Forbes on the list of magazines without fact-checking or copy editing?

So I took some time to read some of the linked columns on Marc Acito’s website. It does not appear that the nature of his much-discussed recent piece was some sort of fluke, as they all suffer the same misapprehended pretense to cleverness.

“I, too, am outraged about pornography on the Internet,” he writes in one column. “It costs entirely too much and takes too damn long to download.” That’s neither particularly clever, nor is it original. It’s also too obvious a joke to bother making at all, yet there it is. And for that sort of writing he sells a book and has a syndicated column?

As I often had to explain to people back during my Portland Communique days, I’m in essence congentially incapable of writing for anyone (publishers, editors, whatever) other than myself. I am, due entirely to my own peculiar idiosyncracies, restricted to writing online for free.

In other words, this isn’t about wondering how Acito could have a book and a column when I don’t. I have neither a book nor a column because I could’t write in those contexts if I tried.

I don’t mean to be some sort of attack dog here, but I happen to find poor writing (and its success) to be disappointing and at least mildly painful.

Ironically, the Blogtown, PDX item on the Acito piece which sparked all of this quotes someone as once having said that “Portland celebrates mediocrity.” Were that the case, we’d be touting Acito’s piece, not lambasting it.

“You carry rocks in your head,” says the song from which this site takes half its name, “and pitch them without warning.” That was me walking on errands this afternoon.

There was the woman in the large green truck waiting to turn out onto SE 39th, where I had the right of way, blocking the crosswalk even though she ended up having to wait the entire length of time it took me to cross behind her before she could move.

There was the mother in the red minivan with at least one kid also waiting to turn out onto SE 39th, from next to the library, cutting me off as she did so against the stop light into oncoming traffic.

There were the two frat boys cutting me off on the sidewalk, oblivious to the fact that the reason I was stopped was to let the woman in the wheelchair pull onto the ramp up into the waiting bus.

“It’s the little things that matter.” So cliche has this become that more and more people seem to be forgetting that it’s cliche precisely because it happens actually to be true.

The reason I let myself get worked up over these moments, the reason I find myself viciously musing upon the idea of carrying actual rocks around in my bag to throw at these people, is simple.

In a world seething with large-scale examples of human stupidities over which we as individuals have utterly no control, it is only through controlling these many potential moments — the everyday moments — of small human stupidities that we can help make a place for each other here.

Once upon a time, I left New York because of people like this.

It’s not merely that these people don’t notice. It’s that they don’t care to notice. You have to make the choice to care to notice. And they don’t. Increasingly, they don’t.

Which should shame them all, because making that choice is the only way to make a world in which it is worth abiding.

The most disturbing part of this story is that there actually were real live people out there who found themselves in an outright revelatory twitter over the now-debunked “coincidence”.

Looking through this site’s referers, I notice that the North American Disasterologist Society frets that this site has bigger nads than theirs.