Department Of My Work Here Is Done
Exhibit A.9995
Can anything match the parental pride such as that experienced by moiself, when son K’s first reaction upon reading the name of the offender in the news article, Serial flasher gets long sentence for exposing himself… was, “It’s the role he was born to play.”
“Washington County Circuit Judge…handed down a sentence…to Michael G. Dick, who pleaded guilty to two counts of felony public indecency…”
* * *
Department Of Spending Too Much Time Thinking About
An Existentially Inconsequential Concept.
As heard on a commercial for Saatva dog beds ( the ad was in a recent Hidden Brain podcast, “Be kind to Yourself “):
.”…these dogs beds are not your typical slabs of foam covered in polyester. They are true inner spring mattresses that provide unparalleled back support and proper spine alignment for dogs of all sizes….”
I can’t remember if it was on an earlier HB episode or a different podcast where I also heard an ad for Saatva dog beds, in which it was claimed that a Saatva dog bed is the mattress “your dog deserves.”
This sterling example of the sentimentally manipulative capacity of marketing got me to wondering: How can a dog *deserve* a certain kind of dog bed?
deserve
transitive verb: to be worthy of : MERIT
(“deserves another chance”)
intransitive verb: to be worthy, fit, or suitable for some reward or requital
( from Merriam-webster online dictionary )
I can understand a dog wanting something (a tummy rub) or needing something (a drink of water); I can understand a person wanting or needing something for their dog (a trip to the dog park; a leash). I can understand a person rewarding their dog for a specific act – with the reward directly connected to the act so that the dog understands that it did what was asked of it (e.g., giving the dog a treat for obeying a command to sit or heel…), and thus you can say the dog “earned” or merited the treat.
But how does a dog merit a piece of furniture that will be given to it – *must* be given to it (it’s not like the dog can take its Mastercard and go to Petsmart) – by its human?
I don’t know about that superlative. A dog meriting a bed is perhaps not the greatest mystery. But it does get me to wondering, about other mysteries of life and human behavior (this dog bed thing has everything to do with human motivations and almost nothing to do with dogs), including….
* * *
Department Of Existentially Consequential Concepts Which Deserve All The Time In The World To Contemplate…
Despite My Doing So Not Making A Damn Bit Of Difference
Sub-Department Of I Blame Vladimir Putin,
For Everything…
…including the fact that beloved friends are going through a grueling Something which has afflicted them, for reasons unrelated to them personally and/or anything they may have done. Like Putin vis-à-vis the Ukrainians, there is this Something out there which is trying to torment and kill them, for no rational reason.
The cosmos is full of beauty and wonder and misfortune and pain, all of it unevenly and randomly distributed. Understanding this phenomenon is the key to equanimity…along with being able to tell the truth in all circumstances. Say, this is dreadful, when it is dreadful; cry when you have to and laugh when you can.
Moiself knows that disease organisms, like all primitive of life forms, just do what they do: try to survive and replicate. Got it. But, dammit it, you flaming asshole tumors, pretend for one nanosecond that you have sentience. Get some self-awareness here: if you kill the host, you die, too, HELLO !?!?!?.
We humanist/religion-free folk know that such afflictions are not personal: we know we’re not being punished when illness and injury occur, nor are we being rewarded when we somehow avoid or recover from the same calamities which afflict others. Still, as human beings; we suffer when hurt. At least we are spared the suffering from cognitive dissonance and the mental gymnastics that come with trying to live with and justify concepts such as karma and fate and believing the existence of deities which are supposedly all-powerful and thus *could* choose to alter the Something…but simply *don’t.*
So, we can admit upfront that contending with lethal illnesses et al sucks, as in,
“This is massively, putridly, ginormously, donkey-dong sucking….”
“Hey! I thought you weren’t going to get personal?”
….even as we live in a world where, come yet another day, there will also be the mixture of the profound and the mundane to be appreciated, in, say, the sight of the morning dew sparkling on the araneus diadematus’s web, which she’s anchored between the raspberry bushes and the recycling bin. And neither phenomenon – the simple but stunning example of the splendor of the natural world, and the specific ordeal of the illness we battle in that same world – is one we either caused or merited.
The late great Roger Ebert, noted film critic and freethinker, [1] shared his thoughts about his then-imminent death in his blog post, Go Gentle Into That Good Night. This was during a time when Ebert’s mental faculties were as sharp as ever despite his body having been ravaged by both his disease and the treatments for that disease. His perspective is one that is shared by many humanist/religion-free thinkers. It is a lovely meditation (excerpted here), the entirety of which is worth reading and rereading, no matter what your worldview is regarding your own mortality or that of a loved one.
“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear… I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris…
I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.
To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”
* * *
Department Of Because I Was Trying To Avoid Something I Need To Work On,
And For Some Reason Had A Flash Back To This Topic
That topic, broadly speaking, would be co-worker relationships. Most of us have had a combination of ups and downs in that category, but have you ever had a coworker for whom your mere presence was apparently so annoying that it motivated them to play a petty (but delightfully so) prank on you?
Last week my remembrance of one such “relationship” resulted in a FB post from moiself. And now, my social media secret is revealed: the main reason for almost any story I post (or tell at the dinner table) is related to what inspires 5-year-olds to play doctor: I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. I love to hear and read the stories of others, so I share one of mine, as a prompt.
My post:
“Okay, it’s another thinly disguised story prompt (I’ll show you mine if you show me yours): please share any similar stories you may have re a really poor relationship you had with a petty, nasty, bigoted, misogynist, and/or just plain stupid coworker, which led to an amusing incident.
Here’s mine: On my first day back on at second season of a summer job (Disneyland; The Hungry Bear Restaurant), one of the kitchen crew clicked the play button on a mini-cassette recorder he had in his pocket, and serenaded me with Elton John’s, ‘The Bitch is Back.’ “
And dammit, although I got comments, for the first time no one shared a similar story. [2]
As you can imagine, this workplace incident didn’t happen out of nowhere. A friend requested the backstory; and so: [3]
At the end of my senior year in high school, anticipating the need to earn college tuition money, I began working weekends at Disneyland. I obtained “seasonal” worker status, which was the status of the majority of my male and female coworkers with whom I shared summer shifts at Disneyland’s Hungry Bear Restaurant (HBR). [4] Once we were hired by The Happiest Place on Earth®, if we seasonals worked the entire summer season and at least one other holiday season (winter or spring breaks; Thanksgiving…) we were guaranteed a job for the following summer.
The serenader in question – moiself will refer to him as Kid Rock [5] ( who wasn’t a thing then, but if he had been, I think my serenader would have been a *big* fan ).
Kid was a boor from the moment I met him. His square-jawed face’s limited repertoire of expressions were all variations of a smirk, and he oozed dumb jock attitudes and mannerisms. Moiself initially experienced a wee bit o’ guilt for judging him at first glance, until my second, and third, and one hundred seventeenth glances and encounters (as well as my observations of his interactions with others) confirmed my stereotyping assessment astute perception of who and what he was.
With his male coworkers, Kid was constantly jockeying for position, ingratiating himself with his kitchen shift managers, and attempting metaphorical pissing matches with the other kitchen guys. [6] He considered himself to be above his peers (although they were all doing the same job, at the same pay scale), even as he courted their respect (or fear) for being a “player,” with an edgy (read: mean and stupid) sense of humor. The nice guys in the kitchen crew (and there were several) earned Kid’s contempt, because being a nice guy meant being well thought of by the HBR females (we were “the girls,” of course).
“I can smell that creep from here.”
No surprise, Kid also had a binary way of relating to the HBR females: they were either objects of his sexual desire or not worthy of it. His preferred mode of communication with female co-workers was a combination of peacock preening, barely-masked sexual come-ons, and furtive insults (aka, “jokes”). He got giggles from some of the girls, but, as I observed, those girls seemed to be giggling to mask their unease, and trying to prove that they could “take a joke” and weren’t prudes. If Kid’s thinly disguised sexual banter was rejected by a girl, he’d let it be known that he hadn’t really wanted her at all – he’d just been trying to make her feel better, because she was unattractive. I saw him behave this way with *every* female at HBR, with the exception of one of the counter area managers, whose slight but noticeable physical disability effectively neutered her in his eyes.
And, as was typical of many guys of the time (even the not-so-loathsome ones), when Kid complained about his male coworkers he was able to do so using specific language re what bothered him about their actions: they’d been slow on the grill, had been late to their shift, had burned a batch of onion rings, had neglected key steps in their closing shift, had acted too passively, or aggressively….. Any complaints he had about a female coworker came under the cover-all of critiquing her very essence, with no particulars as to behavior: “She’s just a bitch.”
Kid’s attempts at titillating braggadocio didn’t impress moiself (SURPRISE !), and I limited our interactions as much as possible. Whenever possible, I ignored him. Therefore, of course (and, yay!), he had to announce to one and all that he didn’t find me appealing. But that wasn’t the end of it. It took me awhile to figure out the source of his irritation with moiself because I didn’t spend much time considering it – which was, for him, the issue. He seemed continually annoyed by my lack of interest in what he had to say, about anything.
In Kid’s eyes, I had committed the worst sin possible for a female: I’d indicated, not by saying so but by merely not engaging with him, that I had no interest in his opinion of me. I did not wear his taunts and insults as a badge of honor (as did a couple of my bad ass, feminist HBR colleagues), I simply stopped hearing them. I realized for the first time what it meant to hold someone beneath contempt. Strong emotions, including contempt, require effort and time to maintain. To moiself, Kid was just…macho flotsam.
I did not engage Kid in the repartee – playful, and with occasional double-entendre overtones – that I did with the “nice guys” and my female colleagues. We were all mostly within three years of one another, age-wise; naturally, there was workplace banter and casual flirtation and good-natured kidding bordering on insults. With regard to the latter I punched up, never down, with both male and female colleagues. The few guys who harbored a nasty streak stayed clear of me, after one of them, the Assistant Shift “Chef,” [7] tested my limits on my first week on the job. He did this with (what I later found out was) his standard routine with which he teased the new counter girls:
Assistant Shift Chef summoned me to the kitchen area, informing me that it was SOP to give counter girls a tour of the kitchen facility, even though they’d be working out front (later I was told that he always did this “tour” with others present, as having an audience was a key component of his routine.) Under the pretense of wanting my opinion about a possible flaw in Disneyland’s chef’s apron design, which seemed to have pockets and a seam or something no one could quite figure out, he reached down, fingered the outline of his crotch, and ask Newby Counter Girl ® moiself, “Do you know what this is?”
I’d been informed re the HBR hierarchy on my first day at work. Despite his title, Assistant Shift Chef had no authority over me (or any female HBR female), so I decided to go for it.
“Hmmm.” I assumed a wide stance, one hand on my hip and the other slowly stroking my chin in a gesture of solemn deliberation. “Wait; don’t tell me, this is familiar…Oh! I know! It looks like it a penis, only smaller.” [8]
Assistant Shift Chef guffawed heartily, as if he had collaborated with me on the joke. Still, I noticed (and savored) the nanosecond of terror and humiliation which flashed across his eyes, just after my line sunk in and before his crew began to whoop it up.
Once again, I digress.
The first day I returned to HBG for my second summer season (after my freshman year of college), I was delighted to see that several of my favorite seasonal employees had also returned…oh yeah, and there was also the Kid. Although, maybe he’d been there all year? I can’t remember if Kid had been a year-round employee or was another seasonal worker (all of whom were college students – the idea of Kid in any institution of higher learning never occurred to moiself).
Anyway, Kid had obviously been alerted to my return. He waited at the rear of the pack welcoming me back, and after the rest of us had exchanged greetings, he removed the mini cassette player from his pocket and pressed play. This time, I was the one with the genuine smirk on my face.
* * *
Department Of Entertaining The Donations Dude
Dateline: Monday; 1:30 pm-ish; Goodwill donations center. The guy helping me unload the donations from my car engages me in small talk about the current mugginess and upcoming weather forecast. I hand him a bag full of books; he points to a book at the top of the bag, whose title is something like, Staying Sane In An Irrational World.
“Well now, what’s that about?” he asks.
“Who knows,” moiself shrugs. “It’s a book of empty pages.”
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [9]
“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
( Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything )
* * *
May your pets somehow obtain the furniture (you think) they deserve;
May the book of your life not be filled with empty pages;
May you live long enough to find out that which makes you happy;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Ebert, who grew up Catholic, chose not to define his religious beliefs, saying he is not an atheist and not a believer. He clarified his religious views in a blog post called “How I believe in God.” He said, “I have never said, although readers have freely informed me I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist — which I am. If I were to say I don’t believe God exists, that wouldn’t mean I believe God doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean I don’t know, which implies that I could know.” (from Roger Ebert entry, ffrf.org )
[2] Perhaps there were none to share; perhaps all of my FB friends have been beloved (or at least tolerated) by even the most neanderthal of their colleagues.
[3] Thanks, RU, although I’d already considered sharing more of the details.
[4] Which, as more than one dissatisfied patron told me (as if I were responsible for the name or had any influence in *any* Disneyland policy) : “Shee-it, girl, this ain’t no restaurant, this is a burger and fries joint.” Or a glorified fast food place, with no table service…aka, in Disney-speak, a “quick service eatery.”
[5] I am happy to report that although I’ll never forget his face I cannot recall that co-worker’s name (nor would I used it in this space, even if I did remember it).
[6] At that time, D-Land’s various food attractions staff were sex-segregated with respect to responsibilities: males in the kitchen, running the fryers and grills and stocking the food wells, and females upfront – the “counter girls”, taking the guest’s orders, receiving payment, and “boxing” and giving to guests the food and drinks.
[7] I can’t believe that title (chef?) was given to the dude who was in charge of the run-the burgers-through-the-grill machine line.
[8] A thousand thanks to seventh grade PE teacher Mrs. Ewing, who suggested a version of that response to flashers and other harassers.
[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
The Classic TV Sitcom Identity I’m Not Hiding
August 25, 2023
Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), nature, Oregon, politics, Recreation, travel, TV, Wow, Yikes! aggressive dogs, batshit loony commenters, Bewitched, bogus class warfare, dogs and runners, Gladys Kravitz, hippies, illegal camping, nature loving hypocrisy, The Classic TV Sitcom Identity I'm No Longer Hiding, van life 1 Comment
Department Of, Curses – My Cover Has been Blown!
According to a rather irrelevant and batshit crazy deranged, ad hominem attack/comment someone made about moiself on a Facebook group…
Can you believe it – someone said something nasty on social media?!
…I am…(gulp)…Gladys Kravitz. [1]
(Which makes MH, Mr. Abner Kravitz. Yep, I’ve been having fun with that all week).
Left: Gladys Kravitz; Right: Samantha Stevens
For those readers younger than 50, Gladys Kravitz was the nosy neighbor of the TV series Bewitched‘s protagonist, Samantha Stevens. Gladys was convinced that there were extraordinary goings on in Stevens’ household, and was exasperated to the nth because she couldn’t prove her suspicions to her husband ( “Abbbnnneeeerrr!” ) [2]
Background to this startling revelation about my heretofore secret identity: Dateline, Tuesday morning, circa 7:30 am. I was at the coast, out for a morning walk…
But first, a relevant digression. A long time ago…oh, no – here it comes again…
From my late high school years until my late twenties, I ran [3] between two to five miles, every day. As recreational runners know, unleashed dogs and runners are not a good combination. [4] Every runner I’ve met has stories of being confronted, harassed and/or attacked by an unleashed/unaccompanied-by-its-human, aggressive dog. The stories, and the avoiding-being-a-dog-bite-victim advice runners receive and pass on to other runners, are mostly similar, but sometimes divergent.
A person running triggers the prey instinct in many dogs; thus, the common wisdom shared amongst runners: when approached by a dog whose posture and behavior…
* stiffening or freezing of the body;
* forward-leaning, hunched down, hunting/stalking posture;
* “whale eyes” (wide, with a lot of white showing);
* teeth baring; tense mouth/curled lips; wrinkled nose;
* ears laid flat against the skull or stiffly held straight up (not relaxed);
* barking, growling; “air-snapping”….
…indicates aggression, and there is no dog owner in sight, you should:
* stop running
* stay as calm as you can
* avoid eye contact (which can be seen as aggressive);
* speak to the dog in a calm, firm, but non-threatening voice; [5]
* remain upright;
* don’t scream (or flail your limbs or panic or jump up and down);
* back into a corner or against a wall so the dog can’t get behind you;
* look for a tree or car to climb [6] and hope to f***’s sake the owner appears…
I faced the aggressive dog situation many times when I was running for exercise. Those strategies worked for me, as they did for other runners…except when they didn’t. I heard too many stories of someone who did everything right and got bitten anyway.
Fellow runners also shared the WTF?!?!? confusion of hearing sure-fire advice from so-called experts which contradicted advice shared by other experts. As in: ignore the dog; *don’t * stop running. Continue what you’re doing, because some dogs will pay you no mind when you walk or run past them but if you stop, they “think” (okay, no human really knows what a dog thinks, we are trying to guess/interpret) you are a threat to them.
In other words, encountering an aggressive dog is situational and dog-specific: sorry, but there is no sure-fire, works-every-time, strategy. But, human nature being what it is, there is this sure-fire reality: there will always be some person who will tell you that, whatever you did, you should have done something else.
Back to the future background to the Mrs. Kravitz revelation: Dateline: the Oregon coast (Manzanita); Tuesday morning, circa 7:30 am; out for my morning constitutional. On that day I decided to walk north along the imaginatively named Ocean Road, which parallels the beach, then splits into two roads, one of which (Beulah Reed Road) continues along the coast and up into the streets winding around the base of Mt. Neahkahnie.
I walked along the road, noting the increasing number of vans and other vehicles I’d been seeing in my early morning walks – vans and campers parked alongside Ocean Road which look as if they’ve been there all night (as opposed to the vehicles whose drivers pull over, watch the waves and savor their morning coffee [7] before driving on to their jobs, or what/where ever). Those been-there-overnight vehicles are situated in such a way to indicate that the occupants are camping there, despite the fact that it is illegal to do so, and despite the “No Parking between 11pm – 5am” signs posted along the road.
As I turned up Beulah Reed Road I saw two more looks-like-illegal-camping vehicles parked on the west side of the road. Safety-conscious pedestrian that I am, when I am walking along a sidewalk-less road, I always walk facing traffic; thus, I passed close by both of the vans, whose occupants were presumably still inside/asleep (the vehicle’s windows had shades and other objects blocking the windows and windshields). One of the vans stood out due to its color and décor: a green van festooned with white and yellow flowers, sporting a Nebraska license plate and a message – “love mother nature and she will love you back” – painted on the van’s rear window.
The Green Van was in the same spot on the west side of Beulah Reed Road where, in the past few months, I’d walked past other camping vehicles one of which provided moiself with a memorable visual a couple months ago. The naked man who’d emerged from that vehicle and began urinating by the side of the road just as I was passing by was an unpleasant sight, but a minor startle compared to what happened Tuesday am.
I continued walking up Beulah Reed Road for a few more minutes, then headed back to Ocean Road. As I neared the Green Van (this time, walking on the far side of the road) I saw a husky/malemute dog lying in the sand by the right rear of the GV. The dog had not been there five minutes ago, when I’d first walked past the GV, and there was no sign of any humans (other than moiself ) about. When I was about thirty feet away from the GV the dog’s eyes fixed on me; it got up and slowly began to cross the road toward me.
Oh, shit. It takes minutes to type what flashed through my mind in nanoseconds Some of the nicest dogs I’ve met, and some of the meanest, have been husky/malemutes – and those two breeds consistently rank high on the Biting Dogs lists…. [8]
The dog was obviously not going to be one of the nice ones. It slunk toward me, in a crouched position (the classic hunting posture – have you ever seen footage of wolves or other carnivores stalking their prey?). Its approach was menacing, but silent…which I found more disturbing than barking. [9] If it had been barking, that would have (hopefully) alerted its owner.
“How’d ya like to see these teeth up close?”
I stop walking and spoke softly but firmly, remembering not to make eye contact. I did all the “right things,” which had no effect on the dog’s aggressive body language and approach, so I slowly began to continue my walk. The dog circled in front of me, blocking my path. It growled, bared its teeth and walked stiff-legged toward me, then began to snarl and bark. I put my walking poles between me and the dog and called out loudly: WHOSE DOG IS THIS – COME GET YOUR DOG. I did this several times; finally, a woman appeared from the west-facing side of the van. She had long, reddish hair and looked to be in her late 20s – early 30s. She made no apologies for her menacing dog, but unenthusiastically attempted to
(1) assure me that her dog was not aggressive (“He just has a lot to say” she said,
as her dog began barking even louder, flattened his ears, and raised his hackles)
(2) get her dog under voice control.
She failed at both (1) and (2).
She held no leash (and with the dog’s thick fur I couldn’t tell if it even had a collar to which a leash could be attached). She kept calling to the dog, which would turn to look at her, take two steps toward the GV, then turn around and bark and take three steps toward moiself. As the dog continued to ignore the anemic “suggestions” of his owner to return to her, I swung one of my walking sticks at him, which temporarily stopped his advance (at that point he was less than two feet from me).
Oh, for some pepper spray, I thought – not for the dog, but to use on that pathetic excuse for a human being. GV lady may make van-decoration-declarations on loving Mother Nature but she obviously doesn’t give an oyster’s ass about walking responsibly through Mother Nature’s land while respecting and protecting *all* of Ma Nature’s creatures, including bipedal ones.
This brand only works on German-speaking dogs.
I made firm, aggressive eye contact with the woman when she repeated her, “He’s not mean/he has a lot to say” bullshit excuse. I replied, “Yeah, he’s saying a lot and none of it is nice – I’ve been bitten by a dog; I know when I’m being threatened. You need to get your dog under control, RIGHT NOW.” The insolent look on her face reminded me of a pouty adolescent whose parents had threatened to ground her until she cleared the dinner table. “I am going this way,” I pointed toward Ocean Road, “and your dog needs to go that way.“ I pointed toward her van.
Which eventually happened. After the woman and her dog disappeared behind the other side of the van, I took a picture of the back of the GV.
I was seething when I got home (and really hungry). I posted the GV picture on my FB page, along with a very brief description of the incident. As I was doing so I remembered that on my way back I’d passed an elderly couple walking on Ocean Road, headed in the direction I’d come from. Damn, I chastised moiself – should I have warned them about staying away from that van? With that thought in mind I posted the same photo and incident description, with an “FYI” warning/introduction, on a FB page where locals post pictures and info about items of North Oregon coast interest.
I knew I should report what had happened to “the authorities.” As I fixed my breakfast and mulled over whom to call (The town? The county? ) I was contacted by my Friend and Neighbor ®. F&N had seen my post, and urged me to report the incident. I called the police non-emergency number; the dispatcher who finally answered said that Beulah Road was under Tillamook County jurisdiction, and that she’d have a TC deputy contact me.
The TC deputy took down the details of my report, and then…oh my my (“Officer Chatty Cathy,” my mind soon nicknamed him). He had a lot to say about what had happened to me, and about related incidents he had been/was currently dealing with. I was apparently a sympathetic ear into which he unloaded his and his law enforcement colleagues’ frustrations with similar incidents and with “what’s going on in the county,” including:
* increased illegal camping
* increased reports of aggression between illegal campers and county residents
* illegal campers’ aggressive/unleashed dogs (who go after both people and other dogs)
* the overload of reports the county has to investigate without the staff to do so….
He said that TC had a backlog of *hundreds* of calls about illegal camping and other violations, but that because what happened to me involved menacing, he could prioritize my report, and would head for Beulah Road. I thanked him, and noted that the van had probably moved on. Actually…probably not, he said. And, in his experience, if it did move it would likely move to somewhere nearby, and a green van with Nebraska plates would be easy to spot. Should he find the van, he said he’d have an in-depth conversation with the van/dog owner. How he handles these cases, he explained, is based on the dogs’ and or vehicles’ owners’ demeanor and response. If they listen respectfully and are forthright and apologetic, he tries to educate them and lets them off with a warning. If they are unapologetic and insolent, and even (as some people have done) go so far as to assert that they have no intention of abiding by the _____ (leash, parking/camping/trash disposal, etc.) laws, he’ll give them “as many citations as possible.”
He asked me to spread the word: please tell people to report these encounters, even as he acknowledged the perception that “They (law enforcement) will do nothing,” and so most incidents go unreported. It’s true, we (local police/sheriff departments) are understaffed, he said, but people need to know that the reports, even if they cannot be immediately investigated, help them gather statistics in general, and make records in particular for individual menacing dogs and their owners, so that if (or as he put it, “unfortunately, when“) the dog harasses/attacks another person or pet, the dog owner can’t get away with, “Oh, he’s harmless/he’s never done that before….”
At one point in our conversation, I told him how I’d began my walk thinking about the increase in illegal parking/camping, and asked if he knew if that is indeed the case, or just my anecdotal impression? And is this uptick (in illegal beach camping) related to homelessness? He told me the increase in numbers wasn’t my imagination, but that my assumption about the cause was incorrect. He then asked me something which led to an “aha” turn to the conversation: “Have you heard of the website, ‘vanlife’?”
“You’ve seen the hype around #vanlife. You’ve seen the stunning photos on social media. Now you want to throw everything to the wind, quit your job, build out a camper van, and live a carefree life of adventure….
This page is designed as a jumping-off point for your personal vanlife journey. We go over the pros and cons of this lifestyle, the reasons why full time van life is awesome… We answer the most frequently asked questions about living in a van – everything from bathrooms and showering…to finding sweet camping spots.”
(excerpts from the intro to Van Life How To: Complete Guide to Living in a Van Full Time,
my emphases )
“After we’ve posted this cool picture of ourselves can we go back to our penthouse and order takeout sushi?”
I said I knew of the site, but had never visited it. I thought it was similar to other sites I’d heard about, where people share information about RVing and/or traveling and living in trailers and vans. It is that, Officer CC said, but has become so much more: it has become a source of the increased “incident” calls faced by local law enforcement. He proceeded to express his frustration re the influence of the van-lifestyle sites, where people post info for others who’ve chosen to live in vans, sharing tips about where to travel and camp “for free” (but not necessarily legally).
More and more, Officer CC said, the people he speaks to and then warns and/or cites for illegal camping are mentioning (in some cases, boasting) that they were “referred” to the Oregon coast by vanlife and similar websites and online bulletin boards. And, he stressed, these people are *not* homeless– they seem well-funded (trust fund babies?) and/or are working remotely. For whatever reasons, they have romanticized the idea of public urination and defecation [10] life on the road. They…
* find it glamorous to be house-less by choice;
* take pride in ridding themselves of the bourgeois trappings of consumerism:
* receive positive feedback from like-minded folk when they post
cool pictures on Instagram of their adventures in livin’ on the road;
* believe that dogs also “need freedom” and so they ignore local leash laws;
* tell him that they love livin’ “for free”…
which – surprise! – turns out to be anything but free for the people in the communities who pay the taxes that fund the services to clean up after those freedom lovin’ van lifers, who leave their trash and toxic waste behind as they move on – and the damage these love-nature-and-she’ll-love-you hypocrites do to natural habitat areas frustrates him to no end…
As he described his dealings with these voluntary nomads, more than once he referred to van-life enthusiasts as, “hippies.” I could tell from Officer CC’s voice that he was much younger than moiself; it took all of my maturity (ahem) to refrain from correcting him:
“Actually, they aren’t hippies – that was an older generation. Any surviving hippies are at home rubbing patchouli and/or CBD oil on their aching joints…I think y’all need to come up with a more contemporary epithet for the younguns whose lives and values you find disrespectful, or just fruity.”
I’m not criticizing or mocking the deputy. He was amiable, empathetic, and eager to articulate the frustrations of law enforcement officers who cannot adequately fulfill their oath to serve and protect when they are overwhelmed by calls they cannot address.
Our talk turned to what people can do to protect themselves against aggressive dogs (Officer CC said his wife is a runner, and that she and her running buddies frequently deal with unleashed and aggressive dogs). I said that, due to my afore-mentioned, bitten-by-a-dog incident, I’d done my research, and ordered a cannister of citronella spray [11] and an air horn, for self-defense. Before I could tell him I’d ruled out bear sprays/pepper sprays, he strongly advised that I tell my friends *not* to carry pepper sprays, because
* Unless you’re an expert who practices with pepper spray on a regular basis you can end up inadvertently spraying yourself, particularly when you’re under duress;
* At the beach, where gusts of wind can arise seemingly out of nowhere, pepper spray can backfire, as in, get blown back on *you.*
He said that while he hated having to recommend it (“Nobody wants to hurt an animal,”) carrying a club might be called for (I said thanks/no thanks, and mentioned my walking poles). He expressed admiration for the air horn strategy: “What a great idea!” he enthused, noting that the loud noise would both startle the dog and alert nearby humans.
Yeah; okay, are we ever gonna get to the Gladys Kravitz connection?
After my conversation with the deputy I drove to Hillsboro, where I had business to attend to. While driving I received a voice mail from my Friend & Neighbor, and pulled over to return her call. F&N said that my local/beach group FB posting had spawned a comment firestorm: most were from people relating their own/similar incidents, and/or expressing sadness re what happened to me in particular and what they saw happening to their community. Other posters engaged in unfounded and unsolicited second-guessing, reframing the incident, and even claiming to know the dog’s intentions, despite having not been there. [12] Several of those I-wasn’t-there-but-I-know-what-really-happened posters also opined on what I *should* have done to avoid being menaced by the dog.
( Ladies, does this sound familiar?
“If you’d only done this/said that/worn that/walked this way,
you wouldn’t have been assaulted.” )
I’d read a few of the early comments, including two which asserted that “people should mind their own business” and “stop caring about who parks where or does what.” [13] The MYOB theme was picked up by a few other unbalanced strident posters. How that became a thing, considering the context, was a mystery to moiself. Translation: I found it bewilderingly irrational. The afore-mentioned Gladys Kravitz remark came from one such poster, who addressed her remarks to moiself and fumed about why I was being Gladys Kravitz, and that I should have minded my own business….
Say what? Minding my own business – exactly what I was doing. I did not approach the dog and try to determine whether he was neutered. My business, which I was minding, thanks for your concern, was walking. I was out for a walk on a public road, enjoying the scent of the briny coastal air and minding my own beeswax, when an aggressive, unleashed canine decided to make his threats my business.
F&N and I had a giggle about how comments on my post had spiraled into many tangents. I said that, after violating the never-feed-the-trolls rule (I corrected one unhinged commenter, who seemed to be reading comprehension-challenged and tried to rewrite my story to fit her outrage at…whatever), I’m not going to read any more comments on that group. F&N said she’d keep me apprised of the more entertaining (read: whackadoodle) posts…although, I told her, the Gladys Kravitz epithet would be hard to top.
The next morning my phone rang: it was F&N’s update call. Apparently, by the end of the previous day, “things got nasty,” as she put it. She’d checked the FB local/beach site before bedtime: there were “248 or 258” comments, including a thread where people posted pictures of when they’d been bitten by an unleashed dog, and others posted either support or criticism for the bite victim. Then a man mentioned that he might carry a gun when he goes to the beach, and lawdy mama, it took off from there, with about 40 more posts related to carring concealed weapons on the beach. In the morning when F&N rechecked the site, about 40 of those packing-heat-on-the-beach posts had disappeared, taken down by the group moderator (or perhaps, I posited, by the posters who’d developed cooler heads overnight?). F&N said the nastiness also included some posts which made blatant or tacit references to class warfare, claiming that heartless “rich people” at the beach hate “the rest of us” and harass people who have no choice but to live in their cars…in sharp contrast with the deputy’s testimony that the majority of the people he and his fellow deputies encounter and warn about/cite for illegal camping are neither destitute nor homeless, but self-obsessed, “van life” adventure seekers, whose idea of freedom is mooching off of public services they can well afford to pay for….
And moiself? Oy vey. I’d not even considered filing a report about illegal camping.
I just want to go for a walk, anywhere it’s safe and legal to do so, and not get bitten.
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [14]
* * *
May you enjoy any/all outdoor activities free from dog (or human) harassment;
May you delight in observing online trolls but not in feeding them;
May you enrich the public discourse by coining a better word than “hippies”
to describe Gen Z…hippies;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Or at least, channeling her spirit.
[2] And of course, Gladys Kravitz turned out to be spot on: Samantha Stevens *was* a witch. Despite promising her mortal husband Darrin that she would *not* use her powers, just about every episode of Bewitched involved Samantha using witchcraft to create unusual happenings, or to try to undo the wacky situations created by her witch and warlock relatives, who would make mysterious arrivals and departures and mess with the mortals. Mrs. Kravitz witnessed just enough to have her suspicions, which would always be explained away by Samantha or others. Yep, Mrs. Kravitz was a nosy neighbor, but her suspicious were correct, and she was gaslighted.
[3] Or I could say, “I was a runner,” but I never took my identity from that; I ran for enjoyment and exercise, as opposed to training for the Olympics or whatever.
[4] Unless the dog belongs to the runner and is also running because…well, it usually isn’t the dog’s idea.
[5] This is not to make yourself the alpha or assert dominance, but to get as much control of yourself and the situation as possible, and to make any cues you give the dog – “sit; down; stay; go home” as understandable as possible.
[6] The strategy used by one elderly gentleman, in a neighborhood I used to live in, when he was attacked by two free-roaming dogs when he was doing his early morning neighborhood rounds, delivering advertising flyers. The man and I had greeted each other when I went out for my morning run, and I was able to rescue him when I returned and saw that the dogs had treed – carred? – him.
[7] Or sometimes, doobies…as I notice when I pass the vehicles and they have the windows down.
[8] Which I learned in my training for the animal rescue organizations for which I volunteered, and I confirmed this when I returned home, by searching for dog bite statistics.
[9] Many a person who has survived a dog attack says that the silent ones, who approach you steadily, are more dangerous than the barkers.
[10] That was my snarky thought, not his.
[11] The smell of citronella is irritating/offensive to dogs, but not harmful.
[12] Perhaps there is a Canine Psychic Intentions website I am unaware of.
[13] Those comments seemed to be related to other posters who focused on the illegal parking and camping situation, not the aggressive dog.
[14] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org