Will Suffer Degradation for Food

Seekers,

Some of you who have been around awhile, back when this blog was under the auspices of those quasi-human loafpinches at A-L (fill in the middle letter yourself; you can do it!), will remember that at about this time last year I engaged in a great tirade against that modern practitioner of usury, L-----y Tax Service.

If anyone is interested I will repost that rant, but basically the thing was that I was enraged that they paid some poor assholes to stand out in humiliating Statue of Liberty costumes (that, friends, may provide a hint to their identity, but I am not saying for sure) as a method of shilling for their ripoff tax preparation service and "rapid refunds' that of course were loans made at interest rates that would make Shylock look like a fucking piker.

The humiliating circumstance of these people, making shit money for basically turning themselves into clowns, clowns whose purpose is not to make people laugh but to suck the lifeblood from people too stupid to complete a 1040EZ form and who needed their $54 federal refund so badly that they are willing to pay 900 percent interest to get it...well, it just makes me sick.

So enough of that. I saw something almost as bad the other day. There was no usury involved, but the humiliation factor was even worse.

I was walking near an off-track betting parlor in a small city near where I live. I have written about off-track betting parlors before, and as much as I like to gamble I must say that they are pathetic places, and this particular parlor is one of the more pathetic of the pathetic lot. I was on my way to an indoor farmers market nearby; I am not trying to claim that I have never been in that godforsaken betting parlor, because that would be a lie. It is a place frequented by some of the strangest and most decrepit people I have ever seen in a semi-upright state, including one old man who walks around in a weird, staggering gait, wearing wraparound sunglasses even when the sun hasn't been seen for hours or days, who always has a large portion of toilet paper crammed up each nostril for reasons that I care not to learn about.

Enough of that. What got my attention as I walked by was a young man, a slender black fellow in his 20s, wearing a fright wig and a clown suit. He was holding a box that was supported by a leather strap around his neck, a contraption that looked like one of those boxes the cigarette "girls" had in the old movies and old commercials in which they would walk up to someone and offer then a Swisher Sweet or a Tiparillo or some fucking awful turd of a cigar in exchange for a nickel or something and then flee in hopes of not having their ass pinched.

But this poor guy. This was so much worse than the L---y Tax Service drones, whose getups are absurd and degrading but at least half a step up from wearing a goddamned clown suit. And the box had a sign on it:

MAKE $15 PER HOUR..ASK ME HOW!

My first thought was to ask him if HE was making $15 per hour for standing on a street corner looking like last week's smacked ass, but it occurred to me that I should just leave the guy alone because when you are being humiliated you don't need some asshole to come up to you and just make it worse by asking how little money you are being paid to prostitute yourself, especially when you are doing it while dressed as a fucking clown. Wearing such a getup is about as glum and naked an admission of having a failed, wasted life as there can possibly be, unless you are gainfully employed by a circus or are an independent contractor who works kids' parties or something. Dressing as a clown to promote some asshole's ripoff business is, well, basically like being a carnival geek without even getting the dubious nutrition of a raw chicken head or two a day.

Sadly, a couple of this guy's friends happened by and began to torment him by asking if that stupid-assed outfit had something to do with some kind of weird probation agreement. This was actually sort of the plot of an episode of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" show, on which after Larry got involved in some ridiculous misunderstanding he was sentenced to stand on a street corner wearing a sign that said "I STEAL FORKS FROM RESTAURANTS." So I guess perhaps the question of whether this poor guy was undergoing some kind of punishment was conceivable, at least in TV world, and today's TV sometimes is tomorrow's reality.

So I never did find out why this guy had to dress like that, or what was in the box that was supported by the strap around his neck (I am assuming it was not free cigarettes), or how much he was being paid to make a perfect asshole of himself.

I hope he was making at least $15 per hour, and if he was I hope he buys enough dynamite to blow up the fucking place that made him parade around like that. Some things are just not acceptable.