A sample of some of the mail I get about this site:

My name is k**** b****** of Fresno. And I was wondering why the save mart store on fruit ave is so run down. Is it because a poorer group of people shop there? and you don’t care its just a buck to you. Because I have been in the other stores and it seems Like there pretty nice,not like the one one fruit. I no what it is,you spent to much money on the save mart center and your over your head to really care about whats important. If you can’t take good care of all the stores just the same you should get out of Fresno period. Fresno Is getting run down and big corp like yourself should help because Fresno needs that kind of help. Thank you very K**** B*******

I get an average of one or two messages a month from people complaining about the service at Save-Mart, or asking me for a job at Save-Mart, or asking me where the closest Save-Mart is located. And, to a one, they’re all from people who seem as incapable as this one of (a) composing a sentence, (b) of spelling words like “you’re” or “they’re” or “know”, or (c) of using punctuation…

I’m not sure what it is about Save-Mart. The biggest problem, I think, is that the chain doesn’t have its own website and that my page on its history and architecture is one of the first to come up on most search engines. After clicking, the visitors with IQs above 60 (the ones who can actually compose a coherent English sentence) quickly realize that my site is not Save-Mart’s site and move on. The rest send me email…

I know it has nothing to do with the Central Valley in general, because some of the most intelligent life on the planet comes from there. And, as this recent quote from a Chronicle article on the RIAA suggests, Bay Area residents aren’t always the brightest bulbs in the chandelier either:

I thought, if it’s on the Internet, it must be OK… I thought it was becoming legal.

If it’s on the Internet, it’s OK. Classic. That would explain the spam, the child pornography, and all the assorted penis-enlarging schemes, not to mention the occasional virus or worm. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, there is indeed no underestimating the intelligence of the American public…

So today’s was definitely my creepiest bus trip home in quite a while. Sometimes I get on the bus and know instantly that the driver is going to be, ummm, a handful. Today was one of those days. And I was right…

Through the whole lurching trip, she was having really loud conversations. With someone. Someone who either wasn’t there or had mastered invisibility. I didn’t see any evidence of a cell phone either, not that I would have felt much better about the state of affairs if there had been one…

About every third stop, she would yell “Who rang the bell? Where’s the stop?”. I can understand this, sort of. Maybe she wasn’t familiar with the route. This wasn’t really a stretch considering she also didn’t seem very familiar with how to drive a bus to begin with…

By the time we hit First and Harrison, she was engaged in a shouting match with another motorist. It went on and on. I thought she was going to ram the bus into his car, but she settled for the last word, calling him a “dummy” and adding “yeah, you know you are”…

She had trouble finding a couple more stops before getting to mine which, of course, she also bypassed. After the four of us who’d mistakenly assumed we’d be getting off the bus yelled “stop”, she told us to “please let me drive the bus” and informed us that there was another bus behind her, so she couldn’t stop in the designated zone. Funny, that hadn’t stopped any other bus I’d ever been on (nor had it stopped her at the preceding stop; she’d just come to grinding halt in the middle of the street)…

Anyway, we finally all exited the bus from hell. I stifled the urge to respond that I’d have been more than happy to “let her drive the bus” if she’d shown any particular skill at it. I just wrote down her bus number and dialed up the complaint line when I got home…

Knowing how Muni works, she’ll probably get a commendation rather than a mandatory crack test, but I did my part…

An antidote to yesterday: today we’ll be featuring one of the funniest things I’ve read in weeks (and how surprised am I that it was in the Guardian, which tends to get a little more humor-free with each issue):

Why is it that any mention of S-M nets more picky, niggling “corrections” than any other topic? … It’s the nature of the S-M community, which tends, as a group, to think too much and talk too much and write self-important e-mails when it could be playing. This could have something to do with it being full of the sort of people drawn to activities that, while they appear edgy and daring, are in fact safer than golf, which at least carries a risk of being struck by lightning. S-M lends itself to overplanning, overequipping, and an obsession with detail. In other words, it’s for nerds. I say this with all due respect and (as a risk-averse, nerdish person) self-recognition, but I say it anyway: S-M isn’t exactly running the bulls at Pamplona; S-M is a petting zoo. Get over your bad selves.

None of this explains why it’s always the scenesters insisting that any passing mention of perviness must include their own personal perversion. If I write about bondage, say, I’ll get “Of course, it’s originally an Apache initiation ritual, but you should never hang someone from their eyeballs without gloves. Also, I think you were remiss in failing to mention cortical saline inflation …” Sigh. I didn’t mention Apache cortical-inflation eyeball hanging because I was trying to make sure everybody understands what I mean by “top” and “bottom” first, and I only have this one little column to do it in, you self-inflated sixth-grade suck-up. Sit down. And don’t write me letters.

 

If I were going to have an affair with a woman, I think she’d be the one. Especially if she’d just keep saying this over and over again:

I’m just not convinced that sharing a taste for certain sensations qualifies a bunch of folks as a “people.”

Or maybe a community?