It’s tempting to use garbage as a metaphor, or dump. For example, this place is a dump. But dumps can actually be useful. It took over a year to find a capacitor for the school generator when I was in the Peace Corps. The country had no zip codes, and no international businesses ship to individuals at addresses with no zip codes.
Technically, we never found the right capacitor, but we found two in the dump that matched its specs. They didn’t fit in the housing, so I hung them from the outside with shoelaces. It looked sloppy and dangerous and it was, but the town officer and I told the kids–and this is true–that if they touched the capacitors, they could kill them.
I thought back to when I was in a band in high school trying to fix amps, completely oblivious to the fact that the capacitors inside could hold a charge for six months after being unplugged that was strong enough to fry me.
Regardless, the dump can be fun. You find all sorts of strange, disturbing shit, and some of it is perfectly fine. Pieces of bicycles that can be salvaged, indestructible refrigerators from the not so distant past, and stacks of old newspapers that have been outside for decades and are still legible.
So while I’m tempted to call this platform a dump, I can’t do so in good conscience. I’ve never been to OnlyFans (I’m too cheap) or Instagram (not a child), but recently, Substack is giving me that vibe, or flooding my feed with scantily dressed tradwives and other wannabe influencers spouting religious gibberish while leading on desperate guys. I told one without malice that she’d probably do better on OnlyFans or Instagram, as I’d heard those are the places to go for what she was doing, and she got angry.
I have no problem with OnlyFans. If I was a good looking woman, I’d be on OnlyFans. Prancing around in skimpy outfits is better than working, and I’m not a prude like a lot of the people here. The younger people are typically increasingly prudish. If you’re a sexually frustrated angry young man, cutting out porn is probably not the best idea.
There’s always been a disconnect between men and women, and it seems to be getting worse. She tried the familiar tactic of poking around for insecurities. “You’re just a bitter old man who can’t satisfy a woman.” Well if I’m so old and bitter, how am I hooking up with women, and if it’s just a random woman, I’ll try to satisfy her, but if I don’t, I can live with that.
I told her she only had a few years left tops and to make them count, as women tend to age a bit earlier than men, and felt that was fair. She had addressed my age somewhat insultingly, so I tried to address hers more civilly.
Six hours later, she replied I just wanted attention and I was stupid, and maybe if I had a decent job and wasn’t broke I’d have something better to do, and she didn’t care anyway.
After six hours, she didn’t care? And I was looking for attention? This is supposedly a religious person, and she’s judging me based on assumptions about my employment and wealth? I blocked her, but still wondered why so many women do this.
I don’t have a job and don’t really need one, at least not for another 10 years, and I have a dream of going backwards. No more corporate. I want to go back to being a waiter, then working in fast food, then–against all odds–returning to the job that started it all when I was eight or nine and getting a paper route again.
As far as aging, I’m not too concerned about the outside. The half-Chinese blood has somewhat saved me from the ravages of time and substance abuse, but I had to quit drinking and it almost killed me, the booze and the quitting. I used to get into fights and had painful accidents frequently. The last time I went for a checkup, back when the price wasn’t so prohibitive I’d just rather die, the doctor said I was in good shape but had a lot of injuries, and asked if I was a boxer. I said I wasn’t, and that if I were, I was clearly in the wrong profession.
It isn’t my mortality that bothers me as much as physical pain. I am getting older, and old injuries that healed are starting to ache again, but I can’t stop exercising. It’s one of the bonuses of having an addictive personality. It knows no bounds. I can become addicted to anything, including exercising out of sheer boredom, and I fear the inevitable degradation I’ve seen happen to others earlier in life.
They get too fat to run without feeling like their knees are going to explode, so they stop running and get even fatter. This hurts their backs and they can’t exercise at all anymore, so their muscles atrophy and they get even fatter.
The best advice I got was from an older server after I told him my arms were aching. He said to exercise a little anyway and get the blood flowing to wherever it ached, and that actually helps to recover.
Still, I feel like it’s a waste of time. The last time I threw a fastball as hard as I could, it felt like my entire body was going to explode. That arm has exploded before throwing baseballs. My shoulder popped out, but the trick is to grab a fence or a doorknob and lean away from it sideways until it pops back in. When you dislocate your shoulder or your ankle, the doctor just pulls on it until it pops back into place. The tendons holding your ankle in place are heavy duty–the foot has to be pulled hard and you’re in no position to do it, so you need a doctor for that, and they get a workout.
This tradwife didn’t upset me at all. She followed Jesus’s teachings, which clearly state that the more money you make, the better you are, and again, jumped from one insecurity of hers to the next hoping one would sting me, but women like this are strange. They get offended when you just don’t care, and then begin to wonder. Maybe this idiot does have money? And who is he not to care what a pretty girl like me thinks?
When women tell me I phased out, I wonder if I might have had a stroke or just have brain damage. I’ve had enough concussions to no longer remember how many. One woman wrote that no matter how drunk you get, you remember the people you had sex with. I haven’t had sex with that many women, but every time I try to count, I get a different number, and I don’t remember some of their names, including a few I was with for months. I forget birthdays (including my own) as well, and this angers people because I remember equations, the dates of historical events I learned about decades ago, batting averages, ERAs, the listed heights and weights of MLB baseball players, and all sorts of other pointless crap. You remember Derek Jeter’s career batting average and slugging percentage, but you don’t remember our six month anniversary?
So it isn’t exactly an insult when I call this platform a dump, and there’s no way to know if people were always so stupid or the internet just exposed it, but it seems like people are dumber. You’re trying to sell your youth and attractiveness on a site that primarily consists of writers happy to make a few nickels a day? The best lesson I’ve learned from writing is the value of a nickel. I can’t bring myself to spend nearly $6.00 for a bag of Cheetos (you can buy five pounds of potatoes for less), let alone give some strange, annoying twentysomething money. Not while I can still get porn for free.
Has Substack become a more diversified digital pimp? Are people even more emotionally driven? Can fewer and fewer people hold more than one sentence in their minds at a time? And why are there so many fucking memes?
Maybe I should just make memes or write comics. I can’t draw, but not being able to do something doesn’t seem to stop anyone from trying. Perhaps I should start taking cues from these young women and try putting my best testicle forward. Per Chechov’s Gun, I can’t mention a bag of Cheetos without eventually eating them, but I’m afraid that’s going to have to wait until Christmas unless this testicle tactic works out.
One tip for the profiteers: the people with no children or significant others who have never been married and wear and repair clothes until they’re rags make up the majority of the “middle class” who aren’t broke. Going out is expensive, marriage is expensive, clothes are expensive, and children are ridiculously expensive.
So maybe lower your sights and stop wearing makeup. It’s an expensive, pointless, lie, and you look better without it.