Maybe I read too much Kafka growing up. Whatever – I hate and fear bureaucracy; I always assume having anything to do with it will be hell. So I ignore and neglect it as much as humanly possible.

Naturally therefore I filled out my retirement benefits application wrong – and wrong in a very — I hate this word — impactful way. I paid reasonable attention to what I was doing when I filled it out, but that wasn’t enough, and I made one significant mistake.

I ignored the first few letters from SSA alerting me to the rather expensive implications of my fuckupery; when I finally held my nose and began reading further letters, I realized I had to try to fix what I’d done. But how? Would the SSA even allow me to change the form?

***************

So … the rest of this narrative is going to be as UDesque as what I’ve already written. What you are about to read is in fact echt–UD.

I decided my best bet lay in action directe. Forget phones and internet: This would have to be face to face in a local SSA office. No doubt the office itself would be appalling and the wait (in order to be told to fuck myself) would be all day. Fine. I deserved the punishment.

Washington Avenue, Rockville, was all I had by way of location, but I figured I’d get to the vicinity and check my phone for the exact address. Except that my phone for some reason wasn’t connecting, so I had to keep walking and reading the fronts of office buildings… And there it was.

I entered exactly the crammed immiseration chamber I anticipated – six packed rows of seating from which you stared at numbered windows and a computer screen above them which told you what waiting list digits had just been called. I drew a deep sad breath, took my number (C395), and sat down with an article about the war in Yemen.

To my left, in a little alcove, hovered two genial but hawkish policemen: If your cell phone rang, they rushed over and told you to put it away or leave the room. When a large Chinese family loitered for a bit at the exit, they hurried them out. These two kept the room quiet and orderly.

I also noticed that the SSA clerks dealt calmly and efficiently with people — even disheveled, confused people.

**************

My number was called way, way before I figured it would be. I gathered my pathetic paperwork, mentally rehearsed the terse sob story I’d prepared, and drove forward to window 3. I expected one of the following outcomes.

1. You’re in the wrong office. You need to go to Silver Spring, Baltimore, New York…
2. What? I don’t understand.
3. Once you do what you did on the form, there’s no going back.
4. You have to file an appeal. Here’s a list of fees, forms, and attorneys…
5. Come back tomorrow with more documentation.

I had just watched the woman who asked my name and age handle a befuddled shuffling young man who said to her by way of introduction I’m very sensitive…

Rather broke my heart, if you really want to know, but she was kind and patient and solved his problem. Maybe she could even make some sense of ol’ UD.

**************

“No problem.”

Did I just hear that? Did she just say in answer to my convoluted hopeless entrapment in the deathcogs of the machine that she was about to reattach my positive negalator to my negative posilator licketysplit and all was well?

Yes.

“But tell me,” she said, trying to smooth out the incredibly creased pages of my passport so she could read them for i.d., “why did you make that mistake?”

“Because I’m dumb,” I grinned.

She didn’t grin.

“You know,” she said, “I have a bit of an issue with uninformed clients.”

What followed, as the immiserated masses waited their turns behind me, was the talking-to I mentioned in this post’s title. This was the sort of thing I was expected to know; it’s not all that difficult to understand what to do. One shouldn’t be afraid of bureaucracies. One has to deal with them sometimes. Etc. Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

I didn’t begrudge her. Au contraire, I deserved it; there were actual needy people all over the room, people not floating along on high FICO scores, lots of SSA money, and several other sources of funds. Why the hell was I clogging up the works?

I mean, she didn’t say that last stuff; that’s me talking. She simply – and kindly – told me to face the music.

Which – if true – is why the principal of Damascus High School, near UD‘s house, was foolish to write in her initial public statement that the rapes were limited to the school’s junior varsity football players.

Background here. As you know if you read this blog, anal rape and high school football go together like a horse and carriage.

Taken by La Kid from
the offices of Bain & Co.

(Most of its words and phrases
are taken from this article.)

——————————–

OUMUAMUA

Lightsail of artificial origin!
Non-trivial periodicity
Of the light curve! O Oumuamua:
I am in an excited state of spin.

You are excited by external torques…
Curved sheet, hollow cone or ellipsoidal,
Part of the vast unbound population,
Are you alien, probe, mineral, Orc?

… Garrett Park Elementary School.

(UD attended several centuries ago.)

… ‘bama.

It’s okay to dislike football.

[T]hose who steer clear from football are not doing a disservice to the [University of Maryland] players; it’s a barbaric, violent sport that has a confirmed link with severe brain damage. While the university stands to benefit financially from the popularity of its football team, the players — almost all of whom will miss out on the NFL — do not.

A city overrun for years by violent primitives suddenly elects a reformist woman mayor. Her radical political platform featured making haredim educate their children; letting women walk on the street without having to find hiding places so that their vileness is kept from the view of men they might pass; and protecting women and girls from being spat on, called whores, and beaten up for draping only two rather than three black sheets over themselves.

Good luck, Mayor-Elect Bloch! Here’s hoping you have excellent personal security: These guys hate women and they’re coming after you.

A director of one of Don DeLillo’s plays describes his reaction to DeLillo’s writing. It’s my reaction too.

He interviews DeLillo:

Retirement … wouldn’t suit him the same way [it did Philip Roth]. “Everybody is different and there are always distractions. But I feel I have an idea in my mind I need to work on. And when I’m able to sit down and put my fingers on the typewriter, things are moving along pretty well. These days I’m much slower. I can’t work at the same pace. But what the hell, I’ll keep going. It’s what’s keeping me alive.”

These are the three big categories under which you will find repression of free speech on the contemporary American college campus. Let’s glance at each one:

1. Inquisition: Way-Christian schools are always alerting us that “Academic freedom is not sacrosanct. […] It too must submit to God in a Christian college,” so shut the fuck up.

2. Ineptitude: Drop-out factories like Chicago State University are the academic equivalent of North Korea because they’ve got an insane amount of corruption and fuckupery to keep quiet.

3. Ideology: One-party states like Sarah Lawrence and Reed College do not take kindly to conservative professors… or, in the case of Reed, to liberal professors.

… Muslim countries are falling all over themselves to ban exactly those garments. Algeria’s already banned them in the workplace; Egypt’s on its way to a more comprehensive ban.

What is striking … is that scholars at al-Azhar, the highest seat of Sunni authority in Egypt, back banning the niqab. While al-Azhar supports the hijab, it said the full-face veil is a step too far.

One of the most outspoken critics of the niqab is Amina Nasir, a member of parliament and a professor of philosophy at al-Azhar University. She described the full-face veil as a threat to national security.

“The full-face veils have nothing to do with the Islamic religion at all,” Nasir said. “It even contradicts some of the verses of the Holy Quran.”

UD‘s old friend Scott Wallace, in The Atlantic.

She has written about him here. And here.

Look at this picture.

Mr UD stands just behind and to the right of the RESPECT EXISTENCE sign.

UD was featured in her friend Barney Carroll’s obituary. And in her friend Wojciech Fangor’s obituary.

La Kid? She was featured, with her chorus, in a NYT image from one of Obama’s inaugural concerts. We ordered that one; it hangs in her bedroom.

… in Florida.

The 21-year-old FSU student she was with was also murdered.

Motive? Too early to say but here’s a guess: The student broke up with the killer, or wouldn’t date him …

So many murders. You’ve probably already forgotten about her colleague.

Long considered one of the best places to live in America, Damascus, Maryland – a short drive from UD‘s Garrett Park – has big houses and good schools and pretty landscaping. And (yawn) it has teenage anal rapers galore.

Yawn because do you know how many teenage anal raper stories I’ve covered on this blog? So many high school football teams in the country seem fiercely devoted to jamming broomsticks up the asses of new players as a kind of Welcome Wagon gesture… If I wanted, I could blog every week about pool cues, broomsticks, and pretty much anything else being jammed up the anal canals of newbies.

Why? Why? Why?

Oh, who gives a shit. It’s a thing, a major thing, part of the university fraternity hazing continuum, only I guess more intense because of the very small closed absolutely brutal world of the football team.

**************

TO THE DESPOILERS GO THE SPOILS!

If anally raping junior players is the key to success, why mess with a good thing?

With a victory Friday [this was the Friday just before the rapes were discovered], Damascus will pass Urbana (1998-2001) for Maryland’s longest winning streak of all time and add onto the country’s longest active winning streak.

Yes, with its patented broomstick-up-the-ass technique, Damascus has formed a truly unbeatable team bond!

Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes, however, that the experience of reading the Washington Post’s breathless pre-rape article about the school’s amazing achievement is a little different now, with the eye landing hard on certain words, the mind automatically altering certain words…

‘Over Damascus’s 50-game winning streak, Coach Eric Wallich has searched for new ways [LOL] to motivate his team.

… With a victory Friday, Damascus will pass Urbana (1998-2001) for Maryland’s longest broomstick [haha make that winning streak] of all time…

… Damascus (8-0) has become the premier team in Montgomery County this century — winning six state crowns since 2003 — by relying on a rape-heavy [ahem! run-heavy] system.

… Kids look on and dream of donning the green, gold and white jerseys, even as high school football participation has dropped nationally because of concussion and health concerns, among other reasons. [Like anal rape.]

… The Urbana teams that set the state winning-streak record also featured a savvy run game and deep-threat ability. [Turns out you can go to jail for deep-threat ability.]

… [One of the players] said Damascus players are also viewed highly at school and in the community. Handling that attention has helped them manage the spotlight in crucial games. [Managing the spotlight just got a lot more pesky.]’

***************

Hey but wait but oh oh oh says the school’s principal: It was the JUNIOR varsity team, not the big boys with the new state record!

A commenter on this article speaks for UD:

In all the media reports the emphasis from Principal Crouse about this not having anything to do with the powerhouse varsity team is a little disturbing and I question her priorities.

Correct. You might have noticed that football everywhere has a (cough) culture problem. You don’t get to break up the team when something like this happens. You don’t get to suddenly chuck all your language about how everyone’s part of the team, we’re all a unit, blah blah. You don’t get to claim in your official statement that the group rape is “unrelated to the varsity football team.” First of all, we don’t know that yet. Second, this is the varsity team in a very short time. And if you’re trying to convince us that the event was a bizarre one-time, Halloween-night grotesquerie etc. etc. good luck with that.

Another thing: UD knows of virtually no group teenage anal rape these days, football or non-football, that doesn’t include someone recording the thing, texting about the thing. If the Bixby Oklahoma case is anything to go by, parents are currently trying to buy the evidence (!) and everyone’s madly erasing tapes and texts. Damascus has a state-wide record to protect… IOW: get ready for the investigation.