Wednesday, August 20, 2008

All I Want To Know Is Why. That's All.

I can't get my head around it. I try and try, I honestly sit and ponder, til I'm about to make myself sick, and still I can't come up with an answer.

What, on earth, would compel a human being to spit in a public place?

Baby and I were way the hell out in the suburbs today (don't ask), and we stopped at Fair Oaks Mall to get Chick Fil A for lunch (again, don't ask). We considered eating inside, but all the fat people and children in strollers were freaking us out, so we got lunch to go. As we're walking out the door, a young guy and a girl are walking in. We're a bit ahead of them, so we actually leave first, and I make a last second move to prop the door a bit more open for them to go through. But before the guy gets to the door, he takes a step to the side and spits a giant gob of god knows what on the ground. He doesn't even break stride, and the girl doesn't bat an eye. He grabs the door, and they go inside, presumably to eat.

What.The.Fuck.

They were well-dressed. His button down shirt was tucked into his khakis. She was wearing a skirt. It looked like it could have been a lunch date, or maybe just two co-workers going out to eat. But they were definitely not urchins, at least not on the surface. I live in the city, I see homeless people do crazy ass things on a daily basis. I once saw a homeless person on M street drop his bags, pull his pants down so his crack was hanging out, and scratch his back and butt up and down on every tree on the block. Just going from tree to tree, befouling them. At five in the afternoon. And okay, that was just fucking weird. But the spitting guy wasn't crazy, he looked normal. And the woman looked like she probably wasn't retarded. Hell, they might have even gone to college, even if it was just Virginia Tech- that still counts as college.

There were other people around, as well, and no one reacted as far as I could tell. For them this was, if not socially acceptable behavior, at least not something so boorish as to warrant some kind of response. I was dumbfounded. Not that spitting in public was invented this afternoon by some fat guy in Dockers at Fair Oaks Mall, but the singular repulsiveness of the act has been stuck in my head all day. There are so many things at work. For starters, you possess a complete obliviousness to the world around you, such that you're not even aware you're doing something that makes other people want to wretch. You also believe it's perfectly okay to coat the world's sidewalks with the germs and waste and filth of your body- you're already fucking disgusting to begin with, but you feel compelled to spit out this stuff because it's too gross even for you. How gnarly is that? And what about the woman? How'd you like to be the person who FUCKS the guy who spits in front of the mall? Honestly, what on earth is wrong with people?

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