House of Eratosthenes

The woman and I drove up to the boy’s mom’s place, and dropped off the boy. Then we went on a shopping excursion which would be concluded in the evening at Wal Mart. In Folsom. On a weekend. And while I’m wondering, how is it I continue to be talked into this, I’m seeing WAGTOCPAN everywhere. There’s more of it than there was a week ago, more of it last week than there was a year ago. It’s got a chokehold on us, WAGTOCPAN does, and it’s going to eventually destroy us all.

I’m talking about Women And Girls Talking On Cell Phones About Nothing.

How is it any skin off my nose? Because WAGTOCPAN is freakin’ everywhere. The whole does more damage than the sum of it’s parts. It’s a form of pollution. There’s a kind of exponential or second-degree curvature to the damage they do; put more simply, it seems to take four times as long to cut through a crowd with twenty WAGTOCPAN, as it is to transcend a crowd with only ten WAGTOCPAN. Rudeness decides the Darwinism; the right-of-way goes to whoever seizes it, and the tendency is for the seizure to be done by whoever is female, and engaged in an electronic conversation elsewhere.

How do I know they’re talking About Nothing? I can see it in their eyes. People have a certain look on the face when they are saying, or listening to, important things. These girls aren’t showing it. They just aren’t. And then there’s the quantity. Quantity, you know, eventually defeats quality. It has to. I see five randomly-selected women in Wal-Mart, three of them are going to be gabbing away on a cell phone. With that glassy “not very important” look in their eyes. Five years ago, it would have been one outta five. Ten years ago, it would have been one outta twenty. Now…it’s a majority. And of course, if we had been shopping on Saturday, about ten to noon or thereabouts, it would have been more than that.

What the hell are all these women talking about? Are they a bunch of Jack Bauers, each one of them helping to interrogate a terrorist or defuse a bomb?

I’m just not buying it. They’re talking about crap. And you know, that’s just fine with me. To each their own, libertarian leanings and all. Except, there is that pollution factor. Walking through Folsom, or driving through Folsom, or doing-whatever through Folsom…lately, on a weekend, it’s like swimming through a hive of angry bees. Everywhere you look, WAGTOCPAN — blah, blah blah. In enormous gleaming metal vehicles. Looking where they’re going? Really?

They don’t appear to be. And they’re in command of awesomely heavy and hard objects on wheels.

And here’s something else to think about, something that leads me to believe it’s all about nothing. We’re in Folsom…land of gadgets. People just love to buy gadgets here, from the latest Lexus to the latest iPod accessory to the latest — you name it. Everyone wants to prove they have arrived. Folsom, where the price of your iced-coffee drink is drawn in large neat numbers on the dome of your plastic cup, so everyone can admire that you paid $4.75 for it. Folsom, the valley of “I’m Not Spoiled, Just Loved” bumper stickers.

A hands-free device costs between ten and fifteen clams. Mine was fifty, because it’s a bluetooth model; you can get it now, for half that much. But you don’t need bluetooth.

How come Folsom, land of the six-bedroom houses and jewel-encrusted cell phones, is flooded with so many women holding the appliances up to their ears? If it’s a serious conversation and they have to have it all the time, wouldn’t they eventually adapt to having it?

You know how scary it is to pass a woman in a big truck, on the left, when she’s holding a cell phone up to her left ear? And supposed to be paying attention to what’s going on?

Al Gore wants us to measure our “carbon footprints” and based on the size of same, feel guilty. Or buy something. Or both. (I think mine was 6.75 or thereabouts.) Seems to me it’s an idea right for other walks of life…like WAGTOCPAN. Oh, how I’d love to see an article appearing in a glossy magazine somewhere containing the words “According to experts, there are several things the average person can do to bring her WAGTOCPAN under control…”

I should hasten to add something. In all my years on the planet, I’ve seldom seen women-and-girls pick up a bad habit that wasn’t started by the guys first, and I doubt this is any exception. And I happen to know MABTOCPAN is indeed a problem. I’ve seen it happen. Furthermore…guys, it seems, are on balance far less decisive about what speed they want to drive, when they chatter on their cell phones. They chew someone out, they go faster, someone else chews them out, they want to slow down. But if I were to do a count of how many people are chattering away on their cell phones when they should be watching where they’re going — this is a female thing. I know the men are equally guilty, it’s just harder to catch them in the act because their conversations are shorter.

This is another reason I know the conversations are meaningless. Men and women have different habits with their social customs, but not with how they send and receive important messages. This has little to do with important messages; it’s a social custom. I’m serial. Super-duper-serial.

I just wish people, regardless of whether they wear skirts or trousers, would watch where they’re going when they engage in it. Now excuse me, I have to take this…

Update: As far as MABTOCPAN goes, here’s an example that borders on the surreal…

Timothy Michael Seibert was in the midst of raping a 49-year-old woman, according to police, when he answered a cell phone call from his wife.

The woman was so close to the phone she could hear Seibert’s wife yelling at him, asking him where he was and what he was doing, according to arrest documents filed by Silver Spring Twp. police.

See, gender doesn’t have a whole lot to do with it. The cell phone thing, in general…it’s just gotten way, way outta hand. “Hey, whaddya doin’?” “I’m watching a movie, this dude sitting next to me is getting really pissed about my cell phone.” “Yeah? Cool.” “What are YOU doing?” “I’m mugging some guy, getting ready to steal his car.” “Hey, cool.”

Cell phone calls of the “What Are You Doing” variety, have got to be the plague of our times. People who take such calls, have got to be on the most shallow end of the gene pool. Raping women is worse, of course. But taking a cell phone call about what you’re doing, and making a conversation out of it, is a crime in itself.

[…] Everybody Hates Bluetooth Remake of 1984 Let Rosie Talk Exclusive Club What Hillary Left Out Don’t Hire Bloggers? ToxicWives Mad As Hell Steyn Nails the Libby Trial Memo For File XL Bare Minimum WAGTOCPAN Will Destroy Us I’m a Slithering Reptile […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 03/19/2007 @ 09:48
[…] I don’t want to be too hard on the SNULs, because I have some very good blogger friends who’ve been known to SNUL from time to time and some of them do it in a way that it can be entertaining. I hope none of them come by, see this, and get their knickers in a twist about it…I don’t mean any offense to the individuals. But overall, I see this as a form of pollution. It’s like having a dog in a super-dense suburban neighborhood (more on this below). Or fisking, or phlacing, or WAGTOCPAN, or letting your child push around a shopper-in-training grocery cart at the store. These things all have it in common that they involve a magnitude of environmental damage on a curvilinear relationship with how many people are doing it. Two adorable moppets in a trendy upscale grocery store pushing “shopper in training” carts, cause four times as much destruction to an “environment” of sorts, as just one them would. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/13/2007 @ 06:37
[…] 14. WAGTOCPAN. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/06/2007 @ 01:50
[…] to you, but you can’t be bothered to reciprocate. Really a way-off-into-the-deep-end WAGTOCPAN […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 02/24/2010 @ 20:39
[…] all-out assault against the WAGTOCPAN. Go get ‘em! Folsom has it worse than most places. Everybody looks like they’re […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/21/2013 @ 09:33

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

WAGTOCPAN Will Destroy UsMonday, March 12th, 2007

WAGTOCPAN Will Destroy Us
Monday, March 12th, 2007