March 02, 2003

The Bottom Rung

I went to do laundry today, which is always a huge production, considering I have no on-site laundry. It's the biggest pain in the ass ever. But in any case, I had headed to the normal laundromat I have been frequenting this entire semester, and started up the laundry, when two of the most obnoxious idiots came into the store. It was a man and a woman, closer to thirty than twenty, dressed like junior high school kids having a severe identity crisis. The guy was wearing torn shorts, had a green mohawk, chain wallet, too many piercings, and large chains around his neck, that probably made it hard for him to walk. The woman looked pregnant, but wasn't, had enough makeup on so you couldn't see her face or recognize any features, and had dark purple hair.

After being loud and obnoxious, publicly fighting over some stupid laundry triviality, and using vulgarities in front of small children, they went outside to wait, sitting on the steps that lead to the store. They then proceeded to bust out two six-packs of beer and two joints, and started drinking and smoking out in the open. Soon the whole laundromat smelled like weed and alcohol. And now here's the best part, it was 12:30 pm. Yeah, that's right—a Sunday afternoon and these ass clowns are getting drunk and high. After finishing both six-packs amongst them, and God only knows what else, they stumble into the laundromat, drunk beyond any semblance of control, and start picking fights with random customers and using racial slurs, before growing bored and stumbling out onto University Avenue to harass pedestrians.

I was shocked beyond belief at first, despite the two years I had spent at Berkeley, even having visions of police using nightsticks to beat the shit out of this epitome of trash. But then I stopped and thought for a moment. These kinds of people, people who act like pre-adolescents with emotional problems likely to shoot up their high school, are an important part of our society. They represent the bottom of the barrel—the worst society has to offer; the people who will go no where, ever. These are the people who will be a burden on everyone else around them for the rest of their lives. But without them, everyone on the social ladder would be one relative rung lower. Thus, while people like this may waste my tax money, and that of my parents, and that of my friends, and are in general an obnoxious part of our urban environment, their very existence elevates me one rung on the social ladder. So when people say that these sorts of people are a burden on our economy and society and culture, I must disagree: they indeed serve a very useful purpose—they make everyone else not so deplorable happier about their status in life. I suppose not all is bad about them. Then again, I wonder how much of my tax money they really waste—and the vision of the nightsticks returns.