Nobody to blame but myself

Well it's the last day of Official Rant Week, and I have to say it's a real disappointment. Not a disappointment that it's over, but a disappointment in how pathetic I was. I mean, I started out OK with the drivers. Then I actually hit my stride with the pronunciation rant--it takes a truly bitter person, after all, to rip a ten-year-old for mispronouncing a six syllable word.

But the next day, when I gave Roxy Lo a B for designing a pretty bike with no useful bottle cages, that was really soft. She should have had a straight F. After all, what business does a non-cyclist have designing a bike anyway? And spending two paragraphs ripping on the French for designing a bike with no conceivable reason not to have bottle cages was downright pathetic. The French should have been ripped for two solid paragraphs just for being French, and then I should have mustered a lot more vitriol in the two paragraphs more where I did rip on their stupid bike design. Opportunity squandered.

Then there's yesterday's post about sharing trails with horses. Well yesterday's post was very nearly conciliatory. What did equestrians ever do to deserve such polite treatment? Especially from the same guy who has been known to try and spit in the open windows of their trucks as they pass him on the way up American Fork canyon. Where is the requisite hatred these unpredictable scatterers of feces deserve?

If I were to do Official Rant Week justice, I'd be taking advantage of opportunities to go off wherever they present themselves. For instance, I'd use the book I'm presently reading, The Innocent Man, a non-fiction work about men wrongfully convicted of some murders in small-town Oklahoma. The state is full of NASCAR-loving, bible-thumping hillbillies who proclaim to love Jesus and espouse his word and follow it literally. Except that even though Jesus teaches forgiveness, whenever a murder is committed, they want nothing more than to convict and execute someone in return, regardless of whether or not there's a shred of evidence against the accused.

The pathetic ignorance of these inbred wideloads isn't limited to the lower socio-economic strata, either. Cops, crime lab techs, prosecutors, defense attorneys, juries, and judges all the way up to the appellate level are all equally inept and unperturbed by constitutional violations, a lack of proof, and prosecution cases built on perjury and laughable circumstantial evidence. And of course Oklahomans aren't alone in their appalling, blood-thirsty cheers when someone is actually executed. If I were truly venemous, as befitting Official Rant Week, I would somehow express in words my nearly uncontrollable urge to vomit repeatedly as the book unfolds.

If anything I've said this week deserved the label of "rant," I would have of course included the teenagers in American Fork (the town, not the canyon) being cited for being disorderly in public after they rapped their order at a McDonald's drive-thru. Again, it's a case of room temperature IQ's at all levels, starting with the night manager, who claimed to feel "her safety was at risk;" extending to the cops who felt like anything had been done wrong in the first place; and finally with McDonald's corporation for standing behind the stupid night manager who had clearly blown things out of proportion. There's simply no excuse on my part for not finding and taking advantage of these truly rant-worthy current events.

Even had these opportunities not presented themselves, were I a ranter worth my salt, I could have of course ridiculed the single most prevalent example of stupidity rampant in urban areas worldwide: wannabe bike messengers riding old, crappy bikes around town with no helmets. Do these idiots really think urban riding is that safe? Have they not noticed the cars, buses, and garbage trucks they're sharing the road with? Or are they just so stupid as to think they, because of the phenomenal bike handling skills they've developed in the three months since they started riding, won't be hurt by any of these?

And then, as if these imbeciles needed encouragement, along comes Rapha, a company founded on stupid ideas sold to stupider people for way more money than a reasonable person would ever pay for a practical, well-designed version of the product. I mean really, who wants to wear a suit jacket on the bike anyway? People dumb enough to ride without helmets, that's who. But really, even if you did want to wear one, just to be ironic (if that floats your boat), why wouldn't you get one at a thrift store since it's just going to get trashed anyway? Had I been paying attention, I would have picked up on this and made it the subject of a blog post.

I won't ask you to forgive these oversights. I won't take a mulligan on rant week and try again later. I have nobody to blame but myself. Because there was more than enough to rant about this week, and the subjects I did actually select were worthy topics. I just failed to give them a worthy rant. I mean, I could have outdone yesterday's rant with a rant about the smelliness of my own gas yesterday afternoon. And about the nauseating toxicity of the air inside my car as I was running errands on my lunch break. Or I could have done a third-person rant from the perspective of the finance manager at work talking about the disgusting pig she works with who fouled the air of his own cubicle right before she walked over to ask him a question. And how it made her eyes water as she stoically stood there and absorbed it. But I failed to pick up on any of these topics and undoubtedly disappointed my readers, all six who remain, as a result.

At this point, all I can do is apologize. I am truly sorry.