SleepingOrange Disapproves of Things

LAMPPOSTS

It looks like the Inaugural Dickery for this thread will be a rare two-for-one sassing; the obvious target is of course lampposts, as was suggested. The less-obvious-but-still-pretty-obvious-to-anyone-with-a-few-neurons-to-clap-together target is "The kind of person who suggests 'lampposts' in a thread for soliciting rants" and, more broadly, lolrandom humor in general.

There are a few expectations that come with the broad style of pure loathing masked as tongue-in-cheek humor I'm trying to convey here: what dry thrill anyone can get from reading it should arise organically from the topic, whether that be from chuckling at an annoyance you share with the writer or deriving perverse satisfaction from watching someone attack things you enjoy. Perhaps you simply want to laugh at some compound invectives, and that's okay too. But what's not okay is providing bullshit nonsense inanimate objects, because seriously, who can get in a dander about lampposts or waffles or pillows? (The answer is me, but that is because I am a master ragecrafter; it's the principle of the thing!)

Obviously the point in submitting a response like that isn't to garner comedy; there are much riper and lower-hanging fruit out there for that, from politics to pop culture to the arts and beyond. No, such a response is either to "win" by stumping me or out of a kneejerk desire to do something someone obviously doesn't want you to so. The former is unabashedly smug, while the latter is the demesne of five-year-olds and genies. Nobody likes smug people, genies, or especially five-year-olds.

You know, I had a couple of paragraphs here about how "lampposts" was a pretty good example of shitty lazy "random"ness, but this is just getting inexcusably out of hand. I'm going to cut this short and move on to a more truly-satisfying topic before this column goes from "SleepingOrange Disapproves of Things" to "SleepingOrange is Embittered but Boringly So".

But, since my spirit animal is a smug five-year-old genie, here's a token passage about lampposts and why they duck. Because DAMNED if I will lose!

Lampposts may seem pretty innocuous to the casual observer, but the fact is that they're an omnipresent middle finger to anyone in a car. Everything about them is so perfectly able to absolutely infuriate motorists that a more suspicious person might believe they were designed so.

First off, they do nothing to help drivers see where the road is; you know what does that? Headlights and reflectors. All a lampposts does is flood your sight, ruin your night vision, and ensure it's juuust far enough away from the next lamppost that that one does all those things too. Because heaven knows all the dangerous accidents happen on dark country roads, not well-lit streets that mock you with their strobing streetlamps and extremely-solid posts.

But you don't even have to be driving the car for lampposts to ruin your night: everyone here probably knows what it's like to be a passenger in a late ride with the family. There's no freaking way you're going to talk to those assholes after your sister spent the entire drive spilling her soda on your favorite pants (and it was Goddamned grape so the stain will never come out) and whining, your mother wouldn't let you get that cap gun they had at the convenience store (it was two dollars, what the hell), and your father is a hair-trigger berserker on top of being a smelly alcoholic. So you have to read or play a video game or something to stave off the boredom... But not if lampposts have anything to say about it! They're just far apart enough that you can get about enough of a sentence read that you'll forget the first half of it in the time it takes between readable zones of light, and just bright enough that if you turn on the doorlight, your father will shriek at you for glaring up the windows and beat you with a tire iron.

Lastly, and by far the worst, is that lampposts make it so that pedestrians think it's appropriate for them to go out and walk at night. Bitch, I am using that sidewalk, and I don't need your shitty fleshy body traipsing all over it and getting in my way. Uppity little ambulators thing that just because they can see, they have a right to be out and about. They are wrong: the street and everything street-adjacent is for me.

Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm

There... There are no words.

But there will be.