Some of you may be wondering what I’ve been doing these past few months since I haven’t been writing the Rundown. I mostly kept off of Facebook, so I have no idea what’s been going on in the island, aside from what I overhear when I eavesdrop on people’s conversations at Thriftway.
I’ve returned to Facebook to find out what’s up. So far, I’ve discovered that my feed is no longer filled with people I know, but rather advertisements and posts from groups I’m not a part of. Half the posts are soothing videos of people making tiramisu. I watch them, thinking, “I’m learning so much!” Then I never make tiramisu. Instead, after pissing away an hour online watching cooking videos, It’s too late to cook much of anything, so I make cereal for dinner.
But now I’m back to reading the rants, so let’s find out what has been rankling us for the past few months. I was hoping we’d break new ground in the complaints department, but no. We’re mad about graffiti again.
We all instantly emerge from our hovels to inform the poster that they are in fact the problem. We have this comment: “You are just jealous STALK is cooler than you. Go put a sticker on his tag that’s just flattery in the graffiti world. If you want to paint over it, at least do something cooler than what is there.”
Um, making it say PENISTALK would be cooler? It would be a collaboration across time and generations. A palimpsest, a discourse, a modern day Talmud of public iconography.
A person with incisive moral clarity makes this point: “putting stickers onto the tag is okay? That’s hypocritical.”
Another person finds the complainer to be an ignorant fool. “They have no idea about reality. The people lashing out at this graffiti are actually grasping because they want some attention. Kinda ironic 
”
I, too, have no idea about reality.
Others give us the historical context for graffiti on Vashon – it’s a way of sticking it to the czar. “The Russian Empire was pretty oppressive for the majority of Human Beings. I would not worry about semantics.”
This leads to a discussion that ends in this statement, “I agree with you on those points. But Stalin was not part of the Russian empire.” How did we get there from graffiti? I don’t know. But if someone’s random scribblings led us to a discussion of Eurasian history, then maybe they have done some good.
Another person defends the graffiti on these grounds: “Do you guys realize that the more you hate it, the better it is?” There’s a pervasive attitude that aggravating and even hurting people you don’t like is a moral good. This bad attitude is the animus that led us to the political situation we are in, where internet trolls are running the country.
Beyond hating graffiti, we also hate people who own Teslas. We have this post:
Clearly my enjoyment of Wreck It Ralph is more important than your kneecaps. That’s why I got a car that lets me watch TV while I drive.
Wait, can you watch TV in a Tesla? Or is it just a giant touchscreen like the ones in Star Trek where a gentle tap can either put you in warp six or launch photon torpedoes? (I watched a lot of Star Trek during my hiatus in order to bring you trenchant insights like: why don’t starships have seatbelts?)
But seriously, how harshly can we judge people who own Teslas? People should be graded on a curve, with the more recently you bought one, the harder we’ll judge. I’ve known for a long time that the CEO of Tesla is a monster, but I’m the sort of person who spends their free time online getting mad at celebrities. Maybe you had other priorities.
You can always flip off a driver who nearly runs you down, though chances are they won’t see it. However, an innocent and sensitive bystander might get caught up in your ire, such as the one in the following post:
I totally get how this poster feels. Whenever someone honks a horn anywhere, I assume they’re mad at me.
I was parking at Thriftway the other day and I heard a car honk on the street. I said, “What did I do?”
My daughter said, “They weren’t honking at you, Mom.”
And I said, “Are you sure? Maybe they’re mad at me from afar.”
“Maybe it was a goose honking,” she said.
“The goose is mad at me.”
As a side note, why is the poster apologizing for feeling sad? It’s okay to be sad. And if we feel bad for feeling sad, then we end up in a guilt spiral.
And speaking of bad feelings, we have this post policing how other people react to posts:
Nothing will make me feel rage like being told to calm down. It is especially irritating when I’m calm, but I’m telling someone something that makes them feel uncomfortable. In that case they’re not telling me to calm down. They’re saying that they are now disquieted and they want me to stop making them feel emotions they don’t like.
Either that or they’re pointing out that I’m getting too heated and emotional discussing the subtext of Star Trek episodes when I’m in line at the Post Office.
I don’t think the rants page should be a commiseration page. We can hate graffiti and hate it when people hate graffiti.The rants page should be a place where we hone our skill of being haters. Hating things without pushback is unhealthy. If you’re going to hate something, you need to be equipped to defend your hatred on multiple levels, have rebuttals for common arguments against your stance, and be able to employ an arsenal of colorful insults for people who disagree with you. If we simply let people post that they don’t like graffiti or that we shouldn’t name orcas without pushback, they’ll think these are generally agreed upon opinions. They’ll think that they are right! And god forbid someone on the internet thinks they’re right.
For example, here’s some hate we can deconstruct:
Once commenter adds: “They hate being called out on social media”
The poster, who remained anonymous in solidarity with the whales who should not be named, added this illuminating clarification: “JS53203000v just pooped NS OS Duqwamish then JOg5 had a quip w/ JA5025 on beach 5060k w/ resal 902110 .. 902110 .. JA654 on the shoew”
I have spent hours reading this, running it through every translation algorithm available, and have come up blank. The poster is apparently opposed to not only names, but also any language having the ability to communicate. Truly the sort of radical opinion we need.
Others disagree with the poster. They point out how tracking the whales is an important part of scientific research and has given us insights into the myriad threats they face and have used that information to affect legislation. These cogent arguments cause the poster to back off and even veer back into comprehensibility by saying, “This post was a joke anyhow .. I’d rather we didn’t assign them prisoner numbers/letters. “
Another recurrent complaint is people dumping stuff on the side of the road for free, and it just staying there forever until it merges with the forest.
For example, there was a spotting of this feral refrigerator. I know people should throw away their appliances, but we’ve gotten a dishwasher, a second fridge, and a dryer off the side of the road, and one of those appliances is still working today.
We also have this familiar complaint.
I have a strange feeling, like a vague repressed memory, of being in town during the summer, seeing a parade, stopping by booths, eating strawberry shortcake, and hearing music. Maybe it was a dream.
And that concludes the rundown of everything I’ve missed since summer. Nothing else of note has happened in the world.
Author: Anna Shomsky
I'm a former teacher and a data engineer living on Vashon Island. My writing has appeared in Five on the Fifth, Broken Spine, Women on Writing and on the Post-Culture Podcast. I wrote and produced the radio show Whispers of Vashon for 101.9 KVSH. I’ve had short stories published in the anthologies Island Stories and Chicken Scratchings, as well as through the Open Space Literary Project.
