Dingleberries
... aka Kool Aid tipplers
I’ve been surrounded by positive people all my life. Not hey-this-can-work positive, but adamantly this-is-the-way-it-is, case-closed—keep your opposing thoughts to yourself.
It’s taken me three score and ten years to realize all that positivity non-equals truth, justice, or the American way, thank you Jerry Siegel[1]. Or as French moralist Francois de La Rochefoucauld pointed out back in the 1600s, “No persons are more frequently wrong than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
Right and wrong. Boy, have those concepts dogged my every step through the past seventy years. Only in post-Turtle days, i.e., the last four months, have I given myself permission to disengage from my dingles.
Dingle•berry
noun; 3 definitions
A Southern Mountain Cranberry, tart and biting.
Dried fecal matter stuck to the side or in the hair of an anus.
A friend or acquaintance whose tart, biting conversation is stuck in one place, like dried fecal matter.
Everybody has a dingleberry or two in their life, I suppose. The first one I ever met was a guy who kept complaining, over and over, about his current boss, his last boss, the SOB who just interviewed him, his worthless backbiting coworker, the bitch who just dumped him, the cunt who dumped him before that. Intractably, incontrovertibly right about everything, he broached no outside perspective, no alternate conclusion, no blameless scenario. Tedious to endure at first, his rants turned grueling after the first three hours, despite my watch claiming it’d only been a few minutes.
Since he was my husband’s old, dear friend (read: dealer) and I was wholly shell-bound at the time, I had no way to get away, much less get avoid him. By the sheerest fortune, he eventually committed the sole crime that could override Tom’s craving for cheap, accessible weed: he hurt Baby.
Anything having to do with his child was sacrosanct as far as her father was concerned. Yeah, they fought like mortal combatants, but that was between them, playing out in fascinating, if excruciating to witness, caged matches. But outside that ring, he was a Hulk-esq protector with a hair trigger called “my daughter.” I was horrified about the incident she finally found the courage to reveal—no easy feat—but unabashedly thrilled when Tom banished said dingleberry from our house, our lives, and my earshot.
Since then I’ve dealt with myriad other dingles, most more subtle (and intelligent) than Tom’s supplier. But be they paying clients, distant relatives, colleagues, or even dear friends who got trapped in circular misfortunes generated by money/medicine/politics/religion, they all played the same blame game. Nothing, remarkably, was ever their fault. Their own deeds, words, or even threats never could, would, or did contribute to their predicaments, current, past, or likely future. How could anybody possibly blame an ex-merc for terrorizing a teenaged wannabee burglar? Damn kid shouldn’t have tried to climb through his window—I mean, ya gotta be an imbecile to break into an apartment from the front, right? So he cracked his skull and ended up in a coma for who-cares-how-long. That’s what’s wrong with the city’s police department! Bunch of sissified assholes who don’t understand the Second Amendment! No, he didn’t need a public defender! He didn’t do anything wrong except put defend himself from an unarmed snot-nosed idiot!
I’ve used that tale and dozens of others as grist for PMA deconstruction, exciting incidents to disguise in stories I’ll never try to publish, and intricate human-nature observations to mull in unrelated-yet-fundamentally similar situations. On-the-job berry-dingling instruction. Observational education. All funneling into the same supercilious pool that, thanks to our most recent past president, now has a shiny new label-slash-slogan: MAGA.
While I have no true MAGA-ites in my life, from all I’ve read, heard, and witnessed, they’ve cultified dingleberry-ism, raising it to damn near Jonestown[2] heights. Not only are they arrogantly positive they’re right about everything, they’re bombastically indifferent to in-your-face proof that they’re wrong. They’re like… dingleberry squared. Dingleberry to infinity and beyond. Dingleberry-ness run Helter Skelter[3].
All of which begs the question: why am I writing about dingleberries this beautiful first Monday of the first month of 2024? Two reasons. One, because I didn’t have the chance to write, “Five years ago today, I had a CheezeWhiz incident,” which, ya gotta admit, woulda been a great opening for a piece, although, alas, I’ve since forgotten its thread because my memory is like a dirty colander—some stuff gets trapped in the grid, but mostly everything just pours down the drain. Besides, that “five years ago” day was the thirty-first, already past, and so non-consequential in this brand-spanking new year.
Reason two is almost as profound: I’m purposely starting this new post-Turtle year clean. No… very little… minimal baggage. On looking around, I now recognize the abuses I blithely accepted as my due throughout my colloquially “dead” half-a-century-plus-twenty lifetime. In this new era, I’m giving myself baby-step permission to catch those incidents, circumstances, and pointed dingleberry barbs as they occur. Zounds! And to distance myself from said situations and speakers.
Like, supposedly, real people do.
So be forewarned, all ye cranberry impersonators hanging tenaciously from my life’s convoluted fabric. I see you now. I’m onto your game, clued into your M.O. The gaslighting, the playing on my insecurities… the circular conversations in which my slightest, intentionally innocuous remark gives you license to castigate, belittle, or blame (not to mention confuse and bewilder) me.
Not anymore. I expect you not to change. You’re you. So be it. But I’m a new me. I’m a nonbinary transgender male, my pronouns are they and them, and yeah, I’m manning up.
My coin has turned.
[1] Jerry Siegel, writer, created the comic book superhero with his artist friend Joe Shuster in 1933. They were both going to Glenville High School at the time.
[2] Named for its infamous leader, Jim Jones, who so beguiled his followers into blind obedience that they all willingly drank poisoned Kool Aid at his command. The sole survivor contacted me. He’d been chosen—against his will—to stay behind so he could tell the world how 918 people sacrificed themselves for their charismatic leader. I think he eventually committed suicide, too. I woulda ghosted the book for him but alas—he’d tithed his entire not-insignificant fortune to Jones.
[3] For those too young to remember, the book Helter Skelter by Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and collaborator Curt Gentry (W.W. Norton & Company, 1974) documented the most horrific murder spree in American history (until 1994, when football hero OJ Simpson legally did not leave Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in a grotesquely bloody murder scene that rivaled the one at Sharon Tate’s house.) The title Helter Skelter was taken from a Beatles song of the same name that obliquely talked about “bringing down the mighty,” which song writer Paul McCarthy purported meant as a reference the Roman Empire, but which Manson dingleberrily interpreted as a call to action for America protesters.