Invasive species

You
guys have a lot to bitch about. Our inaugural Invasive Species issue seems to
have, um, grown out of control. The pretense was simple: We invited our readers
and contributing writers to submit anonymous rants about all the unavoidable
annoyances they encounter. And now our inbox is overflowing with vitriol.

The feds define “invasive species” as anything non-native to the ecosystem that
causes economic, environmental, or human harm. We just opened the definition to
cultural considerations, took a couple liberties, and let our readers and
writers flail away. So, enjoy this little bit of nastiness. And remember: Go
easy on the messenger. The majority of the following entries were written by
our readers.

— Chad Oliveiri

Cracks

Sweetheart,
I don’t want to see your ass. Or your thong. I sure as hell don’t want to see
that tattoo. Do you have to walk like a wooden puppet to keep your trunk from
spilling out your stretch-extra-lows? Do you need a tourniquet just to keep
your pants from popping open? Yeah, I thought so. I shed a tear for all the
poor, teenaged lovelies who will sacrifice the nerve endings in their legs
because someone in charge of the young miss department told them they’d look
better walking the mall with all their curves squeezed out the top of a denim
paper-towel tube. It’s an assault on the female form.

To my soon-to-be ex:

Take your smothering, obsessive, psychotic love and shove it in your smelly magnetic
slippers. Yeah, those slippers that have the magnetic do-hickey in them that
you can only hope will save you from crippling arthritis, when in fact they
gave you that nasty toenail fungus. Each time you rolled over in bed to rub those
nasty feet on me I had the fantasy of grabbing you, getting you into a head
lock, and pile-driving your big, bald dome into a glass coffee table. Then
spraying you over and over with pepper spray. It’s over pal and I don’t care if
you carve my name into your arm with a razor blade or threaten to kill yourself
with a bottle of Midol and a pack of NyQuil. Because I have met someone hotter
and more well-endowed than you. Yeah, that’s right chump. I’m stepping off the
three-stroke train and riding the jumbo jet!

DIY design

Some
advice for all you would-be garage-sale-runners, by-owner-house-sellers,
newsletter writers, and small-business starter-uppers: Close the clip art
library and step away from the PowerPoint. We live in a city with a glut of
talented graphic designers. Press $50 in one of their palms and see if they can
at least confine your flyer/sign/website/newsletter to three different fonts.
It is a lie that you can make anything look good with greeting-card software.
Trust me: I have no idea what you are selling because I’m too busy having a
seizure. In this world of do it yourself, our eyes are being bombarded with
Wingdings and little men in helmets digging beneath “under construction” signs.

Britney and Kevin

Dear
newlyweds: I finally had the opportunity to set aside a day and watch a Chaotic marathon. The way you two talk
about love and sex while smacking gum is inspiring. Britney: I’m glad you found
Kevin to be your pimp. Kevin: I’m glad you’re pimping Britney as a career. But,
mostly, I love the way you two have captured your relationship to digital
video. White trash hasn’t been this lovingly rendered since Harmony Korine’s Gummo.

Checkers

One
must start sentences with capital letters. It’s in the books. It’s
indisputable. Try starting a sentence in Microsoft Word without a capital and
see what happens. It automatically capitalizes it for you, even if you want to
keep it lowercase. Try typing in any e.e. cummings poem. A bevy of glaring
green and red squiggles will sneer at you from the page. Spell-check,
AutoCorrect, and automatic grammar revisions are standard issue tools with word
processors like Microsoft Word. But when corrections are made automatically,
how does one actually learn to write?

Vandals

Someone
threw rocks through five windows of my house on different days, and my home was
burglarized. I can’t say who is responsible. I do know that I have had
confrontations with a street-corner drug dealer when his dealings get too close
to me or my property. Perhaps the vandalism and burglary are his way of telling
me to back off. He would have recruited a teenager to do his dirty work. Only
an agile youngster could have climbed through my small kitchen window to enter
my house. Judging by the evidence, the intruder could be someone I know. The
most disturbing irony is that a young man whom I thought I could count on may
be an accomplice to this violence. And I will never know for sure.

Christian rock

I
don’t have anything against Christians. I just don’t want to be caught dead
listening to their “pop” or “rock” music. And have you noticed how it sucks you
in? You’re driving along, scanning on the radio, you find something that’s OK,
you’re pretty sure you’ve heard it before, you’re humming along, and then BLAM!
— all of a sudden you’ve got “He is King,” or “I lift my heart to you, Lord,
yeah!” blasting from your radio. What the hell? And sometimes there are whole
rock groups that turn out to be Christian. They’re all over the regular radio,
they even make videos. And then you see an interview and they’re thanking God
for the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Am I the only one who didn’t see that
thing with Creed coming?

Dogs

Dogs
making a racket at midnight. Dogs snarling with impotent, irrational rage. Dogs
drooling and exhaling their coprophiliac breath on strangers. Dogs defending
their imaginary turf with claw and fang. Dogs are loathsome precisely because
they resemble human beings. They certainly serve no useful purpose. They leave
their stinking filth all over the place. They move around in unruly packs. They
sniff each others’ butts. They have embarrassing names (though not as
embarrassing as Madison or Tyler). And loud, obnoxious noises issue continually
from their mouths.

Yuengling

The
name sounds vaguely Asian, but it’s of German descent (having been Anglicized
from Jüngling) and belongs to the oldest brewery in the United States. So why
have I never heard of this now-ubiquitous brand of beer before last year, when
Yuengling trucks started rolling through town and neon signs trumpeting the
lager sprang up in bars? I’m not saying Yuengling is vile or unworthy of its
newfound glory. But beer drinkers are behaving like Mom packed a Thermos full
of it in their Hong Kong Phooey lunchbox on the first day of kindergarten and
they’ve been mainlining it since. If I were ever looking to exert mind control
over an entire country, I’d start with their self-medication.

Rhinos music

Who
says soccer has to be played to jock rock? There’s no disputing the Rhinos’
popularity, but we’re willing to bet people aren’t showing up at Frontier Field
to hear the irritating club tracks and blaring announcements pumping through
the PA during play. Former City Newspaper contributor Jon Popick certainly isn’t a fan. And he’s taken his obsession with
Rhinos noise to hilarious heights, attending each home game with a decibel
meter and charting the noise levels on meticulous graphs he’s posted on
www.sick-boy.com. Better tone it down, Rhinos. Or else Sickie’s gonna get
angry.

Up in the club

If
I were an alien, or living somewhere in a small European town, and all I knew
of American culture was what I saw on MTV 2, I would think that behind every
door (outside of which is parked some enormous white SUV with farcically large
rims) was just a cornucopia of exploding Crys bottles, dry ice, white leather
couches, and women in bikinis gyrating on anything they can get their thighs
around. Has anyone ever been in a club that actually looks like that? What
happened to the hip-hop street scene, with the graffiti, break-dancing, boom
boxes on shoulders, big clock necklaces and cool hats, and rappers crouching
down into the camera? Ah, yesterday.

Cows of the road

When
a car’s driver believes it is okay to pass you while IN THE SAME LANE, they are
too rude to own a license. I hope the blonde with the Dorothy Hamel haircut in
the white car on 104 east going 80 mph learns how to get her kicks without
scaring others half to death. A simple drive to Webster should not include
being terrorized by selfish cows.

Verbicide

Words,
like organisms, grow and change. They have their own natural habitats. And
sometimes, they’re imported to places they don’t belong to serve as verbal
ornamentation. This is about nouns that have been dragged across the
part-of-speech barrier and forced to do duty as verbs, a practice known as verbing. As Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes) so succinctly
stated: “Verbing weirds language.” I’m not sure where the blame for this
phenomenon lies, but my money is on the jargon sector of the word economy. Take
computer geeks: Almost nobody now remembers that before they arrived, “access”
was something you gained, not
something you did. But this is no
laughing matter. Consider this cautionary tale attributed to one Peter Ellis, a
verbicide survivor: “First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because
verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing
because I no verbs.”

Hummers

If
an M-1 tank took thalidomide and steroids, mated with a Lego set, and then gave
birth on the Discovery Channel, the result would be the Hummer. For all the
obvious reasons, Hummers are idiotic to the Nth degree. But good gas mileage,
aesthetics, and common courtesy to other drivers don’t make any difference to
folks who are willing to drop tens of thousands on a hulking loutwagon. Drivers
of these braindead behemoths could save a lot of money if they just bought a
smaller car and hung signs around their necks that said “Yes, my penis is tiny.
And no it doesn’t work very well any more.”

Cell
phone cameras

In
a word: Terrifying. It’s gotten to the point where it’s prudent to assume that
whatever you do can be photographed at any time and sent to any place. I’ve
never been the paranoid type, but I’ve witnessed enough people whipping out
these tiny public nuisances that I am finally growing concerned over the
presence of Big Brother… or at least Nosy Little Sister. Granted, cell phone
cameras have their place (documenting auto accidents, etc.), but I have enough
to worry about without wondering whether there’s lip gloss all over my face or
if my parents will somehow see what I’m up to. Mardi Gras beads aren’t exactly
free, you know.

Airquotes

It
is flatly impossible these days to go a whole day in the company of other
humans and not see four crooked fingers poised in midair. Usually they spring
up when the speaker is using a cliché, cutesy slang, or is too brainless to
understand how irony works. Often they’re accompanied by a dim-witted
self-satisfied grin. Always, they signal the fact that the speaker doesn’t know
how or when to use real quotation marks.

Patriotism

In
response to your request for readers to identify and articulate feelings of
invasion. I would like to submit my current top four:

The
US has been invaded by an extremely savvy and corrupt reigning government. The
Bush Administration has an arsenal of psychological weapons at its disposal
that it deploys to keep enough of its citizens frightened into an infantile
desire to have a father figure promise to keep us safe if we let him smoke
people in the Middle East.

I
feel invaded by the ever-present pressure to be “patriotic” as defined by the
Bush Administration and a large segment of our population. I feel my right to
have a dissenting opinion about the war and about our government in general is
threatened.

I
feel invaded by an army of American flags!

I
feel our schools are being invaded by the military. And our children,
especially those whose money is tight or grades are low, are being carted off
to feed the war machine like herds of cattle.

Thanks
for giving me the opportunity to vent.

Smart dummies

Everywhere
you look, something is smart. We kill civilians with smartbombs, shop for
squeaky chew-toys at PETsMART, cover our bounced checks with SmartPay, and
dispose of our natural wastes with SmartFlush. This is particularly annoying at
a time when you can’t go to a bookstore or library without seeing some work
aimed at Dummies. Buddhism for Dummies,
Rock and Roll for Dummies, Bartending for Dummies. All that they
haven’t covered with these witless little tomes is brain surgery for Dummies.
So humans get dumb and technology gets smart. Get the message?

Naughty neighbors

I
wish I could own numerous “classic” cars, park them in my yard, and use their
spare parts as flower pots. Oh, and I wish I could blast my TV and stereo while
the cops stop by for their weekly visit because my boyfriend, who happens to be
a drug dealer on parole, decides to threaten all the neighbors and their kids.
But what I want most is for my morals to be passed on to my children so that
they, too, will terrorize whole neighborhoods.

Fireworks

Fireworks
are the pesto of the new millennium. Just as the miraculous blending of garlic,
basil, cheese, and oil triggered a culinary obsession in the ’80s that quickly
lost its appeal, advances in pyrotechnology have put fireworks on the plate of
every professional sporting event, town festival, and Little League opening
day. I don’t even care that hearing loss due to fireworks is on the rise or
that frightened dogs run away during fireworks displays. As with hotel cable porn,
it’s just too much of a good thing. Improvements in electronic timing and
fusing mean fireworks can be synchronized with music and make rudimentary
shapes in the sky. Smiley faces. Hearts. Pyrotechnic experts are now working on
ways to form letters. Nightly advertisements spelled out in fireworks can’t be
far behind.

Big boxes

I
think we’re all in favor of creating hometown jobs, and I am usually pleased to
see buildings erected in which businesses can flourish. What I can’t abide,
however, is waste and a shocking lack of foresight. It seems lately that
drugstores rather than dandelions have been infesting our vacant lots. But a
brand-new Eckerd on Stone Road just closed after being open a mere couple of
years, and there’s a recently constructed Rite Aid on Empire Boulevard that is
no more. I assume that the individuals making the decisions about the need for
these services did some sort of study regarding viability, and I would also
assume those people have been replaced by someone more qualified.

Concert ticket rip-offs

I
hate to sound like Grandpa Simpson, but in my day, you plunked down your $15
(including service charges) and then walked uphill 30 miles through the snow,
barefoot, so you could see Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica (with Cliff Burton!) at
the War Memorial. Perhaps production costs have gone up, or maybe child support
and alimony expenses are skyrocketing, but the Rolling Stones apparently think
it’s acceptable to charge up to $350 per ticket for their upcoming show in
Albany. Concertgoers really shouldn’t have to decide between buying a major
appliance or watching Mick’s 90-year-old bones creak around on stage.

Military recruiters

I
don’t want a free pen, a “boonie hat,” or a sports watch. Is that all a
foreigner’s life is worth to you brass? A sports watch? Is that what my life is
worth to you? An Army T-shirt? You think I’m impressed with shiny buttons, firm
hats, and a crisp salute? I look at you like I look at a parking-meter
policeman. There is a human under there somewhere. I know it. I’m sorry they
put you up to this, but you are the face of a racist, impersonal killing
machine for the rich, and I despise your presence in my school. Invaded? That
only happens once. I want to end the occupation.

And another…

They’re
everywhere! I see them at the mall, at street festivals, and at parades.
They’ve set up headquarters on Main Street, and (gasp!) they even invade our
schools on a regular basis. They spend millions of our tax dollars to advertise
on TV. They lie! They make false promises to lure our children into their
ranks! Once they’ve ensnared them, they send them on dangerous missions without
adequate protection and expose them to horrific chemicals like depleted
uranium. Our kids’ chances of getting killed while doing their bidding are
increasing every day. Yes, folks, it’s the invasion of the military recruiters!
Let’s get them out of our schools and send them packing before they pack our
kids in body bags.

Age-inappropriate strolling

First
it was all about keeping your toddlers in the stroller long past the
appropriate age. Seeing Little Lord Fauntleroy gaze imperiously at you from a
stroller that could barely contain him, a glazed look of privilege on his face,
was scary. Now children on leashes are back, the lethal kinks evidently having
been worked out (oh well). So why does everyone get upset when I try to pet
them? Hey, it’s on a leash — it’s no longer human. Wasn’t my idea.

Magnetic ribbons

Enough
with the ribbons already! It was bad enough to see the AIDS Awareness red
ribbons pasteurized into pink, purple, and yellow “awareness,” but the magnetic
ribbons with patriotic sayings like God Bless America slapped on the trunks of
cars are impossible to escape. It’s more than a little disturbing to see war
merchandized like a movie. But my personal favorites are the Escalades and
Hummers with ribbons that say “We Support Our Troops.”

Locker-room flaunting

Of
course there’s gonna be nudity in a locker room. A man needs a place to let it
all hang out. But keep in mind that with naked comes a need for additional
personal space. Don’t crowd your fellow naked man. Unless the shower room is
packed, don’t pick the shower next to the lone person in there and splash on
him. Singing’s OK, just leave some room. When toweling off by the mounted
hairdryers, please don’t stand on your tippy-toes and spread your ass cheeks to
dry your crack. Nobody wants to see that. And please, no hacking lung butter
into the sink. Swallow it like the rest of us, you gross slob you.

Cars and bikes

To
drivers, bicycles are troublesome road hazards. Vice-versa for cyclists. It’s
only fair, then, that both should
qualify as invasive species. (Just ask pedestrians!) An uneasy relationship
anywhere, Rochester’s bike-car situation is particularly bad due to the absence
of bike lanes and the pervasiveness of that slothful suburban mindset that says
“drive” no matter the distance. Local motorists seem genuinely mystified by how
to react to bikes in the road, so we rule (grudgingly) in favor of cyclists.
Drivers need to LOOK BOTH WAYS before making right turns, but cyclists can’t
have it both ways. If you claim the rights of vehicle and pedestrian, that only
spells trouble.

Suburban lawnsigns

Cross
the city line into Brighton or Penfield and you’ll find dozens of lawn signs in
support of Rochester’s mayoral candidates. Are they thinking regionally and
wanting a strong city as the hub as the greater community? Or are these
“burbanites by choice” telling us city folk how to vote? If so, it
feels a bit patronizing. I’m confused.

A-Street drunkenness

Visit
Alexander Street on any weekend night and you’ll get to watch people drink
themselves into a regressive state where they act like brain-damaged degenerate
apes. (No offense to real apes.) And the mating rituals — a grotesque parade
of overly tanned, scantily-clad flesh and cheap desperation — would’ve made
Darwin proud.

Home design TV

The
obsession with home design shows has given way to the erroneous deduction that
anyone can design, everyone has good taste, and our personal space (those of us
who are lucky enough to have one) could always use a little updating.

Bush

US
foreign policy stinks. Using communism — and now terrorism — as an excuse,
our government has done endless evil globally in our name, supporting
tyrannical governments and obstructing benign governments unwilling to kiss up
to corporate interests. The US has helped overthrow legitimate elected
governments in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Chile. We have supported and abetted
tyranny in El Salvador. State Departmentese says that this is “our backyard.”
Our backyard? To those who live there — including the thousands of displaced,
tortured, and disappeared — it is home. And we have no business disrupting
entire populations. I wonder what would happen to patriotic sentiment in this
country if our citizenry was forced from its undeserved pillar of entitlement
and became aware of the reality of US hegemony.

Empty lots

Try
walking 10 blocks in any Rochester neighborhood without encountering an empty
lot. It almost can’t be done. And that’s a shame, because in spots Rochester
teases at being a fine walking city. In poor neighborhoods, though, it’s more
than a cosmetic matter. The combination of racist intent and bureaucratic
ineptitude make blight nothing short of a crime against humanity.

Emoticons

Those
extra cheery, parenthetically based smiley faces piss me right off. They remind
me of those girls in high school who dotted their i’s with hearts. They can all
go to hell right along with folks who bang out those cyber-hackneyed
abbreviations like “LOL” or “LMAO” in their e-mails. Not sure where this
animosity comes from, lol, it just smacks of airheaded TGIF-ness… : )

Lake Ontario pollution

Rochester’s
spectacular sunsets are often attributed to pollution, but we pay for them in
unseen ways. Pollution’s effects on Lake Ontario can not be adequately
summarized, but, to take one example, the mid-20th century eradication of Great
Lakes trout was once attributed to two invasive species: sea lampreys and
humans. It doesn’t take a biologist to guess which organism did more damage.

Cover lovers

You
would think cover bands would be an invasive species in themselves, but in
reality it’s their fans. Musicians are just squirrels looking for a nut, and
the demand for regurgitated Top 40 is unfortunately quite high. As long as
someone wants to hear Journey or Nickelback or No Doubt or Stone Temple Pilots
instead of something original, musicians will be there to rehash the
homogenized status quo. Hell, it beats playing weddings. “Freebird!”

Rubber bracelets

A
few weeks ago I got the latest in rubber jewelry: the electric green Organ
Donation Awareness bracelet. It honestly was my first bracelet; I wanted to get
the yellow Livestrong bracelet, but yellow doesn’t go with anything I own. I also thought about a red Red Cross
bracelet that means blood donation or whatever, but those were over as soon as
there was a blood drive at school — everyone got one, and I was SO not going
under the needle for something so passé. So
I was totally stoked when I got the little green bracelet in the mail (all I
had to do was sign this organ donor thing and forge my mom’s signature). Only
problem is the first day I wore it, one of those kids with every color had one
— you know, the kind of kid that backs lupus (purple), breast cancer (pink),
prostate cancer (light blue), pancreatic cancer (also purple) and skin cancer
(black, gross right?). I mean seriously, dude, pick a disease. You can’t have
all of them.

Bugs

I’d
just taken my dinner out of the microwave and set it down to get a cup for
something to drink when a cockroach skittered across the counter. “Damn it to
Hell!” I yelled, even though there wasn’t anyone else around to hear. Ever
since that slob downstairs moved in, I’ve had more bugs than a freakin’ spy convention.

Bandwagons

Bandwagonning
isn’t uncommon in Rochester. Kobe jerseys proliferated during the Lakers’
recent three-peat. And during the ’80s and ’90s, masses of Rochesterians
professed to love the Dolphins just because it was cool to be a rebel in Bills
territory. But they weren’t rebels. They were poseurs. Jumping on the bandwagon
— any bandwagon — might be good for apparel companies, but it’s insulting
to true sports fans.

Rochester’s invasive species: a naturalist’s guide

The
Yellow-Bellied Carper: A common pest which dwells in isolated rural areas but
complains in a loud, distinctive, high-pitched whine about the city of
Rochester — its schools, parking, policing, taxes, housing, waste disposal,
residents, etc. Rarely nests in urban environments, though sometimes circles
city limits at speed, reluctant to alight lest some dangerous person or object
appear. Despite complaints, always supports the status quo in terms of
politics, civic leadership, beliefs.

The Pompous
Owl: Near cousin of the Carper, who, not content with his relative’s mere whining,
helpfully hoots out a plethora of solutions to what he perceives as the
problems of the city — schools, parking, policing, taxes, housing, waste
disposal, residents, etc. Generously leaves his droppings, redolent with
gratuitous advice, in numerous letters to the editor and op-ed pieces in
various publications, adding substantially to environmental and intellectual
pollution. Like his cousin, also invariably supports the status quo.

The Scuttling
Cockroach: This young and prolific species usually inhabits comfortable housing far beyond
the ghettos, but frequently makes forays, in company with his mates, into some
dangerous areas in order to obtain fruit unavailable if not forbidden in its
own locale. In the pursuit of gratification in the form of banned substances,
often encounters a peculiar form of insecticide, from police presence,
unscrupulous purveyors, even local citizenry. A smug risk taker, the Scuttling
Cockroach never seems to die out entirely, but returns again and again to the
same feeding grounds.

The Loud,
Proud Liberal: Castigates the city and its citizens for neglecting or
mistreating minorities, women, the indigent, the homeless, etc. Nests in large,
secluded housing in restricted neighborhoods, where minorities, the indigent,
the homeless, etc. never set foot; nurtures its young, who often, amazingly,
metamorphose into Scuttling Cockroaches, in private schools or those public
schools for which the zoning board acts as the board of admissions. Usually
well groomed and highly social, tends to flock around spacious, rolling meadows
surrounded by heavy woods and dense thickets, interrupted by the occasional
babbling brook, where he and his fellows swing sticks at small balls in order
to place them in holes in the landscape.