I avoid stupid people. This is hard because I live in Alabama.

To set the stage, I’m listening to Kevin Hart’s audiobook The Decision. Something funny and inspiring to help you approach this negative world with its negative people in a more positive manner. In the book, Kevin offers up a 30 day, no-complaining challenge, certainly not the first of its kind, but a good exercise nonetheless. Me and the wife decided to try it using stars on the fridge. If we catch the other complaining, they have to go back to day one. I never realized I was such a whiny, little bitch.

I failed the very first day while driving. Driving is my Kryptonite during this challenge. A truck came almost to a stop in front of me to take a two inch high segue into a Subway’s parking lot. “YOU’RE IN A FUCKING TRUCK!” It was like when the doctor tests your reflexes. The idiot in the truck was the rubber mallet and my mouth was the knee. My frontal lobe was watching his cork down by the lake. My lizard brain was sitting in the clock tower, naked and reloading.

But after several restarts, I was getting the hang of this no-bitching thing. You become more self-aware. You re-word things ever so slightly. You change the tone of what you’re saying. I’m not bitching, I say to my wife in a calm voice, I’m only stating the fact that a particular driver in the red car ahead needs to take a sharp right (we’re on the side of a mountain). I’m very proud of my eleven day streak. Then I’m in Birmingham and trying to merge over a couple of lanes. It’s on 280. It’s five lanes in this spot and I only need to get over two. Although it’s hard to believe, for a few hundred feet behind me, as I begin to merge, there is only one vehicle. The lady in the car somehow manages to manipulate her speed such that neither slowing down nor speeding up allows me to get over. I miss the exit. I say things you shouldn’t say about other people’s moms. I say things you shouldn’t say if you’re a drunken sailer who’s just sit down on his own balls. If you were Yosemite Sam on HBO. You get the picture. The tiny devil sitting on my shoulder is laughing with glee. Veins are protruding from my forehead. I look at my wife. She is smiling. No star for me today. I am back to square one on our little calendar on the fridge.

I’m not a quitter. I start again. I am on day two when I walk into a mom and pop grocery store in our little redneck town. You know, the type with the plywood dais right at the front of the store where someone hands out money to the cashiers. There is a lady screaming from her dais down to a customer that’s checking out about ten feet away. “- cause there ain’t but about 10,000 actual deaths from that in the whole world -” It was a very recognizable stream of stupid, and I walked right through it. I immediately shed my cloths, but I am still drenched in it. The portion of my brain that harbors logic is screaming. It has been attacked out of the blue. She continues to yell. I try to close my ears and mind, to create a cone of silence around me as I turn down the isle. But still I car hear the lady in check out validate the lady in the dais, agging her on, the dais lady with her butt cheeks proudly swelling out on either side of the shit that’s spewing out of her mouth.

There are a total of three cashiers. Two women and one young boy. When I return to the front, the dais lady is walking past the cashiers. And for the first time, I simply can’t take it anymore. The profound ignorance. The prideful stupidity. The apparent inability to simply Google something.

I say, “Excuse me, mam. I overheard you talking about Covid. I’d like to make a bet with you.”

She looks at me and then at the twenty dollar bill I’ve pulled from my back pocket.

“If you can prove to me that there have only been around 10,000 deaths worldwide due to the pandemic, I’ll give you this $20.” I offer it out to her. “I’ll give you a week to come up with proof. You can hold the money until then. I’ll be back in a week.” I regret not having more cash. $500 would be something you have to address a little more seriously.

“Well, I don’t want to take your money,” she says, “But that’s right. And by the way, that thing you got (pointing to my mask, as she’s not wearing one) is messing with your immune system. You need all those bacteria and stuff to make your immune system strong. When I was young we used to play in the dirt and chicken poop and everything else and we’re just fine. And another thing, all you need is Zinc. Take that and you can’t get it. I take it every day and I don’t got it.” And she turns and leaves.

My head is in a fog as I check out. I grab my bag to leave, but then can’t help myself and turn around to face all three cashiers. “Any of you guys want to take the bet? Prove the crap that’s coming out of her mouth and take my $20?”

Now the young boy is perking up. That’s a twenty, after all. Three hours take home in one fell swoop. The other two are silent. He looks hesitantly at me and then them, and says slowly, “All you have to do is look it up.” This is an uncertain revelation.

So I say, “Yes! All you have to do is look it up!” I am very happy he has stumbled onto this epiphany. He starts to look it up on his phone and I remind him that to get the twenty, you have to take the bet first. He doesn’t say he will, but continues looking it up.

I turn to the lady that checked me out and say, “I don’t understand, it’s not like this stuff is hiding in a library somewhere on a microfilm. You can literally Google ‘Covid US’ and the statistics are right there on the page.”

And she says, “I can tell you about that. Just ask Alexa. That whole thing is just something to disrupt the election.”

I stare for a moment like I do when someone challenges reality itself. I say, “So the pandemic that’s affecting the entire world is happening just to disrupt an election in the US?”

“Yep.”

I walk back to my car. I tell my wife that I made the mistake of interacting with them (meaning Trumpers) for the first time in the real world. I picture aliens, some advanced life forms, coming to Earth and feeling, after first contact, the way I did then. Time to pack up and leave, they would say. The others saying, but I thought we were going to teach them how to-. No! says the alien who bore witness. We leave now!

These are real people in the real world. People who don’t seem to know you can simply Google something to find out what’s true and what’s not. People who think I’m compromising my immune system while they are standing there in front of me, maskless, compromising my immune system. People who think that somehow, somewhere, someone has orchestrated the deaths of almost 900,000 people world wide just to rig one country’s election.

I would like to apologize to Kevin Hart. I am very sorry, Kevin. I’ve lost all my stars again today.

Also, if you’ve read this and don’t know what a dais is, that’s okay. Ignorance of something is okay because you can fix that. Apparently you shouldn’t ask Alexa, though. That bitch is cray cray. But you can Google it. However, if you don’t know what a dais is and refuse to find out for yourself, that’s willful ignorance. If you’re happy remaining ignorant about things, then you’re in the same, shallow gene pool as the People of the Dais, who are both spewing and swallowing each other’s piles of shit like they’re in The Human Centipede 4: Rise of the GOP. And since I’ve already lost my stars for the day, I say to all the willfully ignorant people out there – Go fuck yourselves.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find some chicken poop to play in so I can boost my immune system.