I take Jackson to Taco Bell maybe once or twice a month so that he can have tacos whose shells are made out of giant Doritos. I have eaten one of these amazing creations myself and though it's unclear whose hand I would shake were I to congratulate the inventor of these marvelous things, I don't make a habit of them because they're so delicious it makes me suspicious of what's in them. It seems simple enough, but I know they have some terrible, addictive ingredient in there that I can't help but want more of, despite my better judgment, like lard, or Channing Tatum's tears.

So there we were, waiting for Jackson's tacos, standing next to a white, middle-class, hetero couple who were also waiting for whatever they ordered, when in walked a large, middle-aged white man whose shorts were hanging halfway down his ass. The woman and I looked at each other.

"You can't look away from something like that," she said.

"If I were a different kind of person, it would be all over Instagram right now," I said.

"The People of Taco Bell," she said.

"Mom, sshhh," Jackson said. 

Then her boyfriend piped up and said, "Excuse me, sir! Your shorts are hanging down, you might want to pull them back up!"

"Oh my God," said the woman, "What are you doing?"

"I'm telling him that we noticed --"

"I'm sorry?" said the man with the prodigious butt crack as he pulled up his giant basketball shorts. "I'm hearing impaired!"

"It's okay!" yelled her boyfriend. "You're fine now!"

"I didn't hear what were you trying to tell me," yelled the man.

"I didn't want to embarrass you!" yelled the boyfriend.

"Oh my God," hissed the woman. "Why did you do that?"

"It's a side effect of being brain damaged," said the boyfriend, "I have no filter! It's okay!"

"No, it's not!" she said.

"And now we're the assholes," I said. Terrible, judgmental assholes making light of some man who was simply out living his life and couldn't hear that his shorts were falling down, and it took a brain-damaged man to bring us to our senses. 

She sighed. Her boyfriend picked up their order.

"Have a good night!" he said loudly to everyone in Taco Bell as they walked out the door.

And it was then that I vowed to only go to drive-through restaurants for the rest of my life in order to spare humanity from having to deal with me. Jackson, unfortunately, is stuck with my faulty example of adulthood full-time.

PART TWO OF THIS AMAZING UPDATE

The reason I skipped last month's monthly post is that I had set a September 30 deadline for myself to finish the second draft of this novel I'm writing, and that deadline made a lovely whooshing sound as it went by. October 30 is likely to go by as well without a completed second draft, and while I am only four chapters away from finishing this beast, I find that a lot of loose ends need tying up and I can't just send it off into the world with a note pinned to it that says, "Please read this, it's pretty much done but I can probably make it better." So I'll be going back to it this afternoon, because that's what keeps me off the streets and away from harassing the hearing impaired.

AND SO WE MUST CONCLUDE

Every post needs a photo, so here's one I took in the library yesterday. I was busy erasing all the underlining someone did in a book about Mozart's life when I came upon this persnickety little correction, done in pen. In pen. GODDAMNIT, PEOPLE.

According to Grammar Girl, this pen-correcting person is WRONG and I am tempted to go back to work tomorrow and amend his or her work with a little Post-It errata note. The library vigilante within me is currently squaring off with the Joe Orton-style library vandal, so no one's really going to win. (I know, I am full of links today, but if you're only going to click on one, choose the last one, I beg of you.)

THUS ENDETH THE UPDATE.