Fingernails

Fingernails

Sometimes, when I cross the line to Indiana, I stop at Howie’s truck stop diner for a pork tenderloin sandwich.

See, I was born and raised in Indiana. Now I live just across the state line. But, because I’m a Hoosier by birth, when I go over to Indiana and pass by Howie’s, I usually stop for one of my birth state’s signature foods.

The food at Howie’s is good. The only annoying thing is that, because I’m usually by myself, I sit at the counter. And above the counter is a TV that’s always turned on FoxNews.

It’s mildly annoying because I try to avoid the news. FoxNews. CNN. MSNBC. All that stuff.

I’m a snob. That’s what it is.

Sorta like how, for years and years, I purposefully avoided that show, Big Bang Theory. I dodged if for years like a dog’s pile on a sidewalk. I avoided it cause what little I’d seen, it was so abominably, so contemptibly vapid, unoriginal and comedically uncreative that I needed to pretend it didn’t exist. I tried erasing it from my mind, like the shocking, first sight of a dog’s red, erect penis. If popular entertainment can be junk food, then I perceived Big Bang Theory as the off-brand of Velveeta from Save-A-Lot.

Anyway, I was sitting in a bar onetime and a group of girls walked in. They knew the bartender and asked her to change the channel. She clicked around and left it at Big Bang Theory. I was only a transient interloper at their bar, so what could I do? That’s how my years of dodging Big Bang Theory eventually got sunk.

Howie’s and FoxNews is sorta the same thing. It’s a minor annoyance. I don’t wanna make a big deal out of it, but it is annoying. I’m not a complete sociopath. I understand that, especially out in public, you can’t get everything you want.

So one day I’m sitting there at Howie’s with FoxNews on the TV. I’d ordered my pork tenderloin sandwich and was waiting, when a couple came in. The guy sat next to me, with only one seat between us.

He sat and began bullshitting with his gal and the waitress. They all knew each other.

I kept to myself, but I could tell the guy was distracted by the fabricated outrage they were blabbering about on the TV news.

I stuck to pretending I was interested in whatever was on my phone. I didn’t want him to think that I was interested in their high-fructose indignation too.

My order finally came. Pork tenderloin sandwich with pickle and onion. The waitress announced it. I confirmed.

I put the phone down, ending that charade.

That’s when the guy says to me, “You must be a Hoosier. Pickle and onion.”

“The only way,” I said. “Got it from my dad.”

It was only polite to look over at the guy while addressing him.

That’s when I noticed the fingernails. They ran the color palette from black licorice through shit stain brown to smoker’s teeth yellow. Thick. Crusted. Flaky. Splintered fingernails. Fingernails like burnt potato chips. Fingernails as nasty as any meth addict’s mouth. Fingernails as gross as the worst fungus infected toenails you’ve ever seen. But this was on his hands. Both hands. At the tips of all his fingers.

I turned away in disgust. I hadn’t even touched my sandwich yet. How was I supposed to tolerate it after seeing those nails?

I wondered how in the hell a guy even eats with such disgusting hands. How’s he bring those gnarled claws that close to his mouth? How can he let them touch his food?

Well, I’d received my meal, so I was obligated to eat.

I took a bite. It wasn’t easy. I think my disgust sensitivity is, generally, fairly low, which is a predictor of openness to experience, as well as political persuasion, I believe. Yet, even with my correlating political persuasion, those fingernails put my disgust sensitivity through a real test.

I tried to eat while ignoring the shock of those nails, along with the TV news that kept vying for my attention in the background. Now there were two things to try to ignore. I tried isolating the thought of those fingernails in some obscure crease in my mind. A spot reserved for things like dog penises, nude pics of Lena Dunham, massive hemorrhoids, and beheadings. All the things I’ve seen, but would rather forget.

I thought, “This son-of-a-bitch could show some common decency and respect for his fellow man by wearing gloves, at least when he’s in a restaurant.”

I tried to eat while picturing soft, white cotton gloves. I pictured rubber gloves. Anything. Oven mitts. Hockey gloves. Any damned thing.

Sure, it would be weird, a guy coming into a diner, eating with oven mitts on. Or even hockey gloves.

I imagined him bumbling around in oven mitts, trying to drink a cup of coffee. Spilling it all over. Then, somebody asking him, “So, what’s up with the mitts?”

Then him, removing the oven mitts to reveal those crusty nails.

“Sorry I asked.”

This is how I distracted myself – with amusement.

Meanwhile, they were blathering on the TV about something the president had done. Something, according to them, that proved his incompetence.

So this guy with the fingernails says to me, “See, this is what happens when we elect an idiot.”

Even while I’m eating, I’d rather smell an average man’s flatulence or halitosis than hear about his politics. Especially his farts, because, with them, there is, at least, a bit of substance. There is, at least, something unique in odor and/or resonance. There is, usually, something worth reacting to in a common fart.

“Uh huh,” I said.

First, it was the fingernails. Then, this political vomit from the upset stomach of an acid refluxed mind. An upset stomach of a mind barfing from too much Taco Bell. The only thing left was for his girlfriend to bare her flabby, pockmarked, dingleberried, hairy-cracked ass if he wanted to put the final touch on completely ruining my meal.

And this is the problem. You get rubes who watch shit like that and think they know everything about politics. The same morons and dopes who’d think they know about astrophysics from watching some episodes of Star Trek.

That TV is like a goddamned Greek oracle for most of the clientele that comes to Howie’s. A fucking oracle that advertises chunky pillows, vitalizing fruit smoothies and mesothelioma lawsuit representation between its offerings of prophecy from the deities. Divine wisdoms spoken through the oracle of Sean Hannity on one channel. The sibyl of Anderson Cooper on another.

I remember a time when propaganda was limited, primarily, to the TV set at home, magazines and newspapers, and the radio. Now, it’s everywhere. We carry it everywhere we go. And we love it. We worship, by habit, at the alters of our indoctrination to one idiotic ideology or its opposite. We idolize and glorify our voluntary stupefaction.

The guy said something else about what was happening on the TV.

I played stupid, hoping he’d give up. Hoping he’d see his profundity was lost on me, like trying to convince a dog why it should wear pants.

But he kept at it.

At first, my disgust at those fingernails was followed by a pang of sympathy. I mean, it must suck to go around looking like you got a concoction of earwax, boogers and mulch chips for fingernails.

But after his commentary, a regurgitation of drivel funneled into his calcified brain by the TV, I felt nothing but disdain. I hoped those fingernails smelled as bad as they looked and with every sip of coffee or bite of a hot dog or donut, he got a nauseating whiff of ass, sulfur and/or mildew.

I hoped he had an insulting nickname I didn’t know about. Something in a nickname that mocked those grotesque fingernails. Something as crude as Fungus. Mr. Mushroom. Moldy John. Mildew Phil. Etc.

I imagined this asshole’s brain being as rotted as those goddamned fingernails.

It’s not that I care what he thinks, one way or the other. Rather, it’s the odious and obnoxious presumption that I should care. Or, just as bad, the presumption that his interpretation of things is so profoundly astute that there is no way I or anyone else could disagree.

And that fucking TV was the catalyst.

I still like going to Howie’s for the pork tenderloin sandwich.

I like it enough that I’ll keep going.

I just wish they would put that TV on something else. Anything else.

Even Big Bang Theory.