Complaint Containment

My STUPID driver-side visor keeps coming loose and I need a T20 Torx bit to screw it back in every 3 months or whatever. I’d been borrowing my dad’s, but just on general principle I wanted to get my own as I imagine most could understand (I think my dad sees it as a waste of resources), so I went to AutoZone.

I think the worker who checked me out was a transwoman? I agree that the whole “sex and gender” thing is more complex than meets the eye, so I never want to assume or whatever and I didn’t feel like the level of interaction I was having warranted asking one’s pronouns, but I feel “they” appeared AMAB or whatever and were more femme-presenting than I would typically expect at an auto parts store, my being somewhat of a 20th-century guy in many ways.

The more stereotypical “guy” that “greeted” me at the door completely lackadaisically told me the aisle that screwdrivers were in, whereas the worker I’m talking about, like, walked me to the air fresheners, for whatever that’s worth.

I’m not sure if there’s a connection between their more or less stereotypically “belonging” in a space and the level of help they were willing to offer, but if so, I think there’s an underlying assumption about, like, “deservingness” and the need or ability to earn a place in… a place based on differential treatment of other people that I wasn’t raised with and isn’t intuitive to me. I was raised basically being told to .just work at the absolute maximum no matter how anyone treats you, I assume because my parents were the children of community leaders in small towns and 1) they didn’t want to come off as controlling or entitled, and 2) word would get around anyway–they didn’t have to “convince” anyone of anything.

In a vaguely related way, I remember going to a bar for the first time with coworkers when I was like 22 and asking the people I entered with, like, “So how does this work?” and their being totally confused by the question. “You order a drink.” The kind of thing that was bothering me there was, like, unlike typically at the checkout of a store or whatever, you obviously have to get the bartender’s attention, and to do that, you have to figure out how their attention and, like, desire works. Which, in the post I made about my relationship with the movie Trainspotting,¹ part of my point is that my (and, like, as an ostensible cis man, my dad’s) attention and desire operates completely differently than most people who go to a bar’s.

Like, going to an auto parts store, you can (at least try to) think purely about physical objects–a T20 Torx bit, an air freshener–but you’re eventually going to have to intersect with the creative expression of unconscious, inarticulable human drives.

One of which is the drive for destruction, by the way, but that’s another post.

1. Or maybe “a post”; I’m thinking of making successive posts about it ↩︎