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bullying people with kindness
Thursday, March 25 1999
I had Kim meet me for lunch at 2:00pm, mostly so I could return an unusable DIMM once and for all to Fry's Electronics. When that was completely done and over with, we only had about 15 minutes left before Kim had to go somewhere. So we did a quick lunch at an unfortunately sit-down kind of restaurant, Kooky's Diner at the Frazee-Friars shopping center. It's one of those retro-fifties places where the waitress really does scoot around on roller skates and a neon sign urges us to "remember the days" even though we'd have to be in our sixties to remember very much. Girls wore below-the-knee skirts back then and danced in a way that revealed their bare thighs, or so the mural on the wall indicated. The cars in the mural were so quaint they might as well been horse-drawn carriages. I wonder if there was ever a cute, sexually-tinged horse-and-buggy decade.
Kim and I both had the chili with crackers. It was, as expected, ridiculously overpriced. "They couldn't have gotten away with that in Wyandotte," Kim assured me. A diner in Wyandotte would have been this way (and much more) without trying at all, though it would probably also have to bribe the health inspector on a regular basis.
It was a rainy day in San Diego, so I got a ride home with John the Senior Editor guy. The Grand Pooh Bah is taking him and Al to Las Vegas for some sort of "content pow-wow" this weekend. A "content pow-wow" is something that probably could only happen in that strange place where the cheesiest aspects of California meet the cheesiest aspects of the internet. Where exactly that place is in the real world doesn't matter, so I suppose Las Vegas is as good a setting as any. I don't envy John and Al on their upcoming "pow-wow." My experience with the Grand Pooh Bah indicates that he uses the strategy of bullying people with kindness and then, once they're thoroughly demoralized but in a position of obligational weakness, he injects his latest crackpot idea. This social-business strategy seems to have had the effect of maintaining a climate of insecure irrationality, a surreal mindscape where everyone comes to feel they've been given unprecedented power while at the same time scared out of voicing their opinions on the insanity that surrounds them.
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