I am Hubris the Great, and I have been mopping floors at the local Burger King for the last two weeks because my last employer, TGIF, did not appreciate the superior idea I gave them concerning the use of urine (my urine) as a condiment for a select class of patrons. The inspiration for my menu addition came when a man dressed in a Vince Worfolk (a 370 pound unit of flesh on the New England Patriots) jersey and sporting the obligatory goatee (see: cunt-mouth), and his Manatee-looking girlfriend, who seemed to have strayed from her herbivore biologic life-style, sat down to be served by someone so far their intellectual superior, me, that one adjective coming from my mouth – example, prosaic, meaning tiresome – had the same value as this couple’s entire verbal history dating back to when they first met at the Little Debbie rack at a Family Dollar Store. I asked for their order – a simple enough question – when the Lady Manatee treated the next five minutes as if she were deciding the fate of Mankind, citing various parts of the menu aloud with the same self-importance that Lincoln gave to the Gettysburg Address.
“Oh gosh,” she mused. “I love Pot Stickers. They are so…so…”
“Liable to add another layer of adipose tissue to your already heavily insulated anatomical vessel,” I said, wanting nothing more than to be charitable and help the poor slob along in her sluggish thought-process.
Vince – or the man pretending to be Vince – reacted in the predictable way of the lower order of American male, who conflates social class with the frequent use of the word “piss-pump,” the arrogance deriving from the hyphen separating the alliterative piss and pump. “Hey,” he foamed, “who the fuck are you to talk to my lady like that?”
“Who am I?” said Hubris. (Yes I refer to myself in the third person, if only to gain some distance from my exceptional good looks.) “Why I am Socrates to your houseboy slave; Voltaire to your Troyes peasant; God to your Mosean stone-tablet chiseler.”
Well one word led to another – or, better, one of my erudite words led to one of Vince’s grunts – and soon the manager came to the scene. He ingratiated himself with this slob of a patron using all the sycophancy of a seamstress to Queen Elizabeth I. Vince and the Manatee would get a free appetizer, smiled the oily TGIF leading functionary. I was told to go fetch an order of Loaded Potato Skins, to which I contributed the aforementioned product of the millions nephrons that make up my productive kidneys. The one wrinkle in my revenge strategy was that I made my donation next to a trawling family of six.
Oh well. My Virago picked me up that night and advised me to next time just practice my flawless Hebrew dialect en route to the erring customer so that my spit will accidentally fall upon a steamy plate of sixth-rate appetizers.
Now I am pushing a mop, a task that has the benefit of allowing my neural circuitry to follow its brilliant course.
Hubris The Great 