Awww, boo on your comfort-and-pain-relief place closing, Atropa! I'm so sorry.
It really was abundantly clear how deeply rooted The Tick is in Adam West's Bats. Utterly, thoroughly.
So good to see your pixels back here again, Laura!
And so, so happy about Team Negative and Team Vaccinated!
ION, I do love my Hecubot so much, but I'm a little afraid of myself and my increasingly shitty hair-trigger temper.
Had an extremely undelightful experience a little while ago at Kezar Stadium--as an athletic facility, it's a no-smoking place despite being outdoors (all-caps signs at every entrance identify it as such; unless you're really inattentive it's very hard to go in without knowing that rule), but every now and then people smoke anyway. Which is entitled and assy and also causes my lungs to seize up, but most of the people who do it are teenagers looking to be out of the way of their parents. I still speak up every time, because I fucking loathe it and it's physically painful to walk or jog through a cloud of it when I wasn't expecting to, but if it's someone who looks like they're low on the privilege ladder I'm apologetic and conciliatory and point out the benches just outside the gates where they can sit and smoke in completely legal peace and privacy. And they're always nice and apologetic back and either stub it out or step outside the gate and it's all good.
But, occasionally the smoker is a white dude who doesn't look like a teenager or a homeless person looking for shelter, just like a white guy who does what he wants where and when he wants and doesn't think twice about it, and I do get saltier with them and just bark out, "This is a no-smoking facility! You need to step outside if you want to smoke!" without the niceness. And today one of them was there, smoking an extremely fat blunt while watching everyone run the upper and lower tracks and belching stank smoke all over the upper track.
I called him out and he promptly went from zero to raving sociopath--I was a fucking bitch who just needed to go the fuck away if I didn't like him smoking, and what the fuck was I going to do to him anyway? I pointed out that there was a police station right on the other side of the chain-link fence behind him and I could go there, and he dared me to fucking do it, you fucking bitch, so I did. Had he been a kid or obviously unhoused or a BIPOC I would've let it go instantly, but he was a well-dressed sandy-haired Nordic-looking full-grown adult man and now he was screaming and smoking even harder with absolute confidence that he'd face no consequences at all, so... I took his picture and walked to the police station, and a couple of officers who didn't have anything more urgent to do decided to amble over.
I walked back to the upper track and started walking again, and he started screaming at me again and gleefully asking if I'd gone to the police, Karen (dude, you're so white you glow in the dark; you don't get to call Karen on a woman who doesn't like you screaming at her), and, gee, look, no police, he guessed they must have better things to do with their time than cater to me, Karen, and wow, I must hate my life a lot and (lasciviously) do I need a hug? At which point I saw the two officers right behind him and said, "I'm sorry, never mind," and walked on just as one of them said, "Pardon me, sir?"
I fully admit to being a bitch about it, but (a) all he had to do was step outside the gate and he could've smoked his stupid smug Nordic ass off and I might have quietly seethed but I would've said and done nothing; (b) he went straight to frothing abuse and daring me to do it, so; and (c) he wasn't arrested and I don't think he even got a ticket, just a stern talking-to (after they finished conferring with him and left, he just gathered up his stuff and did the Charlie Brown shuffle out the front gate).
And then I panicked because it was after dark and I wasn't absolutely certain where he'd gone and I felt actively unsafe going out through the front gate even though it was just a few yards from our door, so I went through the back gate and called Hec and stumblingly told him what had happened (by which time I was only half a block away) and he ran downstairs right away to hold the gate and scan the street for strangers and just generally made me feel watched and loved and safe.
I'm not confronting anyone there again, and I don't feel particularly safe there, and the only good outcomes are knowing how much in my corner David is and that at least one smug entitled white dude faced minor consequences for assholery and will maybe think twice next time.