Scraps 2

Door Dashing & The Dregs

1-800-END-TIMES

Though I’d estimate food delivery is ninety percent of the gig, DoorDash also has its share of oddball stuff, like picking up car parts from 1-800-RADIATOR and delivering them to mechanics all over the region. I don’t mind those assignments so much, until they wind up as C.O.D. deliveries (meaning I have to collect a check for payment and drive it all the way back to 1-800 before I can pick up additional gigs.) For the most part, the radiator and catalytic converter deliveries have been one-way jobs that send me off to far flung neighborhoods, then allow me to pick up work “out there”. That keeps it more lucrative even, dare I say? interesting, with fewer depressing highway miles logged.

I suppose there is satisfaction to be had driving delivery! It’s a low bar.

But then there’s this: I recently shopped for a single item: one (1) Dubai chocolate bar for $3.99.

I do not understand the craze.

I picked it up at a Grocery Outlet (discount chain) at the corner of SE 71st and SE Flavel—then drove that single candy bar to Gresham, about 13 miles away. While I did earn $9.50 for the delivery, it was ordered by a young man who looked to be about 12 years old, and who’d used his neighbor’s address for the drop-off, for reasons unknown; I cleared out of there as the neighbor began lecturing the kid.

26 miles round trip for a candy bar? Ludicrous, yes, but that’s just As The World Turns in Dasher-land; not terribly unusual if I give it any sustained thought. Which I’d rather not.

Yes, Virginia; Your Delivery Driver Is Judging You

That candy bar is just a single manifestation of my least favorite Dasher activity: grocery shopping.

From an equity standpoint, I’m all for it: delivery drivers provide homebound people access to goods in a way that is much safer and less complicated than it might be, whether that’s due to infirmity, agoraphobia, disability, or lack of transportation.

Still, grocery shopping for strangers too often feels like I’m changing their diapers.

Google, Apache License 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Consider this: earlier this week, summoned by the app to shop at Safeway (or Fred Meyer, or Grocery Outlet…who can remember?), I filled my cart with the appointed items:

• a 12-pack of Coke Zero Vanilla;

• a 12-pack of Coke Zero Cherry;

• a 12-pack of Zero Sugar Red Bull (an oxymoron if ever there was one?);

• a pint of Talenti Dairy-Free Caramel Toffee Crunch Gelato;

• and a 6-pack of Charmin.

I’m not too proud to admit: I JUDGED. Hard.

I even briefly considered throwing in another 6-pack of TP, gratis (in the likely event it was necessary after consuming the other items). I mean, read that list of chemical concoctions again, and try envisioning what it does to a human body?

To be fair, the delivery was up a flight of stairs. Plus, the client was ordering in bulk, so I don’t need to get too Judge Judy on their ass. Who am I to deny somebody else their guilty pleasures? Even if they can’t lug them up a flight of stairs.

And yet.

Between the gas burned, the miles logged, fighting with the Dasher app (I’ll save that mishegoss for another post), the CokeZero-RedBull-Talenti-TP run left this driver feeling a bit more bereft than usual.

What does that shopping list (or the MANY lists just like it that I’ve shopped for all over god’s green earth) say about us collectively?

How about this afternoon’s Dash to Petco, dispatched to fetch LIVE MEALWORMS AND CRICKETS to feed somebody’s reptile? I was instructed to use the tongs to retrieve 25 live crickets ($0.13/each) from the climate-controlled bulk bin where they live.

I refused. I draw the line at standing in as a cricket shochet.

Mealworms as food. Photo credit © Raimond Spekking

I’m not so squeamish that I couldn’t grab the mealworms in their Tupperware from the little fridge, and I was happy to substitute a pre-boxed container of 25 crickets (prepared by somebody at Petco, I suppose).

Ferry the boxed vermin cross-town to their end?

Sure, Jan, just call me Charon.

I know: my Door Dash data is purely anecdotal. To draw conclusions from my particular gay midlife malaise is likely a fool’s errand. Unemployment + logging miles in a service industry position that chafes + sacrificial crickets + the woulda, shoulda, couldas of Life at any age, is a vibe.

It’s Erikson’s late stage of “Integrity vs. Despair” looking one squarely in the rear view, and on days like these, Despair looms large. Doesn’t mean Game Over, and maybe happy endings still linger in some moment yet-to-come in the final reel.

But I will say this…

…somewhat authoritatively, from a place of adjacency to my life at this peculiar junction, and indeed these past 5 years: goddamn this fucking country.

Why goddamn? Because for all the chuckles of 12-year-olds ordering candy bars on someone else’s tab, or the grocery cart full of churn-inducing urp with accompanying bath tissue, or the meal worms in the delivery bag with somebody’s Mexican food (lighten up; they were going to the same customer), the drivers of Dash, GrubHub, UberEats, app infinitum, we are out here bearing witness to a great deal more squalor than many citizens do.

Because for as rich and resourced and privileged and lucky as the U.S. still believes itself to be (and which, from a financial standpoint, it certainly is), it is a fucking crime the number of folks who live squalid, unhoused, drug-addled and/or mental illness-hobbled lives.

Folks for whom we provide no care.

None that is lasting or thoughtful, at any rate.

Portland has recently announced closure of hundreds of shelter beds across various temporary housing models (we’ve run out of money, or so it is claimed). The volume of encampments in doorways, between freeways, or encroaching on public spaces is obviously growing; the grounds of the beautiful downtown Central Library have been fenced off yet again.

Let me direct your attention to the frazzled-looking old gal holding her sign near the freeway, appealing for handouts as her ratty-looking pittie shivers nearby. Then multiply her by the dozens of other frazzled, shattered-looking folks near freeway on and off-ramps all over town.

Theatre of the Damned

This morning I started the Dash pretty early—before 8am—and between a dropoff of Taco Bell (so early in the morning?) and a pickup of a bagel sandwich, I watched a woman of undetermined age (37? 45? 72?) rouse herself from beneath a bizarre costume of sleeping bag, horned hat, and oven mitts—it’s been cold here in the evenings. She was in front of a shuttered convenience store (where she’d lain herself overnight, I presume.)

She was not on the same planet we’re on. I have no clue whether drugs or mental illness were her métier, but she looked rough. Considering she could stand—and even stagger forward, if uncomfortably—she was already several levels of privilege above many of the zombies we experience with grim frequency in these parts.

After dropping her sleeping costume, the woman was dressed in layers, revealing an amalgam of athleisure gear that seemed thought-out in some way. She was sort of performing efficiency in a cold body, while approximating I am dressed in some semi-appropriate adult societal way. Not that any of these performed cues would pass the smell test for a satisfactory human life, though I did not stop to ask.

An hour later, not a mile away, I watched another adult woman, age undetermined, shuffle off the multi-use path along the 205 freeway, wearing a housedress and fuzzy slippers. Watching her lurch forward, a bird’s nest of hair in her face, I worried that she was about to amble straight into traffic, though she didn’t. Across the road from her was either an abandoned encampment, or—more likely—simply a mound of property left by folks perpetually en route: pieces of wheeled carts, tent fabric, black garbage bags. I saw no one near the mound, but I wondered if the woman in the house dress was headed there to retrieve something.

Impossible to know.

All these sights symptoms of what this country refuses to address; more accurately, what this country embraces never addressing.

Dem Bones (and GOP Bones, too)

Sen. Old-As-Dirt Grassley (emphasis on the “ass”), in 2026. At just 92 years young, Chuck is 3rd in line to the Presidency (as Senate president pro tempore). By Congressional standards, he has a piddly net worth of ~$6.5M, and this sclerotic obstacle has served in Congress for 50 years. No joke. He once said that Americans who don’t invest in the stock market “spend every darn penny on booze or women or movies.” Fuck him.

My entire adult life, U.S. citizens have been held hostage by a literal mausoleum of legislators—they call it “Congress”. It’s a place where a dead-eyed Mitch McConnell stammers blankly at any podium he can clutch (to keep from falling over), while Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Grassley (and legions of other bags-o-bones) stand by sucking their dentures in time to the steady rhythm of their stock trades.

The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

To say nothing of the fecal golem they call “POTUS,” a zombie if ever there was one: nothing but id.

Don’t mind me; I gotta side hustle my way to the end times.

Thud.

xoxo JDF