The Middle Finger is Dead
VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR
I’m heartbroken about the middle finger. It has lost its magical powers. I flipped someone off on the road today and felt no joy, no fear, no regret that it was a mom I knew from school drop-off.
No one needed to teach me. I was an early middle finger sticker upper. I probably started flipping people off when I was three years old. One day it just went up and fuck all, I kept doing it.
I can’t take all the credit. My mom was a flipper offer but she never sat me down and showed me how. My dad was a flipper offer, but he was always driving when it happened, so I could only watch peripherally as he raised the bird.
My grandma never flipped anyone off, but had she been from a less repressed era, I think she would have enjoyed it immensely. I think she would have flipped off those do-gooder PTA gals, her line up those edges quilting group posse, those fucking self-righteous, fake-Christian-value, next-door neighbors who never picked up their tree dumping mulberries that stained her beautiful pristine driveway. I wish she could come back just once and give them the finger. My middle finger wishes that for her.
There are so many people to give the finger to these days. I’m not going to say who I would flip off, but I think we can all think of someone special we’d love to walk right up to, stick up our middle finger and say, “Fuck you, man. You’re a terrible human being.”
A middle finger doesn’t hurt anyone, but it gets the job done. Well, it used to get the job done until it lost its magical powers. I think the gun, sadly, has replaced the middle finger the way video killed the radio star.
Those gun people don’t get it. Shooting someone is so much less erudite than giving someone the bird. Giving someone the finger is like literary criticism whereas shooting someone is like Yelp.
That’s what I love about you, middle finger. You’re just there to tell people to fuck off and walk away. Message delivered. I already sent out my Christmas card this year which is my family, dressed up like Communists, in front of the Mother Earth tree, giving our friends and family the finger.
I’m not going anywhere, middle finger. I know one day someone will piss me off so badly, you will find your inner strength and rise again.
You really are quite brilliant. I would buy your book.