It started with Body Shaming by Kate.  Then her husband Andy and her friend What’s Her Name shamed my face.  What could be fucking be left to make fun of?

My pigment.

I was casually walking into the Third-world club,  as fresh and innocent as the day I was born, when I ran into the Kate and Andy — the tag team of shame.

“How’s the knee?” they said.  For a second I honestly thought they were concerned about my health.

I stuck out my leg, so they could see the knee for themselves — complete with the two tiny holes from the arthroscopic surgery.

They scrunched up their giant mouths that front their big, bulbous heads.  I was waiting for the comment about my two teeny, tiny marks…

“Maybe you should try to get some sun on that leg?” Andy said.  “I think it’s glowing.”

They walked out the door laughing like they had just demoted another “loser” from the cool kids’ table.

Goddamnit, my pigment impairment strikes again.

Chappelle Show Ashy Larry

The dry winter air and lack of sun made my alabaster legs a chalky albino imitation of Ashy Larry.

I limped upstairs to do 20 minutes of one-legged rowing.  There wasn’t a more pathetic ghostly sight at the Third World club that night.

Fucking Overconfident Kids

I started to think about Kate and Andy’s baby boy.  He’s a teenager now.  Unlike most teens, he’s funny, smart and completely comfortable talking around adults — even when they have been drinking in the Third World for several hours.

How the fuck can he turn out like that, getting raised by team ” shame”?  I can only imagine the pile of micro-aggressions they must have unleashed for the past 15 years.

He’s an only child.  Just like my Boy.  Both young men share that seemingly unshakeable confidence. You know the kind of self-esteem that powers people like Trump or Hitler… without the psychopath part.

The Bear has done her share of shaming.  While others treated our son like a middle-class Prince,  I have felt it was my personal mission to “bring our boy back down to earth.”

But compared to Kate and Andy, I’m just a fucking amateur.

Maybe there’s something to these micro-aggressions that makes kids strong.  You pick on them enough at home, nothing in the world can phase them.

When my Boy was first working in a call center for one of the mega banks, his boss said, “How did you get so good at dealing with angry and difficult people?”

“Have you met my parents?” The Boy said.

So maybe there’s a little lesson in this Third World morality play:

If people flip you shit, it means they actually give a shit...

So as a fat ass, lazy-eyed, pigment-impaired loser, I just want to say thanks Kate and Andy.  The insults you hurl from your weirdly over-sized judgmental faces means a lot.