I feel like I’m fairly nice to people in general. I have an open face, love being chipper, love talking to people. But the flip side of this is that should someone treat me with disrespect, I go batshit evil.

The most recent offender to make my shit-list is an evening shift manager at CVS. This is the CVS I pass on my way to and from work. Sometimes I stop in twice a day. I’ve gotten to know the employees, and they laugh at my lame jokes. I know about their families, and they know about mine.

On the evening in question, a woman I’ve not met before was working the register. Jaqueline. I plopped my bottle of whiskey on the counter and she asked for my CVS card. I said “I’m just buying this. No need.” and she rolled her fucking eyes at me. Man. I have been rolling my eyes since I was a fetus. I hate it when people roll their eyes at me.

Then she bagged the whiskey. I said “I don’t use plastic bags. I have my backpack.” To which she said, “It’s the law. I have to put it in a bag.”

Too many people believe this. It’s not the law. There is a state law that says you can take home an open bottle of alcohol from a restaurant, but that needs to be in a bag in your trunk. They did that to prevent people from feeling like they needed to suck down a full bottle of wine at a restaurant.

As for unopened containers, they don’t have to be bagged. You can walk down the street clutching a bottle of whiskey so long as it’s un-opened.

So, I felt kind of like I do when I tell people about it being legal to park in loading zones during non-business hours. Here was my chance to educate. I told her it’s not a law.

To which she put on that special smile you reserve for people you can’t stand and said, “Yes. It is.”

At this point there was a rather large line queued up behind me. I’d slid my card already. And I told her, “I think you need to look it up when you get home. People think it’s the law. But it isn’t.” Her reply was to loudly say, “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”

I grabbed the bag, walked to the entrance, removed the bottle from the bag, and threw the bag on the floor. Because I’m childish, that’s why.

All the way home I crafted my email to CVS. They needed to know that this lady was a snot-ball. I emailed them as soon as I got home. It’s been four days, and they haven’t replied. Guess I’m taking my business to Rite-Aid. Suck it, Jaqueline.

It’s not the end of the world, you’re not dead, you have plenty of time and everything is gonna feel better as soon as you have a drink.

— Delicious Tacos (@Delicious_Tacos) May 2, 2013

A bar in South Carolina printed out my Yelp review and hung it on their wall. That’s not just a South Carolina tradition, by the way. They just liked the review that much.

And so I’m finding it really hard to deal with the email I just received from Yelp. And I’m finding it really hard to deal with me trying to access their site to try to contact them and getting this:

The email, short and sweet, says,

Hi there, 

I’m writing to let you know about our Support team’s decision to close your user account. Your account has been closed because of Terms of Service (http://www.yelp.com/static?p=tos) violations, including using your account for commercial or promotional purposes.

Please note that we do not provide further details on account closures.

In other words, “We decided to close your account and we don’t need to tell you why. Oh, and since we decided that, we’re blocking your IP so we never have to talk to you again.”

Can someone queue that Gotye song, please? Yelp just dumped me and I’m feeling fragile. No explanation. No talking about it. They just peaced out on me, and they could care less.

I checked out their terms of service from another IP to try to see what they were on about. The infractions they eluded to are explained as such:

Your account is for your personal, non-commercial use only. In creating it, we ask that you provide complete and accurate information about yourself to bolster your credibility as a contributor to the Site. You may not impersonate someone else (e.g., adopt the identity of a celebrity or your next-door neighbor), create or use an account for anyone other than yourself, provide an email address other than your own, or create multiple accounts. If you use a pseudonym, take care to note that others may still be able to identify you if, for example, you include identifying information in your reviews, use the same account information on other sites, or allow other sites to share information about you with Yelp.

And I just don’t get it. I’m not impersonating anyone. I’m not promoting myself. I’m clearly who I say I am. I had a bunch of friends on Yelp. I checked in at places I was at. I reviewed regularly. What did I do wrong?

And I don’t take issue with them trying to make sure there aren’t any fake accounts or people dogging other businesses to try to make their own look good. But I do take issue with them not even bothering to consult me about it. They could have cleared this up with one email. “Hey, dog, are you real? Are you a business owner?” I know they have employees. Have the asshat who sent me the kill email instead send me a preliminary email explaining the concerns.

But now I’m left with nothing. And just as I used to love Yelp; as much as I was a huge supporter and defender of Yelp? I now hope they burn to the ground. I spit on them. I hope one of the many lawsuits regularly filed against them takes them down. And I will miss them very very much.

Anyway, when I was little my mom used to leave us with different people fairly often. She’d call them our relatives, but we weren’t related to them at all. This one woman, Aunt Jane, had hair like a horse’s main and hips like a freight train. She was mean and crude, and she gave people tattoos in her living room with india ink.

So, once Jane and her husband, Greg, who I remember little about other than white t-shirts and a mustache, took us out to run some errands and on the way back to their house, we picked up McDonald’s. Man, did I love McDonald’s. My whole body would shake as I stuffed all my fries in my mouth at once.

So, we get to McDonald’s and Greg asks Jane what she wants and all she wants is a hamburger. Which, what? A woman that size? Didn’t add up to me. So when Greg ran into the McD’s to order our food while we sat out in the car, I asked Jane, “Why are you only getting a hamburger?”

Jane told me she was on a diet. I kind of knew what that meant. My mom was always on a diet. I was 4 years old at the time, so my definition of a diet was a thing that fat women did where they ate less for a few days. But, I gotta say, I didn’t see much point in it. Why would you do that to yourself? And I also thought that any food was going to turn into fat, anyway.

So, I said to Jane, “But if you eat that hamburger, you’re still going to be fat.”

I probably deserved that massive swinging slap on my face. I didn’t even get to explain myself, but what would I have said?

We got back to the house and Jane and Greg made me stand in the corner and they wouldn’t let me eat my happy meal, but my brother and sister sat there crying and eventually they joined me in the corner and protested by not eating their meals.

Solidarity.

The rest of my day was super-charged with sadness. Because of a memory.

Sometimes you’re inside a place for so long that you’re sure when you leave that place, every part of you is going to go flying off in different directions. Jail, for instance. You get released at 4:30 am, and some friend of yours has to pick you up, and you go eat your breakfast, but the world is too big for you, and you’re not sure how to act.

When I was 12 and on my 3rd stay in a mental hospital they wouldn’t give me my clothes back for 2 weeks. They needed to be sure I wasn’t suicidal. Your clothing is a privilege in a place like that.This woman came in, some outside do-gooder, and like, wanted to give everyone make overs. Mary Kay. She was a round-faced, sweet woman who’d imagined that a little bit of toner would improve the quality of the lives of the mentally ill. I remember how uncomfortable she was looking at my face, how it registered that I was a child. I was a child in a hospital gown without a will to live.

That place sucked. My roommate was an obese stinky old woman who kept punching me in the tit. The staff would take away my soda privileges for making jokes about death. There’s no room for humor in mental wards. They want you to learn to cope by taking pills and deep breaths.

Once I demonstrated to them that I could handle myself, they let me have visitors. Or visitor. I only had one. Debbie. She was my case worker. I’d been there two months, and they said that for Debbie’s visit I could go off-unit to the gift shop.

Once we got there I felt like that stupid little shop was the biggest place I’d been in my whole life and I started to cry because I knew I’d always be alone in the way I felt. I’d always feel a thing nobody could possibly understand. Debbie bought me a bookmark with some quote about the importance of life.

A month later I got to go back to the group home and back to school. The lights were brighter than I’d remembered and while I didn’t want to actively try to kill myself,life still didn’t seem important. Bookmarks aren’t always right.