Substack Losers

The “dox me wrong” crowd

Here’s a special post (in celebration of my own birthday this week!) that’s half weedy plants from my garden, and half losers incorrectly doxxing me on the internet.

I literally could not resist. Either one.

So first let me say again, for the haters in the back, and the friends in the front, that I am off social media. I have a Facebook page I haven’t used since the election. I read but do not participate on Reddit. I do not have instagram. LinkedIn (which I do have begrudgingly and barely use) doesn’t count. I’m not on bluesky or twitter. This here little blog is all we got. Otherwise there’s email, text, actual phone calls, and in-person visits. I’ve been really into the in-person visits lately. Being chronically online was not good for my psyche.

However, certain people who make it their business to get themselves some low low rents from the city (and seem to take a point of pride in being rude, sometimes intergenerationally so), have decided to insinuate to people I have a Reddit handle called Bad_Daughter_9721, where I supposedly say horrible stuff online, and they got a local hate group mad about it on Facebook. So of course after I was sent the screenshots, I went and checked out my Reddit doppelgänger.

Initially I was a bit flattered. This Bad Daughter person says stuff I mostly agree with, and seems passionate about standing up to the same bullshit I see. She also thinks Christian nationalism is foul. She likes to do research and post links. I went down a few rabbit holes she had on there and all of them checked out. So at least I’m being mistaken for someone awesome, even if I’m not her.

Unfortunately these FB hatepage weirdos really seem to hate her. To the point of blaming her for why they look bad in front of the city. A bit of a scapegoating element to it. Very shoot-the-messenger.

They didn’t bother to ask themselves or each other why I’d need an anonymous handle if I say whatever I want to say here and at city council, school committee, and indeed wherever I am. Like why would I even need that?

They also didn’t bother to ask themselves if doxxing and bullying strangers (or perhaps incognito friends who secretly hate what they’re doing?) is a good use of their time.

So now they’re swarming like a hive of bees, manufacturing grievances against me (or me as her) acting like all bets are off since I’ve somehow taken money out of their pockets by saying not to shop at their businesses. No matter that I’ve never done that and they’ve taken my tax dollars to subsidize their physical location, while I’ve actually never even darkened their storefront door to put more money in their pockets, if you wanna get technical. Before now this solely was because as a thrift store nerd I typically find consignment shops to be a total shrug. I want the joy of finding things for cheap, not upsold by someone who already found them and knows the value. But me saying in front of city council that Two Trunks Consignment should be paying market rate rent and not relying on the taxpayer does seem to have made me an enemy, and been taken as a threat, and this online activity has clearly been retaliatory. No matter that I said what I said under my own name and stand by it.

Such a thinly-veiled doxxing and visiting campaign, now complete with a pile of references to red beans and dirty rice and ragin’ Cajuns, while conveniently picking one of the Reddit handles they hate the most to pin on me, seems very transparent. And honestly embarrassing for the shop owner. Like she could have at least had someone else do it so it wasn’t under her own name and storefront. But apparently this is how her business operates.

To add another ugly layer, her husband, a cop, is in the comments with another cop, talking about me calling the police on my father when I was 14, as if I did it for no good reason and said it as some kind of a deranged brag. (But yes, the mental health issues that go along with being raised in a violent home is called PTSD, and thankfully I got therapy for that in my 20’s.)

The other cop (the one who allegedly likes to punch people), expresses no compassion, and says I need to go back to wrestling alligators in Louisiana.

As if I couldn’t stay up here, watching these two lizards interact, and feel right at home.

There’s a few other layers to this, as I can see. First, I’m the only Cajun I know here. So I’ve got to admit that initially all the Louisiana talk made me feel a bit homesick. I was like yeah, I could go for some red beans and rice right now. I need to make me some.

Then I got the saddest voicemail message. One that broke my heart.

It was a different case of mistaken identity. Someone from Kenney’s Seafood, my favorite local seafood place in Slidell, Louisiana.

Their fresh shrimp glisten with rainbow tails. Their catfish plates are perfect. Their hush puppies are delectible. I could go on. We ordered from this place for my wedding. My mother in law bought soft shell crab for everyone. It was amazing. Those were some beautiful happy times.

And I cannot tell you what I’d give for a proper poboy right now.

So Kenney’s was calling me, both in the metaphorical and literal sense, leaving a voicemail for somebody else about the price of crawfish for the weekend.

I breathed deeply to center myself and then politely called back and told him that they had the wrong number. There would be no crawfish for me this weekend.

So, to anyone referencing my ethnicity and region of origin as a joke, go ahead. People smarter and funnier than you have told worse jokes about my people, and it’s Memorial Day weekend and I am up here with y’all and your foolishness, in the cold rain, sans crawfish. It could be better. Just sayin’.

But I do get a kick out of the fact that me, your one lonely local Quincy Cajun, is such a threat that these people feel the need to tell me bless your heart, trot out their Cajun stereotypes, and incorrectly doxx me on the internet.

Maybe just look up market rate rents for your square footage and rejigger a business plan to not include public resource giveaways out of the mayors office? And if you can’t, bless your heart.

That then leaves me with another misconception to clear up. A common one among New Englanders. Bless your heart is not a synonym to fuck you.

In the south the term is much more nuanced. It is deployed in a situation where the score is already known.

So I could say bless your heart to my child when they give me a flower, and it means your heart is sweet and innocent. I could say bless your heart to a lovely blog reader who dropped off some plants at my house (yes, yay, this happened!), and it means your heart is generous and kind. I could say bless your heart to a friend, after hearing someone swerved at her on the road, and it means your poor gentle heart must have been so upset! I could also say bless your heart to someone who is an asshole making money on the consignment store equivalent to a second-rate cupcake business (remember when every random middle aged woman who likes to bake wanted to open one of those?) on the taxpayer dime and has the additional lack of integrity to misplace blame and faux doxx a local mom of small children in retaliation for bringing it up in public, at a city council meeting, after the local newspaper had already covered it.

Still, I have to wonder what they think the outcome of this will be. Like will saying I’m on Reddit change the fact that the public now knows about this, or spur anyone to action on their behalf?

And if so, what type of action?

Not one to critique the size or shape of someone else’s ass (mine is big enough that people occasionally sigh like I’ve ruined their day when I sit next to them on the train) but I’m starting to think they all have chair-shaped behinds since all they do is sit on them behind a keyboard. I’m not overly worried about them moving beyond internet mean-girling.

Nonetheless, it could happen. I see cops who have punched people in there. Proud boys in there. And ladies who like those kinds of men to remain in uniform. Not a particularly savory group.

Not the sort of crowd that I would say has better values than to throw a brick through my window.

So first let me say that I have a porch window that’s already broken and I went and carefully measured the broken window pane, sent my husband to the hardware store, and he returned with the correct size glass pane, wrapped up in some paper. Then he leaned the new wrapped window pane against the window that needs its’ pane replaced. And, that’s the story. That’s where it still sits to this day.

So I really can’t afford to have more broken windows around me. I don’t know when he’d get to it. Honest.

Also, more importantly, I’ve got little kids. Some of them that I’ve brought to city council meetings and whatnot. I don’t want them growing up and being all “my Momma spoke up for Asian civil rights and then someone called her a Cajun bitch and we ended up having to scrape flaming dog poo off our front steps.”

I live on a busy road. There’s too many times I have to clean up actual dog poo, and I don’t own a dog. I don’t need it flaming.

So if you could please not.

But if you do, rest assured there will be a police report. (And as Mr. Cop Husband has assessed, I unfortunately learned how to make one at a very young age.)

Glad we got that out of the way.

Also, to the dude who thinks some number in the bad daughter handle is the birthday of one of my children, first off no, not my kids birthday, not my Reddit handle. But also, could you take five minutes, go in the bathroom, look yourself in the eye in the mirror, and ask yourself the following question:

Do I feel good about myself, trying to doxx five year olds?

And if the answer is yes, I don’t know what to tell you, bro. What a loser.

So the Facebook losers are looking at the Substack losers, and the Reddit losers.

But who are the winners here?

The mayor’s golf course buddies. The developers building luxury condos. The rest of us are just fighting for scraps and debt.

Whether they buy Eastern Nazarene College or not, it won’t belong to us. Not if it’s done the way the mayor is used to doing things. It’ll be divvied up by people richer than us if he can at all help it.

While you count out your tills and bills and scope around on Reddit looking for people’s real names so you don’t have to deal with the truth of your situation, there’s people cashing checks in this city that don’t have your name on them and never will.

So whatever, bless all y’all’s hearts.

And for Clint Eastwood and his shopgirl relatives, that’s the equivalent to saying make my day.

—-—-

Now, because I promised it. Pictures of some plantain and cleavers aka bedstraw that I saved while weeding my garden and dried using a food dehydrator, and am going to put in a jar of sunflower oil for a few weeks. This oil is then able to be strained, mixed with beeswax (you can buy bags of little pellets that make this easy) and put in little tins or jars as a salve for bug bites and irritated skin. You probably have these same weeds in your garden and could do the same.

And here’s a before and after picture of a weekend project (before all the rain) of weeding a garden bed and path I made, inset with a concrete alligator. You can take the girl out of Louisiana, but you can’t the Louisiana out of the girl. 🐊