DC Chicken Wing Bones Drive Capitol Hill Yuppies Nuts

Where have all the DC hoodoo men gone? Time was you could find a good hoodoo man to bless a mojo bag as easily as you could buy a mediocre sandwich covered in goat cheese at Cosi. Without these neighborhood mystics, Washington residents have no way to deal with the mysterious mountains of chicken bones all over town. The greasy old bones are turning up literally everywhere -- and white people are concerned.

Neighborhood debates over chicken bones often carry some uncomfortable subtext, [Carrie] Nelson admits, so she hopes her former neighbors on Capitol Hill (she recently moved to D.C.'s Hillcrest neighborhood) will exercise a bit more understanding.

"There is something sort of underlying it ... I don't know if I'd say it's racial, but more like, people assuming the worst," she says.

If we did have a hoodoo man around, he’d scoop up all these errant bones, shake 'em like dice and divine from them our horrible future (President and Mr. Bristol and Levi Johnston-Palin). Instead, a rudderless capital faces a debilitating Chicken Wing Bone Problem, which leads to the favorite local pastime of everybody whining at each other in bureaucratic circles.

On one side, you've got the wealthy Capitol Hill homeowners all pissed off because the nearby new-ish 7-11 sells chicken wings, chicken wings that self-loathing slobs eat before dumping the remaining bones all over the sidewalk, like self-loathing slobs. On the other side, you have both the dude who owns the convenience store and all your favorite DC libtards.

After the homeowners took their bitching to the local authorities, the 7-11 guy agreed to quit selling looseys , but he says he'll keep selling those "prepared chicken wings." And why not? He makes a grip of money off these things and they probably taste good in the way that food like that is manufactured to taste, so to hell with Advisory Neighborhood Commission 6A. Besides, the company hasn't yet made "boneless chicken wings" readily available to franchises.

ANC commissioners are now looking to reclassify the 7-11 as a restaurant, a change that would affect the other eleven 7-11s planned for DC. 

Luckily for Carrie Nelson and her former neighbors, a chicken-loving squirrel artfully turned the subject away from race:  

Nelson, who owns a yellow Labrador, admits that she had for some time also pointed fingers at her neighbors for this serious threat to her pooch. "It was like, oh my God, who's throwing their chicken bones on the ground?" she says. Not until just such a bone literally fell out of a tree right in front of her did it occur to her that squirrels might often be to blame.

Other very tolerant people have since spread the blame to rats and crows, all part of an elaborate dance around an uncomfortable racial discussion. Rather than say, "Yeah, it seems as if people -- some of them black -- are eating chicken wings and then dumping the bones on the sidewalk, and that's a bummer, and it's not racist to say so," this lady is blaming innocent squirrels, who tend to be vegetarians.

Listen, homeowners: DC is a city with a large black population, and that population earns a lot less money than its white counterpart, and less money means "dinner out" is more likely to be 7-11 than a wine bar. Acknowledging that black people are buying crappy buffalo wings and then discarding the bones on street corners is a statement of fact that doesn't become racist until you then say something like, “Ain't that just like a fuckin' [insert slur here]."

Cities can be gross, but leftover chicken bones are quaint compared to, say, this lady I saw poop on the floor of a New York subway car, and then a man slipped and fell in it, which made everyone start gagging like some ancient Roman rolling vomitorium. Which neighborhood council do I write to about that ?

 Cord Jefferson's column appears Thursdays on Wonkette. He always neatly disposes of his vegan chicken bones, on Twitter.