I went to sleep with a glass of water on my night stand, and now there’s water on the floor. And when I got out of bed this morning I tripped over the laundry basket and by mistake I cut the under part of my nose while shaving. And I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day because when I got to Starbucks I asked for a chocolate doughnut, and I was told that they didn’t have those anymore, and that a plain one would have to do. And then they gave me a latte instead of a mocha, and when I sipped it I burned my tongue. And while I was arguing with the barista about my mocha, someone gave me a new door ding in the parking lot and then drove off. I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, that’s what it was because after leaving Starbucks I had to sit in traffic for an hour and a half. Who gets out of bed at 6am to sit on the freeway for an hour and a half? ‘I hope you all own shares of BP!’ I shouted. ‘I hope that a dog totals your Prius!’ I shouted, shaking my steering wheel. All the shaking made my doughnut fall on the floor of the truck. I think I’ll move to Australia.
When I got to work, Mark had a Jelly roll with his Mocha. Brett had some lemon cookies and a cup of tea. Guess who still had a lonely, tepid latte? At meeting time the boss said that my numbers didn’t look right, and at the other meeting time I got action items. Who needs action items? ‘Make those numbers right by next week’ he said. ‘Next week’, I said, ‘I’m moving to Australia’.
I am having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. I told everyone. No one even answered.
At lunch time I spilled soup on my shirt, I got pee on my pants, and I bit my tongue. The boss wants to go to the conference with Mark, not with me. And Brett took back the stapler he said I could keep, and the soda machine was out of diet coke, and I broke my pen.
When I went home I had to make mac and cheese for the kids, and I hate mac and cheese. And the baby needed changing, and I hate changing. And "Cupcake Wars' was on TV, and I hate 'Cupcake Wars'. And the school left a message that said that one of our kids was ‘a really neat kid’ but that they needed to talk with us about him. And Sally wants to sleep on her side of the bed, and not with me.
It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
...I guess some days are like that. Even in Australia.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
The Crash
After the dust had settled, Don opened his eyes and spied a tiny caterpillar just a few inches from his right cheek, almost hanging in mid-air as it was busily gnawing on a thin blade of grass that was bending slightly under the weight of the beast. You could almost hear it chewing in the silence that had fallen since the crash. Don sat and stared at it for a few seconds, and then made a face as if to mimic the caterpillar’s chewing - partly, I figure, to check to see that he was still alive, and partly to enjoy the simple things in life that people briefly re-discover after a near-death experience.
Most people would have assumed, and rightly so, that we had been out drinking again and in a fit of poor judgment decided to get in a vehicle and make it go – but this was not the case. What had been the case was that we were kinda checking out some ass on the way to a team building experience that our boss, in his infinite wisdom, forced us to go to. We really had no business going to this event in the first place, as everyone who sat within ear-shot of Don and myself had already made up their mind about whether they could stand working with us or not. Ordinarily, we might have downed a pint of liquor in the parking lot before-hand, and then followed some other poor bastard out to their car so that they could drive us to the event, all the while making obnoxious jokes and sounds, and seeing who could sound the most like Sam Kinnison. Don’s natural drunk voice was a cross between Jeff Foxworthy and Sam Kinnison, so he had an advantage in this area, but I could usually mimic him well enough to get him in trouble on conference calls and such, from time to time. But this is all beside the point, because as I said before, we were not drinking at all that day – we were checking out ass.
Ass comes in many shapes and sizes, and while the debate rages on over what the perfect ass looks like you can pretty much count on most guys to have the exact same reaction when confronted with a given ass. On the affirmative, the guy will either make a shortened ‘m’ sound, or potentially even go as far as to say ‘damn’, but this is rare and is also a call for any other guys in the area to stop what they are doing and have a gander as well, because it’s just that good. It’s a bonding thing. Conversely, on the negative a typical guy will usually stifle a kind of gagging sound, which is difficult to describe but often heard, while averting their eyes – sometimes going as far as to actually shield their eyes with one hand, just in case. Occasionally, there will be a negative of epic proportions at which point the guy will temporarily lose control of his diaphragm and utter a rather louder sound that is either similar to a retching noise, or, if he is more experienced, ‘Oh Gawd’. This is also, contrary to what you might think, a call for other guys in the vicinity to drop what they are doing to experience this with you. Again, it’s a bonding thing. Don’t ask. There are no asses in the middle. It’s a simple yes or no question.
Don was an ‘Oh Gawd’-er because he was more experienced at this than I was. He was also thrilled by the recent development of women taking to putting their names across their backs or butts on sweats because it made identifying and pointing out the ass in question much easier than in a normal girl-group situation. Plus, if you ever felt the urge to compliment someone on their derrier, it made that easier too. ‘Hey Williams!!!’ (pause) ‘Nice ass!!!’
Just kidding, he never did that - at least not with the windows rolled down anyway. Don probably thought it unusual that so many of the girls were named either ‘Juicy’ or ‘Pink’ though – speaking of which, why would you want the word ‘Juicy’ across your ass anyway? That’s just. So. Wrong.
So anyhow, where were we… O right, we were on our way to said team building event, listening to Jimmie Rodgers on the stereo (because we’re freaks) and checking out ass:
Me: ‘Abercrombie.’
Don: ‘m.’ *pause*
Stereo: ‘Um gonna buuuuy me a shotgun,’
Don: ‘Blondie there.’
Me: ‘Damn.’
Stereo: ‘Just as looooooong as I’m tall…’
Don: ‘What?’
Me: ‘Forrester, in the red there.’
Don: ‘Damn.’
Stereo: ‘Gonna buy me a shotgun,’
And this went on pretty much the whole trip, as we toodled down the road, until we came upon something that we did not entirely expect to be possible.
Me: ‘Juicy.’
Don: ‘m’.
Don (shielding his eyes): ‘O Gawd!’
Me (looking over): ‘What, I, *retch*, ack!’
Me (thinking quickly): ‘With her, or that big green one we saw a minute ago?’
Don (grimacing at the thought, but you have to answer –it’s the rule): ‘Green-ey’.
Me (laughing): ugh.
Don: ‘In grey, up ahead’.
Me: ‘I don’t see – ‘
Don: ‘Well, we’ll have to get closer to be sure.’
Me: ‘Oh there…’
Me: *pause*
Don: *pause*
And we paused there, at length, as if we were two yokels trying to make out the meaning of a Picasso painting, and we got closer and closer to the ass in question, but neither one of us said anything or took our eyes off it. It wasn’t a good ass, but it wasn’t a bad ass either. It was set dead-square in the middle, not bony or fat, not shapely but with shape, not huge and not small, and in fact there was absolutely nothing remarkable about it at all, except to say that it did indeed exist somewhere under those grey sweatpants, and upon discovering what can only be assumed to be the one ‘middle-of-the-road’ ass in the entire world, our brains simply stopped functioning as they went into an endless loop of analysis paralysis and
Don: ‘STAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWPPPP!!!!!’
Cue slow motion. I have had numerous near-death experiences before (almost drowning, nearly being hit by a train, motorcycle vs. Mack truck, etc.) and the one constant between them all is that the world seems to slow down for the duration of the experience. The world has now slowed down, which means that I am about to die unless I do something, so here goes…
I hear Don shout, and tear my face away from the ass dilemma to assess the situation. We are traveling about 50 MPH, and there is a line of stopped cars in front of us at what appears to be approximately 10 feet away (though I am sure it was really farther). I have a suspicion that it would be futile to hit the brakes at this point, and I doubt I could even touch the brake pedal before impact. I have to swerve, either into oncoming traffic or the shoulder. I’ll pick the shoulder. It might not be wide enough for the car, and I am not sure what lies beyond it because my eyes can’t see that far that fast, but all in all it sounds like a better plan than the oncoming traffic. And time begins to speed up. . .
WA-ZIZZZZZ!!! We managed to swerve fast enough to avoid hitting the car in front of us, and we were even in the shoulder, briefly, but apparently there was a lot of loose gravel or something in said shoulder which caused a total failure of traction because as I straightened out from the swerve our vehicle continued drifting slowly sideways, and we left the shoulder at the speed of still 50 mph, were momentarily airborne, and then began to descend and bottom out in a near perfect fashion in a canal which was beyond the shoulder of the road by a few feet, running parallel to it.
The car crunched perfectly into the rather narrow canal – like a slot car running on a track really, and we zoomed along the canal floor rather grandly as I stood on the brakes, and Jimmie was howling the whole way too:
Don: ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!’
Stereo: ‘Gunna buy me a pistol…’
Don: ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!’
Stereo: ‘With a big long shiny barrel…’
Don: ‘AAAAHHH!!!!’
We ultimately stopped a few feet short of a metal underpass pipe, and I reached over and turned off the stereo; the caterpillar chewed, and then Don made his chewing face, and then we assessed the situation. The canal was luckily empty, as the sides rose slightly above the roof of the car and had it been full we would have been unable to open the doors (because they butted up against the sides of the canal within a few inches either way), and the water surely would have shorted out the electrical system causing the sun roof to be inaccessible. Picture two guys slowly drowning as they frantically tried to position themselves in such a way as to kick through a windshield or sunroof from the inside of a car. Haha.. Fortunately, this did not happen, though we did have to climb out the sun roof to escape our current situation – which as it turns out had not gone entirely unnoticed by the rest of the motoring community, leaving us to sit on the roof of the car smiling and waving at everyone who had stopped to gawk and ask stupid questions while leaning out their windows like ‘Hao’d yoo doo thay-at?!?’
You would think that this embarrassment would be enough for one day, but alas, remember the ass-in-question that caused this whole mess? Well, it decided to walk over to see how we were doing:
Ass-in-question: ‘Hao’d yoo doo thay-at?!?’
Don (recovered now, and in his best Sam Kinnison voice): ‘Well, you SEE, ‘
Me (cutting Don off, so we don’t end up in jail): ‘We were just looking for, uh, free parking.’
Don (nodding): ‘Free parking.’
Ass-in-question (slowly): ‘Are you guys, uh, feeling ok?’
Me (looking at Don): ‘Oh sure, it’s all good. We’re fine. Everything’s fine. Are you fine?’
Don: ‘Yup! Just fine!’
And the ass-in-question waves and walks away.
Me: ‘I think that one’s a ‘no’ for me.’
Don: ‘Yeah, it’s a no. The lighting must have been bad before.’
Me: ‘It’s not that bad, but I mean, no where near as good as Juicy was.’
Don: ‘Kind of saggy, really. I mean –‘
Cop: ‘Sir, step off the car please.’
Let me take a little break here to give you some background on my experiences to-date with the po po. Actually, they can be summed up quite simply: I never get away with anything. Nothing, nada, zip. I have tried various answers to the ‘do you know why I pulled you over, son?’ question, and none of them have ever caused an incident to end in a favorable manner. Allow me to recap a medley of events for you, briefly:
Cop: ‘Did you see that sign back there?’
Possible Answer: A) ‘Yes’
Response: ‘So you willfully disregarded the sign then. You know, all I ever see around here are accidents and blah blah blah.’
End Result: Ticket
Possible Answer: B) ‘No’
Response: ‘So, you’re a lousy driver and you aren’t paying attention to the road either, huh? I should cite you for blah blah blah blah.’
End Result: Ticket
Possible Answer: C) ‘Yes, but I guess that I made a judgement call, because everyone else wa-’
Response: ‘A what?!?? If everyone jumped off of a bridge would you? If everyone blah blah blah blah, would you!?’
End Result: Ticket
I fleetingly and fancifully thought about getting cheeky with the officer, since I knew I was going to get a ticket anyway, but resisted the temptation to answer in the affirmative. After all, if everyone is jumping off the bridge then there’s probably going to be a good reason (train coming, bridge on fire, etc), but I let that one slide because, well, I didn’t really need any new jewelry that day. Anyway, back to the present:
Cop: ‘Did you see that sign back there?’
Don: ‘Ack!’
Me (stepping off the car): ‘Hi Offi-‘
Cop: ‘Son, have you been drinking?’
Me: (I know the answer to this one, because I get asked all the time for some reason): ‘No sir!’
Cop: ‘License and registration.’
Me (after having retrieved it by shimmying through the sunroof, to the delight of onlookers): ‘Here it is.’
Cop: ‘What happened?’
Sam Kinnison: ‘Well, you SEE,’
Me (cutting Don off, so we don’t end up in bracelets): ‘I, uh, just got distracted, and umm, I guess we ended up here.’
Cop (writing things down and frowning at me): ‘I should cite you for reckless driving, but it looks like you have enough to worry about for right now.’
Me (in disbelief, as I have never gotten out of a ticket before in my life): ‘Uh… thanks.’
Cop: ‘You got a tow truck on the way, right?’
Me (I sure will in a minute here): ‘Yup!’
The cop then cheerfully proceeded to light about 15 road flares and sprinkle them all about the shoulder of the road, as if there was going to be some sort of party in our honor, and then gets in his car and leaves. This is truly excellent, because now anyone who might have missed a bright red Acura sitting at the bottom of a canal with two nimrods sitting on top of it is not going to make the same mistake when it’s surrounded by flares – oh no.
So I sit back down on top of the car to call a tow truck amid what has become every one else on the road’s personal reality TV show, and I think to myself: Do we have AAA? So I call my wife to ask, and if so what our account number is. The conversation went something like this:
* ring ring *
Her: ‘Hello.’
Me: ‘Hi, do we have AAA?’
Her: ‘No.’
Me: ‘Damn.’
Her: ‘Wait, what do you need AAA for?’
Me (cornered): ‘Errr.. Nothing!’
Her: ‘What did you do?’
Me: ‘Uhh… Well, we sort of like, drove into a ditch by accident.’
Her (pausing): ‘And how on earth did you do that?’
Don (who had been listening in - shouting): ‘We was checkin’ out ASS!!!’
Me: (covering the phone): ‘I don’t remember. I have to call a tow truck now though.’
Her: ‘There’s a sticker on your window, remember?’
* click *
Ahhh, that’s right. The auto manufacturer offered free roadside assistance for the first 48k miles. I had forgotten that! So I call them up and a guy with a two truck arrives in short order, winches the car out of the canal and what was a rakish 45 degree angle or more, and we are back on the road in no time. No visible damage to the car at all, save a couple paint scrapes that were caused by a patch of blackberries growing on the side of the canal. Amazing really. So we get back in the car and continue, though somewhat more cautiously and shakily, on to the team building event - which is half over by this point, but whatever.
Don: ‘Don’t fucking kill us this time.’
Me: ‘Okay.’
Don: ‘Pink.’
Me: ‘m’
We pulled in at the address a few minutes later. Turns out that the teambuilding event was, for real, a racing event hosted here: http://www.traxxracing.com/groups.asp .
We opted out.
Most people would have assumed, and rightly so, that we had been out drinking again and in a fit of poor judgment decided to get in a vehicle and make it go – but this was not the case. What had been the case was that we were kinda checking out some ass on the way to a team building experience that our boss, in his infinite wisdom, forced us to go to. We really had no business going to this event in the first place, as everyone who sat within ear-shot of Don and myself had already made up their mind about whether they could stand working with us or not. Ordinarily, we might have downed a pint of liquor in the parking lot before-hand, and then followed some other poor bastard out to their car so that they could drive us to the event, all the while making obnoxious jokes and sounds, and seeing who could sound the most like Sam Kinnison. Don’s natural drunk voice was a cross between Jeff Foxworthy and Sam Kinnison, so he had an advantage in this area, but I could usually mimic him well enough to get him in trouble on conference calls and such, from time to time. But this is all beside the point, because as I said before, we were not drinking at all that day – we were checking out ass.
Ass comes in many shapes and sizes, and while the debate rages on over what the perfect ass looks like you can pretty much count on most guys to have the exact same reaction when confronted with a given ass. On the affirmative, the guy will either make a shortened ‘m’ sound, or potentially even go as far as to say ‘damn’, but this is rare and is also a call for any other guys in the area to stop what they are doing and have a gander as well, because it’s just that good. It’s a bonding thing. Conversely, on the negative a typical guy will usually stifle a kind of gagging sound, which is difficult to describe but often heard, while averting their eyes – sometimes going as far as to actually shield their eyes with one hand, just in case. Occasionally, there will be a negative of epic proportions at which point the guy will temporarily lose control of his diaphragm and utter a rather louder sound that is either similar to a retching noise, or, if he is more experienced, ‘Oh Gawd’. This is also, contrary to what you might think, a call for other guys in the vicinity to drop what they are doing to experience this with you. Again, it’s a bonding thing. Don’t ask. There are no asses in the middle. It’s a simple yes or no question.
Don was an ‘Oh Gawd’-er because he was more experienced at this than I was. He was also thrilled by the recent development of women taking to putting their names across their backs or butts on sweats because it made identifying and pointing out the ass in question much easier than in a normal girl-group situation. Plus, if you ever felt the urge to compliment someone on their derrier, it made that easier too. ‘Hey Williams!!!’ (pause) ‘Nice ass!!!’
Just kidding, he never did that - at least not with the windows rolled down anyway. Don probably thought it unusual that so many of the girls were named either ‘Juicy’ or ‘Pink’ though – speaking of which, why would you want the word ‘Juicy’ across your ass anyway? That’s just. So. Wrong.
So anyhow, where were we… O right, we were on our way to said team building event, listening to Jimmie Rodgers on the stereo (because we’re freaks) and checking out ass:
Me: ‘Abercrombie.’
Don: ‘m.’ *pause*
Stereo: ‘Um gonna buuuuy me a shotgun,’
Don: ‘Blondie there.’
Me: ‘Damn.’
Stereo: ‘Just as looooooong as I’m tall…’
Don: ‘What?’
Me: ‘Forrester, in the red there.’
Don: ‘Damn.’
Stereo: ‘Gonna buy me a shotgun,’
And this went on pretty much the whole trip, as we toodled down the road, until we came upon something that we did not entirely expect to be possible.
Me: ‘Juicy.’
Don: ‘m’.
Don (shielding his eyes): ‘O Gawd!’
Me (looking over): ‘What, I, *retch*, ack!’
Me (thinking quickly): ‘With her, or that big green one we saw a minute ago?’
Don (grimacing at the thought, but you have to answer –it’s the rule): ‘Green-ey’.
Me (laughing): ugh.
Don: ‘In grey, up ahead’.
Me: ‘I don’t see – ‘
Don: ‘Well, we’ll have to get closer to be sure.’
Me: ‘Oh there…’
Me: *pause*
Don: *pause*
And we paused there, at length, as if we were two yokels trying to make out the meaning of a Picasso painting, and we got closer and closer to the ass in question, but neither one of us said anything or took our eyes off it. It wasn’t a good ass, but it wasn’t a bad ass either. It was set dead-square in the middle, not bony or fat, not shapely but with shape, not huge and not small, and in fact there was absolutely nothing remarkable about it at all, except to say that it did indeed exist somewhere under those grey sweatpants, and upon discovering what can only be assumed to be the one ‘middle-of-the-road’ ass in the entire world, our brains simply stopped functioning as they went into an endless loop of analysis paralysis and
Don: ‘STAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWPPPP!!!!!’
Cue slow motion. I have had numerous near-death experiences before (almost drowning, nearly being hit by a train, motorcycle vs. Mack truck, etc.) and the one constant between them all is that the world seems to slow down for the duration of the experience. The world has now slowed down, which means that I am about to die unless I do something, so here goes…
I hear Don shout, and tear my face away from the ass dilemma to assess the situation. We are traveling about 50 MPH, and there is a line of stopped cars in front of us at what appears to be approximately 10 feet away (though I am sure it was really farther). I have a suspicion that it would be futile to hit the brakes at this point, and I doubt I could even touch the brake pedal before impact. I have to swerve, either into oncoming traffic or the shoulder. I’ll pick the shoulder. It might not be wide enough for the car, and I am not sure what lies beyond it because my eyes can’t see that far that fast, but all in all it sounds like a better plan than the oncoming traffic. And time begins to speed up. . .
WA-ZIZZZZZ!!! We managed to swerve fast enough to avoid hitting the car in front of us, and we were even in the shoulder, briefly, but apparently there was a lot of loose gravel or something in said shoulder which caused a total failure of traction because as I straightened out from the swerve our vehicle continued drifting slowly sideways, and we left the shoulder at the speed of still 50 mph, were momentarily airborne, and then began to descend and bottom out in a near perfect fashion in a canal which was beyond the shoulder of the road by a few feet, running parallel to it.
The car crunched perfectly into the rather narrow canal – like a slot car running on a track really, and we zoomed along the canal floor rather grandly as I stood on the brakes, and Jimmie was howling the whole way too:
Don: ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!’
Stereo: ‘Gunna buy me a pistol…’
Don: ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!’
Stereo: ‘With a big long shiny barrel…’
Don: ‘AAAAHHH!!!!’
We ultimately stopped a few feet short of a metal underpass pipe, and I reached over and turned off the stereo; the caterpillar chewed, and then Don made his chewing face, and then we assessed the situation. The canal was luckily empty, as the sides rose slightly above the roof of the car and had it been full we would have been unable to open the doors (because they butted up against the sides of the canal within a few inches either way), and the water surely would have shorted out the electrical system causing the sun roof to be inaccessible. Picture two guys slowly drowning as they frantically tried to position themselves in such a way as to kick through a windshield or sunroof from the inside of a car. Haha.. Fortunately, this did not happen, though we did have to climb out the sun roof to escape our current situation – which as it turns out had not gone entirely unnoticed by the rest of the motoring community, leaving us to sit on the roof of the car smiling and waving at everyone who had stopped to gawk and ask stupid questions while leaning out their windows like ‘Hao’d yoo doo thay-at?!?’
You would think that this embarrassment would be enough for one day, but alas, remember the ass-in-question that caused this whole mess? Well, it decided to walk over to see how we were doing:
Ass-in-question: ‘Hao’d yoo doo thay-at?!?’
Don (recovered now, and in his best Sam Kinnison voice): ‘Well, you SEE, ‘
Me (cutting Don off, so we don’t end up in jail): ‘We were just looking for, uh, free parking.’
Don (nodding): ‘Free parking.’
Ass-in-question (slowly): ‘Are you guys, uh, feeling ok?’
Me (looking at Don): ‘Oh sure, it’s all good. We’re fine. Everything’s fine. Are you fine?’
Don: ‘Yup! Just fine!’
And the ass-in-question waves and walks away.
Me: ‘I think that one’s a ‘no’ for me.’
Don: ‘Yeah, it’s a no. The lighting must have been bad before.’
Me: ‘It’s not that bad, but I mean, no where near as good as Juicy was.’
Don: ‘Kind of saggy, really. I mean –‘
Cop: ‘Sir, step off the car please.’
Let me take a little break here to give you some background on my experiences to-date with the po po. Actually, they can be summed up quite simply: I never get away with anything. Nothing, nada, zip. I have tried various answers to the ‘do you know why I pulled you over, son?’ question, and none of them have ever caused an incident to end in a favorable manner. Allow me to recap a medley of events for you, briefly:
Cop: ‘Did you see that sign back there?’
Possible Answer: A) ‘Yes’
Response: ‘So you willfully disregarded the sign then. You know, all I ever see around here are accidents and blah blah blah.’
End Result: Ticket
Possible Answer: B) ‘No’
Response: ‘So, you’re a lousy driver and you aren’t paying attention to the road either, huh? I should cite you for blah blah blah blah.’
End Result: Ticket
Possible Answer: C) ‘Yes, but I guess that I made a judgement call, because everyone else wa-’
Response: ‘A what?!?? If everyone jumped off of a bridge would you? If everyone blah blah blah blah, would you!?’
End Result: Ticket
I fleetingly and fancifully thought about getting cheeky with the officer, since I knew I was going to get a ticket anyway, but resisted the temptation to answer in the affirmative. After all, if everyone is jumping off the bridge then there’s probably going to be a good reason (train coming, bridge on fire, etc), but I let that one slide because, well, I didn’t really need any new jewelry that day. Anyway, back to the present:
Cop: ‘Did you see that sign back there?’
Don: ‘Ack!’
Me (stepping off the car): ‘Hi Offi-‘
Cop: ‘Son, have you been drinking?’
Me: (I know the answer to this one, because I get asked all the time for some reason): ‘No sir!’
Cop: ‘License and registration.’
Me (after having retrieved it by shimmying through the sunroof, to the delight of onlookers): ‘Here it is.’
Cop: ‘What happened?’
Sam Kinnison: ‘Well, you SEE,’
Me (cutting Don off, so we don’t end up in bracelets): ‘I, uh, just got distracted, and umm, I guess we ended up here.’
Cop (writing things down and frowning at me): ‘I should cite you for reckless driving, but it looks like you have enough to worry about for right now.’
Me (in disbelief, as I have never gotten out of a ticket before in my life): ‘Uh… thanks.’
Cop: ‘You got a tow truck on the way, right?’
Me (I sure will in a minute here): ‘Yup!’
The cop then cheerfully proceeded to light about 15 road flares and sprinkle them all about the shoulder of the road, as if there was going to be some sort of party in our honor, and then gets in his car and leaves. This is truly excellent, because now anyone who might have missed a bright red Acura sitting at the bottom of a canal with two nimrods sitting on top of it is not going to make the same mistake when it’s surrounded by flares – oh no.
So I sit back down on top of the car to call a tow truck amid what has become every one else on the road’s personal reality TV show, and I think to myself: Do we have AAA? So I call my wife to ask, and if so what our account number is. The conversation went something like this:
* ring ring *
Her: ‘Hello.’
Me: ‘Hi, do we have AAA?’
Her: ‘No.’
Me: ‘Damn.’
Her: ‘Wait, what do you need AAA for?’
Me (cornered): ‘Errr.. Nothing!’
Her: ‘What did you do?’
Me: ‘Uhh… Well, we sort of like, drove into a ditch by accident.’
Her (pausing): ‘And how on earth did you do that?’
Don (who had been listening in - shouting): ‘We was checkin’ out ASS!!!’
Me: (covering the phone): ‘I don’t remember. I have to call a tow truck now though.’
Her: ‘There’s a sticker on your window, remember?’
* click *
Ahhh, that’s right. The auto manufacturer offered free roadside assistance for the first 48k miles. I had forgotten that! So I call them up and a guy with a two truck arrives in short order, winches the car out of the canal and what was a rakish 45 degree angle or more, and we are back on the road in no time. No visible damage to the car at all, save a couple paint scrapes that were caused by a patch of blackberries growing on the side of the canal. Amazing really. So we get back in the car and continue, though somewhat more cautiously and shakily, on to the team building event - which is half over by this point, but whatever.
Don: ‘Don’t fucking kill us this time.’
Me: ‘Okay.’
Don: ‘Pink.’
Me: ‘m’
We pulled in at the address a few minutes later. Turns out that the teambuilding event was, for real, a racing event hosted here: http://www.traxxracing.com/groups.asp .
We opted out.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Back in My Day. . .
I'm not quite old enough to bellow 'back in myyyy day' and proceed to tell a long and excruiatingly painful story about making soap by hand behind the barn with my brothers and sisters, concluding with a moral or values or something else long forgotten. Not quite yet anyway. I hope. Though I was in Target (I have my standards) the other day and over-heard a boy about 8 whine incessantly about not getting a new Wii game and ultimately fold his arms declaring that he was bored and that there was nothing to do. The parent subsequently caved. Now, aside from being privately flabbergasted and fondly reminiscing about the one time I tried throwing a tantrum in the store (which I am told (and only kinda remember) ended with my bare backside exposed to everyone in aisle 4, followed by a good long uncomfortable sit in a summertime Plymouth with blue vinyl seats), I thought back to what I did do when I was bored as a child. A small treasure trove of childhood memories burst forth, so I thought I would share :). Keep in mind we were a little bit poor, relatively speaking, but that we were far from a bunch of inbred hoochers living on the bayou - despite what you are about to read. So here goes, top 10 childhood memories about what we did when we were bored:
10) Rock fight. Pro: Easy to organize; rocks are cheap and abundant. Con: This always ends rather quickly with someone running home crying, and their mother subsequently shouting obscenities at others from the doorway.
9) Playing with fire. This actually has its own post, so for details on something that does not warrant repeating and probably should never have been posted in the first place, go here.
8) Making home-made radios. No wait! Allow me to explain! If you dig through the garbage (or your neighbor's garbage) you will eventually find an old can or a jar. If it's a jar with a lid, then you are indeed in luck that day - otherwise you'll have to make do with a can and something to cover the open end (tin foil, envelope, block of wood, etc). Mostly we found cans, and although cans had better acoustics than jars, they were also more dangerous. So get your can and follow me, and lets try to capture an unsuspecting flying insect and then we'll compare the sound of an angry yellow jacket vs. an angry hornet buzzing against the inside of your can. If it's a super-lucky day, then you might find a wasp instead - This is a real treat, because wasps have a sound all their own when irritated. How do you irritate them? Easy! Cover up your can and shake it up real hard. Put the metal side up to your ear. Hear all that buzzing? Now it's like you have a real walkman! No, of course no one ever got stung, repeatedly. . . :)
7) Digging. On a more industrious day, it would then turn into mixing the dirt in a pail with water to make mud. If you wanted to be more scientific about it, then you added a bit of sand, wood shavings, or whatever else you could find. Then we poured it back into the hole we dug it out of and smoothed it out like cement. This took hours.
6) Box car derby. This is probably not what you are thinking. Picture a little kid standing at the top of the stairs, a pampers box sitting at his feet. The pampers box is perched precariously at the edge of the first step, and is mostly empty except for a few diapers selectively arranged as a seat, and also inside, sitting upgright, his 9 month old sister. I am happy to report that there were no fatalities.
5) Roller derby. This is also probably not what you are thinking. Picture a slightly larger kid standing at the top of a long sloped driveway, with a cardboard packing barrel turned on its side, and held in place by a block of wood - and inside the barrel, lying on her stomach, his 4 year old sister. Once again, I am happy to report that there were no fatalities.
4) Mii Fit. Take one small water pail, such as only your grandmother would have, and one nasty old yellow tennis ball (also such as only your grandmother would have) and head out into the front yard. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to toss that nasty old tennis ball up on the roof to where it rolls high up, but does not go over to the other side. Now you track its trajectory as it heads back down the roof, anticipate the little bump and rise it gets from the gutter, and catch the ball in the pail. I am sorry to report that I chased that sad yellow ball around for hours at a time.
3) Doorjam magic. Find yourself a doorjam. Stand in it. No wait, there's more! Stand with your arms at your sides, then push up on the door jam with the backs of your hands as hrdasyoupsblycan andthencnt tosxty slwly. When you get to sixty, release, and walk out of the doorjam. Your arms will rise magically into the air for the next few seconds. It's magic! :)
2) What lives under this? If you have played this game, then you already know the appeal. If you haven't, then you probably won't get it anyway. It usually ended with a stomp fest, followed by carefully replacing the object of interest. My friend Rowdy (his real name), however, liked to poke worms and squeeze their brains right out of their little heads - then watch them wiggle uselessly on the ground. I didn't participate.
1) Build a fort. Boys love forts. Forts are everywhere. A fort could be as simple as a blanket draped over a piece of furniture in the house or as complicated as a wooden structure created from spare siding, a few nails, and some tall grass. One time we made a fort by cutting and stacking blocks of (essentially) ice with a snow shovel, after a massive snow-storm was followed by freezing rain in Idaho. A fort is your home away from home. A castle. A sanctuary, where you are free to sit and contemplate your existential state of being. Or perhaps sit clutching your knees, rocking back and forth chewing on your own hair, plotting the demise of all who have ever wronged you - real or imagined.
I was never really one for contemplation. ;)
Happy New Year!!
10) Rock fight. Pro: Easy to organize; rocks are cheap and abundant. Con: This always ends rather quickly with someone running home crying, and their mother subsequently shouting obscenities at others from the doorway.
9) Playing with fire. This actually has its own post, so for details on something that does not warrant repeating and probably should never have been posted in the first place, go here.
8) Making home-made radios. No wait! Allow me to explain! If you dig through the garbage (or your neighbor's garbage) you will eventually find an old can or a jar. If it's a jar with a lid, then you are indeed in luck that day - otherwise you'll have to make do with a can and something to cover the open end (tin foil, envelope, block of wood, etc). Mostly we found cans, and although cans had better acoustics than jars, they were also more dangerous. So get your can and follow me, and lets try to capture an unsuspecting flying insect and then we'll compare the sound of an angry yellow jacket vs. an angry hornet buzzing against the inside of your can. If it's a super-lucky day, then you might find a wasp instead - This is a real treat, because wasps have a sound all their own when irritated. How do you irritate them? Easy! Cover up your can and shake it up real hard. Put the metal side up to your ear. Hear all that buzzing? Now it's like you have a real walkman! No, of course no one ever got stung, repeatedly. . . :)
7) Digging. On a more industrious day, it would then turn into mixing the dirt in a pail with water to make mud. If you wanted to be more scientific about it, then you added a bit of sand, wood shavings, or whatever else you could find. Then we poured it back into the hole we dug it out of and smoothed it out like cement. This took hours.
6) Box car derby. This is probably not what you are thinking. Picture a little kid standing at the top of the stairs, a pampers box sitting at his feet. The pampers box is perched precariously at the edge of the first step, and is mostly empty except for a few diapers selectively arranged as a seat, and also inside, sitting upgright, his 9 month old sister. I am happy to report that there were no fatalities.
5) Roller derby. This is also probably not what you are thinking. Picture a slightly larger kid standing at the top of a long sloped driveway, with a cardboard packing barrel turned on its side, and held in place by a block of wood - and inside the barrel, lying on her stomach, his 4 year old sister. Once again, I am happy to report that there were no fatalities.
4) Mii Fit. Take one small water pail, such as only your grandmother would have, and one nasty old yellow tennis ball (also such as only your grandmother would have) and head out into the front yard. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to toss that nasty old tennis ball up on the roof to where it rolls high up, but does not go over to the other side. Now you track its trajectory as it heads back down the roof, anticipate the little bump and rise it gets from the gutter, and catch the ball in the pail. I am sorry to report that I chased that sad yellow ball around for hours at a time.
3) Doorjam magic. Find yourself a doorjam. Stand in it. No wait, there's more! Stand with your arms at your sides, then push up on the door jam with the backs of your hands as hrdasyoupsblycan andthencnt tosxty slwly. When you get to sixty, release, and walk out of the doorjam. Your arms will rise magically into the air for the next few seconds. It's magic! :)
2) What lives under this? If you have played this game, then you already know the appeal. If you haven't, then you probably won't get it anyway. It usually ended with a stomp fest, followed by carefully replacing the object of interest. My friend Rowdy (his real name), however, liked to poke worms and squeeze their brains right out of their little heads - then watch them wiggle uselessly on the ground. I didn't participate.
1) Build a fort. Boys love forts. Forts are everywhere. A fort could be as simple as a blanket draped over a piece of furniture in the house or as complicated as a wooden structure created from spare siding, a few nails, and some tall grass. One time we made a fort by cutting and stacking blocks of (essentially) ice with a snow shovel, after a massive snow-storm was followed by freezing rain in Idaho. A fort is your home away from home. A castle. A sanctuary, where you are free to sit and contemplate your existential state of being. Or perhaps sit clutching your knees, rocking back and forth chewing on your own hair, plotting the demise of all who have ever wronged you - real or imagined.
I was never really one for contemplation. ;)
Happy New Year!!
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Man . . .
I have sometimes wondered whether the dim bulbs who work at the K-Mart are drawn there by a mystical force, or if they are otherwise ordinary people who, little by little, get their brains along with their will to live literally sucked out of them by their environment.
One could reason that, when given a choice to work at, say, Target or K-Mart, a person with more than a room temperature IQ would choose Target every time. In fact, one would think that anyone capable of fogging a mirror would choose Target. This would seem to suggest that either only a select few are choosing to work at the K-Mart freely or there is a hidden and overwhelming factor that tips the scales in favor of the K-Mart employment experience. Perhaps an extra 25 cents an hour?
I bring it up because that's the route I went about 18 months ago. Oh, not literally to the K-Mart, and it certainly wasn't for an extra 25 cents an hour, but chasing dollars is what ultimately led to this blog being virtually abandoned. I'm happy to report that the dollar chasing has ended in favor of, well, having a life - and as a result, for better or for worse, you'll likely be seeing more going on here from now on.
Now, that being said, this having a life thing may be a bit optimistic. All it may really mean is that I can squeeze in the vacuuming every weekend instead of every other weekend. Okay, so really once a month, plus once about an hour before house guests come over. Well, new house guests anyway. I've already shared my thoughts on the vacuum in an earlier post, but I will say that you can have a lot of fun chasing around a toddler with a vacuum though. It's kinda like playing with your child and cleaning the house all at the same time, and as a bonus the whirring of the vacuum drowns out the screaming pretty good too. Yup, father of the year.
Anyhoo, I made a song to celebrate my new found free (house-cleaning) time, and put it over there on the right (Man I Feel Like a Woman). In the original, Shania and pals go out and have a night on the town, and girl power, and maybe they get a fro-yo or something afterwards, I dunno... This song is a parody of that one, and would represent the flip side. I hope you like it.
Cheers!!
One could reason that, when given a choice to work at, say, Target or K-Mart, a person with more than a room temperature IQ would choose Target every time. In fact, one would think that anyone capable of fogging a mirror would choose Target. This would seem to suggest that either only a select few are choosing to work at the K-Mart freely or there is a hidden and overwhelming factor that tips the scales in favor of the K-Mart employment experience. Perhaps an extra 25 cents an hour?
I bring it up because that's the route I went about 18 months ago. Oh, not literally to the K-Mart, and it certainly wasn't for an extra 25 cents an hour, but chasing dollars is what ultimately led to this blog being virtually abandoned. I'm happy to report that the dollar chasing has ended in favor of, well, having a life - and as a result, for better or for worse, you'll likely be seeing more going on here from now on.
Now, that being said, this having a life thing may be a bit optimistic. All it may really mean is that I can squeeze in the vacuuming every weekend instead of every other weekend. Okay, so really once a month, plus once about an hour before house guests come over. Well, new house guests anyway. I've already shared my thoughts on the vacuum in an earlier post, but I will say that you can have a lot of fun chasing around a toddler with a vacuum though. It's kinda like playing with your child and cleaning the house all at the same time, and as a bonus the whirring of the vacuum drowns out the screaming pretty good too. Yup, father of the year.
Anyhoo, I made a song to celebrate my new found free (house-cleaning) time, and put it over there on the right (Man I Feel Like a Woman). In the original, Shania and pals go out and have a night on the town, and girl power, and maybe they get a fro-yo or something afterwards, I dunno... This song is a parody of that one, and would represent the flip side. I hope you like it.
Cheers!!
Sunday, August 17, 2008
The Saga of Larry Long
Today, I would like to talk about Larry. Not soft, cuddly, polo shirt-wearing, burn-your-nut-hair-off Larry, but a different Larry. Larry Long. You see, one of the first jobs that I ever held was working in an independent video store. At this job, I would be expected to check videos in and out, make recommendations for customers, abuse the rent-to-own stereo system, and then vacuum up at the end of the day. Sometimes I got additional tasks to help break up my day, like, you know, like setting up displays to advertise new releases and such. It was while I was setting up one of these displays (a life-sized cardboard image of Cary Elwes, grabbing his nuts(?)) that I was introduced to what would be my most deplorable task at my new job, and his name was Larry Long. I have not changed his name. His name really was Larry Long, and do you know why I haven't changed his name? Because Larry Long was, and probably still is, illiterate - so he won't be reading this anyway. How do I know he's illiterate? Keep reading, brave internet friend, and I will tell you the tale.
The video store owner introduced me to Larry Long one day shortly after I started, and we shook hands. To describe Larry without using cliché' is difficult, but I will try. The first thing I noticed about Larry was that he was kind of yellow. Not yellow in a healthy Chinese sort of way - more yellow in an 'I drink myself to sleep every night, and have never brushed my teeth' kind of way. The pit stains in Larry's wife-beater were quite prominent, and were as yellow as his teeth. Larry's eyes were yellow, his hands were yellow, hell, even his breath was yellow - though it’s hard to say if his hands were yellow because of a liver problem or because he smoked so much that the nicotine stains wouldn't wash off anymore - assuming that he washed at all. Larry was sweaty. Larry was not given to kindness. Larry hadn't eaten a meal out other than 7-11 for years - and he wasn't much of a cook either. Larry's idea of treating a date was squirting a couple extra farts-worth of liquid cheese on the nachos when the store clerk wasn't looking. Larry could have easily been an extra on any episode of COPS, playing the part of 'guy without shirt wearing gold chain' who stands in his front yard screaming 'he done it! he done it!' and pointing deliberately and quite unnecessarily as the COPS tazer and drag off some other unfortunate chap like the lawnmowner man.
Please don't think I am being hard on Larry, or that I have any disdain for those who can't read. I don't. I'm just trying to give you a decent mental picture of what I, at 17, am about to have to deal with on a weekly basis until I grow a pair and quit this stupid job.
As I mentioned, Larry was yellowish, and he was also rather short. Five foot four, I would estimate. Five foot four, but he was all man. Larry would proceed to show up at the video store every other week for the next several months, reeking of beer and cigarettes, and we would begin what would be, by today's standards, a rather inappropriate relationship upon our first meeting. The relationship started like this:
Store owner (Vern): 'Hey, come here, I have a job for you.'
Me (and yes, her name really was Vern): 'Ok.'
Vern: 'See that guy at the counter? That's Larry.'
Me (Looking around, and spying Larry, who is leaning on a thirty-pack of Budweiser that he slung up on the rental counter just a moment ago): 'Ahhh... okay.'
Vern: 'Larry needs help picking out movies.'
Me (having made suggestions for customers a million times before): 'Oh, okay, no problem.'
Vern (lowering her voice): 'Larry can't read.'
Vern (continuing): 'You'll need to print out his rental history, and follow him around. Find some movies that he hasn't seen yet, and...'
Me: 'And? ...'
Vern: 'Just help out, okay?'
Me (hm, this is unusual): 'Erraky, sure....'
So I print out Larry's rental history, and it's one of those old dot-matrix printers that takes forever, and Larry looks to have rented about half the store so far, so I have some time to kill here.
Printer: 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzit.'
Me: 'Hey Larry.'
Larry (making a little upwards nod): 'Mnh.'
Me (gesturing towards the intellectually-painful Cary Elwes display I just set up): 'So uhh, have you seen 'Men in Tights?'
Larry: 'I don't do dude movies.'
Me (waiting patiently in slow-printer hell): 'Uh. Okay.'
Printer: 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzit!'
Glancing at the list, I could see that Larry loved his ass some porn. Loved it. Lived for it. Loved it, lived for it, rented it, watched it, and copied each and every one into his own personal porn library. Every-other week. Only on paydays. And he never missed a payday either.
About seven hundred zits later we're done, and I follow Larry. Larry heads straight back to the porno section of the store. Now, as a teenager, I had of course watched my share of porn - but never really discussed them in any kind of detail with another guy. 'Cause eww. This one time, over at Desi Fajardo's house (true story), we watched a great porno together while we drank his father's kahlua and smoked his father's camels, but that was four years ago - and we never felt the need to say more than 'oh, that's nice' during certain parts of the movie. It was not really a sharing kind of thing, and after that I was pretty much solo when watching porn - it's a guy thing I think.
Larry had no such inhibitions, and he crashed through the saloon-style swinging doors to the porno section (in which people under 18 - i.e. me are not allowed) with the bravado of someone who owned this section of the store (and in fact, as I was soon to find out, he essentially did, by virtue of somehow managing to afford two VCRs. . . yet still no deodorant). Larry studies the wall intently, and then holds up a video 'I got this one?' he asks.
Me: 'Uh.. Let’s see, Eight is not Enough...'
Me (damning myself for not printing out Larry's list in alphabetical order - it was by date instead): 'Looks like, last September, uhh.. yes.'
Larry, somewhat nonplussed, put the video back on the shelf and kept browsing. He picked up another and popped the question again. 'This?' he asked, holding it up.
Me (mumbling to myself): 'Postman always bangs twice.. Postman.. Bang..'
Me: 'Ah, yup, yup, sorry Larry, you've seen it already.'
And based on the length of the list that I was scanning, I sensed that this would go on forever unless I took the initiative and started pre-finding movies that Larry hadn't already watched. I looked along with Larry and he began recounting some of the movies he had seen and what he liked in rather horrifically fine detail for anyone within earshot, which I judged to be about 50% of the store given that all that was between us and the children's section was a pair of swinging doors and a six-foot section of painted plywood. I listened, involuntarily, as Larry recounted his weekend living room conquests and picked up on his likes and dislikes, and scurried around trying to find a movie with identical twins, in jail, with a billy club-wielding, red-head dominatrix warden on the cover, all the meanwhile looking up titles that Larry was tossing my way. 'This?' 'This?' 'This?' 'This?' he asked, as he flung porno after porno my way faster than I could look up his choices: 'Hannah Does Her Sisters', 'Buffy the Vampire Layer', 'The Great Muppet Raper', no, no, no... Sorry, Larry, - you've seen them all.
Larry: 'Fuuuck.'
Me (in my head): 'Yeah, that pretty much sums up our afternoon here...'
Me (outloud): 'You're living the dream man, what can I say?'
It was looking hopeless, and just then another guy came busting through the swinging doors. Larry looked up.
Guy: 'I got the stuff. Huh huh huh'
Larry: 'Heh heh heh'
Guy (showing Larry something in his pocket (I hope to God)): 'Huh huh huh,'
Larry (big smile, looking in the guys pocket - maybe his pants, I dunno): 'Heh heh heh'
Me (holding up the last video that Larry threw me): 'Hay, you haven't seen this one yet!'
Larry (squinting intently): 'Whadsat?'
Guy: 'That's... Dude. That's a dude movie!!!'
Me (looking again at the title): 'Drill Bill?'
Larry: 'I toll you I ain't into dudes!!'
Larry (quickly): 'Why'd you pick that!?'
Me (thinking that I couldn't get out of this gracefully): 'Oh, sorry...'
Guy: 'Dude.'
Larry: 'Dude.'
So we (Larry) ended up getting 'When Harry Ate Sally', 'Titty Titty Bang Bang', and 'Bonfire of the Panties' - which as it turns out, was actually switched with 'Bonfire of the Vanities' by mistake. Larry objected when I tried to exchange the movie for his chosen title, until I asked if he enjoyed Brian De Palma as much as I did, which sounded enough like a dude movie to Larry that he finally shut up.
So Larry announces rather loudly that he has to 'go have a squirt', and proceeds to weave his way over to the mens room, followed closely by his friend, leaving me to take the videos up to the register solo, and ring them up. And, as I was walking up to the register, hoping that by 'have a squirt' Larry had meant that he needed to pee rather than anything else, I bumped into Kari (who's Kari ) Editorial note: It wasn't really Kari, as I had already moved three times since knowing her - but it just as well could have been, and for the purposes of this story, it shall be.
Kari (staring at the pile of porn in my arms): 'O M G!' <-- she talked in acronyms sometimes.
Kari's Friends (conveniently, and exactly, one foot away): 'O M G!!' <-- So did they, apparently.
Kari and her friends: *whisper whisper -freak- whisper whisper*
Me: .. (Ah, what's the point... Is carrying around a depraved psycho’s porn for him any better than buying it myself?): 'Hi.'
I kept walking. They kept whispering and giggling. I set Larry's porn next to his case-or-more of beer on the counter and waited. Larry came out of the bathroom, followed by his friend, and rather non-chalantly and with a touch of practiced flair, picked up three blank video cassettes on his way to the register. Kari, oblivious to this, pantomimed a guy beating off - just for me, and then she and her friends turned and walked out of the store.
Guy (looking back towards the bathroom): 'I wouldn't go in there if I was you. Heh heh heh.'
Larry (grinning): 'Huh Huh Huh.'
Larry (gesturing to Kari as she walked out the door): 'Nice can on nat one nair.'
Larry: *belch*
Guy (all horned up, and dry-humping the counter): 'Ohh-h-h, she's bang-a-licous! Bang! Bang! Baaang!'
Me (having raised my hands off the counter, 'cause, I mean, hey): 'Yeah, um... She sure is... Yeah, like.. like a screen door in a hurricane, right?' <--I'm trying to fit in here, really.
Larry: ???
Guy: ???
Me: 'You know, like a screen door, when it's really windy and it... You know what, nevermind. Total's $18.50'
Larry pays with a twenty, belches once more for good measure, takes his change, and walks out the door - but not before I hear him mumbling to his friend 'Screen door. . . Must be a dude movie thing, I think he likes dude movies, hell I dunno.'
Kari and friends walk by moments later and make a gesture into the air as they pass by the outside store windows; they look as if they are giving a low-flying midget a hand job as he passes overhead.
I get to re-live this at school on Monday.
I get to clean the video store bathroom later tonight.
As a result, I get so intimately acquainted with Larry's tastes that when new pornos come in that I know he'll like (which is almost all of them), I add them to Larry's watchin' list, which is now duct-taped to the plywood wall inside the porno room - all so that Larry (and me) will never have to spend longer than 5 minutes in the video store picking out porn - hoping, perhaps, that this will spare me whatever small amount of dignity that I have left.
Larry showed up every-other week for nearly a year before I finally left for college. Every meeting presented some new and horrifying glimpse into the private life of a man who lived for nothing but cataloging imaginary poon - despite the 'Larry watchin' list'. This one time though, right before I left for college, I managed to sneak a copy of 'Homo Alone' into his weekend pile. I hope he had friends over that night.
And I never did get a date with Kari... Though, looking back on it now, I don't think that I really wanted one either...
The video store owner introduced me to Larry Long one day shortly after I started, and we shook hands. To describe Larry without using cliché' is difficult, but I will try. The first thing I noticed about Larry was that he was kind of yellow. Not yellow in a healthy Chinese sort of way - more yellow in an 'I drink myself to sleep every night, and have never brushed my teeth' kind of way. The pit stains in Larry's wife-beater were quite prominent, and were as yellow as his teeth. Larry's eyes were yellow, his hands were yellow, hell, even his breath was yellow - though it’s hard to say if his hands were yellow because of a liver problem or because he smoked so much that the nicotine stains wouldn't wash off anymore - assuming that he washed at all. Larry was sweaty. Larry was not given to kindness. Larry hadn't eaten a meal out other than 7-11 for years - and he wasn't much of a cook either. Larry's idea of treating a date was squirting a couple extra farts-worth of liquid cheese on the nachos when the store clerk wasn't looking. Larry could have easily been an extra on any episode of COPS, playing the part of 'guy without shirt wearing gold chain' who stands in his front yard screaming 'he done it! he done it!' and pointing deliberately and quite unnecessarily as the COPS tazer and drag off some other unfortunate chap like the lawnmowner man.
Please don't think I am being hard on Larry, or that I have any disdain for those who can't read. I don't. I'm just trying to give you a decent mental picture of what I, at 17, am about to have to deal with on a weekly basis until I grow a pair and quit this stupid job.
As I mentioned, Larry was yellowish, and he was also rather short. Five foot four, I would estimate. Five foot four, but he was all man. Larry would proceed to show up at the video store every other week for the next several months, reeking of beer and cigarettes, and we would begin what would be, by today's standards, a rather inappropriate relationship upon our first meeting. The relationship started like this:
Store owner (Vern): 'Hey, come here, I have a job for you.'
Me (and yes, her name really was Vern): 'Ok.'
Vern: 'See that guy at the counter? That's Larry.'
Me (Looking around, and spying Larry, who is leaning on a thirty-pack of Budweiser that he slung up on the rental counter just a moment ago): 'Ahhh... okay.'
Vern: 'Larry needs help picking out movies.'
Me (having made suggestions for customers a million times before): 'Oh, okay, no problem.'
Vern (lowering her voice): 'Larry can't read.'
Vern (continuing): 'You'll need to print out his rental history, and follow him around. Find some movies that he hasn't seen yet, and...'
Me: 'And? ...'
Vern: 'Just help out, okay?'
Me (hm, this is unusual): 'Erraky, sure....'
So I print out Larry's rental history, and it's one of those old dot-matrix printers that takes forever, and Larry looks to have rented about half the store so far, so I have some time to kill here.
Printer: 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzit.'
Me: 'Hey Larry.'
Larry (making a little upwards nod): 'Mnh.'
Me (gesturing towards the intellectually-painful Cary Elwes display I just set up): 'So uhh, have you seen 'Men in Tights?'
Larry: 'I don't do dude movies.'
Me (waiting patiently in slow-printer hell): 'Uh. Okay.'
Printer: 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzit!'
Glancing at the list, I could see that Larry loved his ass some porn. Loved it. Lived for it. Loved it, lived for it, rented it, watched it, and copied each and every one into his own personal porn library. Every-other week. Only on paydays. And he never missed a payday either.
About seven hundred zits later we're done, and I follow Larry. Larry heads straight back to the porno section of the store. Now, as a teenager, I had of course watched my share of porn - but never really discussed them in any kind of detail with another guy. 'Cause eww. This one time, over at Desi Fajardo's house (true story), we watched a great porno together while we drank his father's kahlua and smoked his father's camels, but that was four years ago - and we never felt the need to say more than 'oh, that's nice' during certain parts of the movie. It was not really a sharing kind of thing, and after that I was pretty much solo when watching porn - it's a guy thing I think.
Larry had no such inhibitions, and he crashed through the saloon-style swinging doors to the porno section (in which people under 18 - i.e. me are not allowed) with the bravado of someone who owned this section of the store (and in fact, as I was soon to find out, he essentially did, by virtue of somehow managing to afford two VCRs. . . yet still no deodorant). Larry studies the wall intently, and then holds up a video 'I got this one?' he asks.
Me: 'Uh.. Let’s see, Eight is not Enough...'
Me (damning myself for not printing out Larry's list in alphabetical order - it was by date instead): 'Looks like, last September, uhh.. yes.'
Larry, somewhat nonplussed, put the video back on the shelf and kept browsing. He picked up another and popped the question again. 'This?' he asked, holding it up.
Me (mumbling to myself): 'Postman always bangs twice.. Postman.. Bang..'
Me: 'Ah, yup, yup, sorry Larry, you've seen it already.'
And based on the length of the list that I was scanning, I sensed that this would go on forever unless I took the initiative and started pre-finding movies that Larry hadn't already watched. I looked along with Larry and he began recounting some of the movies he had seen and what he liked in rather horrifically fine detail for anyone within earshot, which I judged to be about 50% of the store given that all that was between us and the children's section was a pair of swinging doors and a six-foot section of painted plywood. I listened, involuntarily, as Larry recounted his weekend living room conquests and picked up on his likes and dislikes, and scurried around trying to find a movie with identical twins, in jail, with a billy club-wielding, red-head dominatrix warden on the cover, all the meanwhile looking up titles that Larry was tossing my way. 'This?' 'This?' 'This?' 'This?' he asked, as he flung porno after porno my way faster than I could look up his choices: 'Hannah Does Her Sisters', 'Buffy the Vampire Layer', 'The Great Muppet Raper', no, no, no... Sorry, Larry, - you've seen them all.
Larry: 'Fuuuck.'
Me (in my head): 'Yeah, that pretty much sums up our afternoon here...'
Me (outloud): 'You're living the dream man, what can I say?'
It was looking hopeless, and just then another guy came busting through the swinging doors. Larry looked up.
Guy: 'I got the stuff. Huh huh huh'
Larry: 'Heh heh heh'
Guy (showing Larry something in his pocket (I hope to God)): 'Huh huh huh,'
Larry (big smile, looking in the guys pocket - maybe his pants, I dunno): 'Heh heh heh'
Me (holding up the last video that Larry threw me): 'Hay, you haven't seen this one yet!'
Larry (squinting intently): 'Whadsat?'
Guy: 'That's... Dude. That's a dude movie!!!'
Me (looking again at the title): 'Drill Bill?'
Larry: 'I toll you I ain't into dudes!!'
Larry (quickly): 'Why'd you pick that!?'
Me (thinking that I couldn't get out of this gracefully): 'Oh, sorry...'
Guy: 'Dude.'
Larry: 'Dude.'
So we (Larry) ended up getting 'When Harry Ate Sally', 'Titty Titty Bang Bang', and 'Bonfire of the Panties' - which as it turns out, was actually switched with 'Bonfire of the Vanities' by mistake. Larry objected when I tried to exchange the movie for his chosen title, until I asked if he enjoyed Brian De Palma as much as I did, which sounded enough like a dude movie to Larry that he finally shut up.
So Larry announces rather loudly that he has to 'go have a squirt', and proceeds to weave his way over to the mens room, followed closely by his friend, leaving me to take the videos up to the register solo, and ring them up. And, as I was walking up to the register, hoping that by 'have a squirt' Larry had meant that he needed to pee rather than anything else, I bumped into Kari (who's Kari ) Editorial note: It wasn't really Kari, as I had already moved three times since knowing her - but it just as well could have been, and for the purposes of this story, it shall be.
Kari (staring at the pile of porn in my arms): 'O M G!' <-- she talked in acronyms sometimes.
Kari's Friends (conveniently, and exactly, one foot away): 'O M G!!' <-- So did they, apparently.
Kari and her friends: *whisper whisper -freak- whisper whisper*
Me: .. (Ah, what's the point... Is carrying around a depraved psycho’s porn for him any better than buying it myself?): 'Hi.'
I kept walking. They kept whispering and giggling. I set Larry's porn next to his case-or-more of beer on the counter and waited. Larry came out of the bathroom, followed by his friend, and rather non-chalantly and with a touch of practiced flair, picked up three blank video cassettes on his way to the register. Kari, oblivious to this, pantomimed a guy beating off - just for me, and then she and her friends turned and walked out of the store.
Guy (looking back towards the bathroom): 'I wouldn't go in there if I was you. Heh heh heh.'
Larry (grinning): 'Huh Huh Huh.'
Larry (gesturing to Kari as she walked out the door): 'Nice can on nat one nair.'
Larry: *belch*
Guy (all horned up, and dry-humping the counter): 'Ohh-h-h, she's bang-a-licous! Bang! Bang! Baaang!'
Me (having raised my hands off the counter, 'cause, I mean, hey): 'Yeah, um... She sure is... Yeah, like.. like a screen door in a hurricane, right?' <--I'm trying to fit in here, really.
Larry: ???
Guy: ???
Me: 'You know, like a screen door, when it's really windy and it... You know what, nevermind. Total's $18.50'
Larry pays with a twenty, belches once more for good measure, takes his change, and walks out the door - but not before I hear him mumbling to his friend 'Screen door. . . Must be a dude movie thing, I think he likes dude movies, hell I dunno.'
Kari and friends walk by moments later and make a gesture into the air as they pass by the outside store windows; they look as if they are giving a low-flying midget a hand job as he passes overhead.
I get to re-live this at school on Monday.
I get to clean the video store bathroom later tonight.
As a result, I get so intimately acquainted with Larry's tastes that when new pornos come in that I know he'll like (which is almost all of them), I add them to Larry's watchin' list, which is now duct-taped to the plywood wall inside the porno room - all so that Larry (and me) will never have to spend longer than 5 minutes in the video store picking out porn - hoping, perhaps, that this will spare me whatever small amount of dignity that I have left.
Larry showed up every-other week for nearly a year before I finally left for college. Every meeting presented some new and horrifying glimpse into the private life of a man who lived for nothing but cataloging imaginary poon - despite the 'Larry watchin' list'. This one time though, right before I left for college, I managed to sneak a copy of 'Homo Alone' into his weekend pile. I hope he had friends over that night.
And I never did get a date with Kari... Though, looking back on it now, I don't think that I really wanted one either...
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Mistakes have been made, others will be blamed. . .
I find myself, as a new parent, regretting some of the decisions that I made during the first couple of years raising the boy. Oh, not the major ones, I got those down: Read to your child 15 minutes a day, don't spike the milk, change their diapers daily, you know - my regrets are rather minor I guess, on a more personal level. Maybe 'regret' is the wrong word, maybe it would be better to say 'knowing what I know now, I wouldn't. . .', yeah, that's it. . . Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't ever be:1) Trying to substitute 'malk' for 'milk' - or really any basement brand food for the real deal. Let's face it, Oaty-o's do not equal Cheerios, and everyone knows it - even the 18 month old - and the perfect time to not discover the emerging pallate of your child is while driving through the middle of the California desert with 72 oz of Oaty-o's strewn across the back seat, 90 minutes away from the next rest stop with something sounding roughly equivalent in pitch and volume to a fire engine's siren coming from your back seat. Buy the damn Cheerios and save yourself the headache. The only potential benefit of buying basement (and I am making a distiction here between so-called bargain brands and basement, btw. Bargain hotdogs, for instance, are just rubbery and kinda nasty. Basement hotdogs turn your tongue magenta.) brands is the amusement of watching the child's face as he or she naively tries the new brand in front of you. The best I got from our 2-yr old was an immediate grimmace, and an audible 'plah', following by a 'da's yucky, papa' - and this was for freezer-o-pops, by the way. Who would have thought that you could screw up frozen sugar-water?
2) Encouraging solid foods too early. I always looked down upon those parents who sat with and fussed over their child during the first several months of solid food - scraping the pureed peas off of their chin back onto the spoon and placing it back in their mouth only to have half of it come back out again along with gurgling, when clearly their must be a better, less time-consuming way. I'll call my method 'the fish-feeding' method. I reasoned that, since this little guy was capable of crawling around and attempting to shove anything in his little mouth that he could find - and I believe that he in fact considered it his job, then the most reasonable method of feeding him would be to go along with a box of Cheerios and shake some out all over the floor in front of him, and wait for him to a) discover and b) eat them. Seriously. My wife nixed this idea, but suggested that we could put some on a paper plate on the ground and wait to see what happened. She expressed some concern that he might get a Cheerio stuck in his mouth and gag, but was willing to give it a shot. I poured the Cheerios on to a paper plate and waited. The discovery phase of the operation went fine - no problem in fact, but as the first Cheerio entered his mouth there was a gagging and wheezing sound, followed shortly by a jar of semi-digested pureed peas errupting from out of nowhere, in a near-perfect arc, showering the floor in a sickly green ooze. My wife had been videotaping at the time, so we have this moment for posterity. I haven't been able to live this one down yet.
3) Trusting the diaper. There will come a time when you rely on the diaper, and it will let your ass down (and often in a spectacular fashion). My time was 2:30 am September 1st, 2005. The kid was awake, in the middle of the night, because he was hungry, or so I had guessed. So I zombie'd my ass out of bed, got the stupid milk bottle, and went to take care of business. We sat, he fussed, but ultimately agreed to the milk. About half way through he seemed to be done, and as I went to sit him up to burp there was a horrendous sound which originiated from his back-end that propelled him skyward, eviscerating the diaper in the process. When he came down, I caught him - and everything else that came along with him. If you had happened on the scene 5 minutes later you would have seen something that looked as if the entire baby food aisle at the grocery store decided to empty itself on some poor chaps floor, a set of footprints leading away from said emptying, and distantly, the sound of running water, a screaming baby, and a cacophony of cuss words which would cling to the bathroom walls like so much baby food for weeks to come - which reminds me, I also wouldn't be:
4) Swearing in front of them. Oh, it's cute when you hit your thumb with a hammer and say 'dammit', and then they look up at you, make a crude attempt at a thumbs up (mimicking you) and say 'dabbit', but sometimes they pick up more than you might think, and will then wait for the perfect time to spring it on you. Like this one:
Grandma: 'Oh, darn-it, I meant to grab some malk at the store.'
Kid (admonishing Grandma, with the gravest of seriousness he can muster, shaking his head): 'We don't say that word Grandma. . . We don't say that fucking word.'
And his pronunciation of 'fucking' was bloody perfect, which was bloody hard to explain!
Why my wife objects to him saying 'darn-it' I'll never know, but whatever. It's better than mispronouncing words sometimes I guess. Right now we're working really hard on 'finger', becuase it comes out 'neeeeger' instead of 'finger' - and since we all hold hands everywhere we go, and since his hand is too small to hold an entire adult-sized hand, he is often heard to ask (in his outside voice, of course): 'Where my [finger]??', 'Okay, got my [finger]!!' as we're crossing the street or whatever. . . We're just waiting for that one to drop at the wrong time . . .
Saturday, July 26, 2008
The Lawnmower Man
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/25/mower.madness.ap/index.html
Now... You might be tempted to look at this guy and think, my God, what a pathetic waste of human life, but I bet that you're not exactly seeing him at his best. At least I hope not. It's my contention that this fellow probably grew up fairly normal (whatever that is these days), and then somewhere along the line from then until now he probably just got jacked with one too many times until he finally snapped. You all know someone on a similar path - that crazy checker at the grocery store, or that co-worker who has put on 40 lbs in the past year and always comes back from lunch smelling like gin, maybe that one old guy who lives on the corner who methodically digs up little squares of his front lawn and sifts through the dirt (but only at night, by floodlight) - you know someone who some day is going to get fucked in the drive-thru one too many times and will go absolutely bug-nutz crazy and plow their car through the drive-thru window and scream 'but it said drive thru!!! It said drive thru!!!' as the cops taser him and carry him off to jail. The point is that this guy was probably relatively normal at some point in his life but that the continual stress of living in our society made him cave in one day and say 'fuck it.'
The idea that some people may be put on this Earth to simply serve as an example for others has crossed my mind more than once, so to that end I suggest using this story for something positive. When you have identified that one person in your life who is going to snap at any time, then email them this story. And then tell them, next time someone readeatedly kicks the back of their chair in the theater, next time they get cut-off in traffic, next time they only hear the second flush, and the sound of running water on the hard wood floor, along with the words 'uh oh' to remember what happened to The Lawnmower Man, and maybe it will make it all better :).
Now... You might be tempted to look at this guy and think, my God, what a pathetic waste of human life, but I bet that you're not exactly seeing him at his best. At least I hope not. It's my contention that this fellow probably grew up fairly normal (whatever that is these days), and then somewhere along the line from then until now he probably just got jacked with one too many times until he finally snapped. You all know someone on a similar path - that crazy checker at the grocery store, or that co-worker who has put on 40 lbs in the past year and always comes back from lunch smelling like gin, maybe that one old guy who lives on the corner who methodically digs up little squares of his front lawn and sifts through the dirt (but only at night, by floodlight) - you know someone who some day is going to get fucked in the drive-thru one too many times and will go absolutely bug-nutz crazy and plow their car through the drive-thru window and scream 'but it said drive thru!!! It said drive thru!!!' as the cops taser him and carry him off to jail. The point is that this guy was probably relatively normal at some point in his life but that the continual stress of living in our society made him cave in one day and say 'fuck it.'
The idea that some people may be put on this Earth to simply serve as an example for others has crossed my mind more than once, so to that end I suggest using this story for something positive. When you have identified that one person in your life who is going to snap at any time, then email them this story. And then tell them, next time someone readeatedly kicks the back of their chair in the theater, next time they get cut-off in traffic, next time they only hear the second flush, and the sound of running water on the hard wood floor, along with the words 'uh oh' to remember what happened to The Lawnmower Man, and maybe it will make it all better :).
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