South of Somewhere

My town is a haven for culture amid an oddly red-necked area. It's like once you step outside the city limits it's collection of tiny southern towns, which is odd considering our proximity to Canada. For the most part there's no reason to leave city limits. I had to stop for gas once several miles out of town and was baffled to find myself faced with jean overalls and the distinct feeling like I'd stepped into Deliverance. He stared at me while I pumped gas, and for dramatic reenactment, he did so with a pig under one arm.

So one night at work it's me and Kat. We're having a fairly slow night right up to close. Then we get in two groups. One is comprised of nicely dressed women, shopping for a bachelorette party. The second is a group of guys young enough that we card them, looking like they just stepped out of the Deep South. We leave well enough alone for a while, but finally one of the boys approaches. Me and Kat look up politely at him and he grins and leans against the counter and starts drawling. "Me an' my buddies just come up from TINY TOWN, not much goin' on down there on a Friday night. We figgered we'd find a party up here. Just drive right on up."

Kat is being polite, but all I can think is that if this guy's fishing for a party invitation he'd be sadly disappointed to know me and Kat were having a tempura night at her place. As I was leaving to count down our secondary register I hear him call Kat beautiful and stifle a groan. By the time I come back he's given up and rejoined his friends. Kat gives me a sardonic look and I grin. As they're leaving all three guys saunter out lazily, bidding us, "Good night beautifuls!" We roll our eyes and the bachelorette shoppers approach. "Were they for real?" We laugh and nod. "What were they saying?" I laughed and said how he kept dropping hints about looking for a party, cause we were the place to be for parties apparently. The women laughed and asked where the boys had been from. Kat told her the name of the county and they said they were Canadian, and didn't recognize it. "It's a little town south of here." I chimed in  "But y'know what's funny is they actually had southern accents. I mean, we're almost as far north as it's possible to be. Maybe you just have to be from the south of somewhere to talk like that." So it's possible to be in the Deep South at any point on a map, as long as you're south of some larger metropolis. I'm developing the Theory of Relatively Southern areas. It's a work in progress.

Look at ME

After my road trip my light came on saying, "maintenance recommended" and I was more than happy to bring in my faithful little huckleberry. So today after breakfast I out with Isaac, and he agreed to hang with me, and drive me back when my car was ready. So we arrived at the garage, and I came in first. The counter was high, and I know the impression I can give is of a much younger person, emphasized by me looking like a kid trying to look over this counter. Initially the guy is attentive, and friendly. I grin and we banter a little as I tell him why I'm in. Then as I'm talking, Isaac comes in from parking his car and joins me, and immediately the guys attention slid off me and over to Isaac. Every comment started going around me.

Isaac did his best to look uninterested, but it didn't matter. About 1/5th of the guys attention was on me. He told me to drop my car off, that they would be able to get to it around 3, which was fine. When we came back in though, instead of realizing his error, he addressed even fewer of his comments to me. It was my name on the sheet, it was my card paying, and I was the one he called about the car, but it didn't seem to matter. Given a choice between explaining to a male or a female, he inherently assumed the male would know more. The laughable part is Isaac and I are about even in our knowledge of cars. 

 It got to the point that I was so frustrated I wanted to push myself up onto the counter and yell that it was my car we were discussing, that he should be making eye contact with me, but I'm fully convinced that even had I done so, and Isaac had turned his back, this man would have continued directing every comment to Isaac rather than me.

Afterward me and Isaac agreed that he was just gay, that he found Isaac exceedingly attractive and simply couldn't have acknowledged me if his life had depended on it.

Points of Note Part 2

I got my first speeding ticket. Speeding is something that is ridiculously easy for me to rationalize. For instance when a city went without speed limits for a few months, nothing happened. There was no rise or decline of accidents, everything stayed the same. It turns out people drive at a speed they're comfortable with, and if you're already going 50 you're going to be just as dead when you crash as if you're going 94. Which is incidentally what I was going on some forgotten stretch in Montana. I came up behind a cop, and he clocked me. I was wearing my glasses for once, and I'm convinced the appearance of my eyes being several times too large and my bedraggled "slept in my car" look kept him pleasantly disposed. He gave me a $40 ticket, but since I found a $50 bill on the floor of a gas station the night before I figure I'm still up by $10.

When I entered the park there were lots of signs for wildlife crossing and they weren't joking. I stopped three or four times when in the national parks. The first time was for bison, and I was disappointed to see how small they were. My mom owns cows, small ones, and these were almost of a size with them! I snapped a picture as they meandered past, disappointed. I told Taylor and her roommate later how surprised I was that they hadn't been bigger. They asked if I was sure they were adults. It was a whole herd, so I was
pretty certain. But I changed my mind on my way home. There was another crossing, and these bison were substantially larger, and furred differently, and incidentally having an adult male bison lumber by you is a rather daunting experience.

And finally, the spice girls, for which I will include a real picture. Taylor and I were wandering Jackson waiting for our showing of Gatsby when we saw a commotion. A man leading a dog that was choking itself on it's collar told us it was a chili festival. We approached curiously and in the light drizzle people had set up several booths and there was a male voice crying that he was giving away chili, championship chili! When we found them we both whipped out our cameras. A sign said Spice World, and two men were in some of the most ridiculous drag I've ever seen. They were ladling chili and calling out and there were girls too but they weren't half so entertaining. But the best part was when they agreed to do photos. They stood under these deer antler arches (which  honestly disturbed me quite a bit) and posed.

 Some Asian tourists came up and got in the picture, one excitedly exclaiming, "Are they the real Spice Girls?" despite two obviously being men, and then a middle aged Asian woman came up and photo bombed the whole thing, standing in front of two of the "girls" with arms outstretched into peace signs. It made my life.

Points of Note on a 30hr Drive

I recently went on a road trip to Wyoming, the Grand Tetons National Park, which in total is about 30 hours of driving both ways. Here's some stuff that happened.

While driving through Spokane I saw they have a Thor st, and I was like, well, maybe they don't mean THAT Thor, but they did, because it was right next to Freya st. I was picturing Viking deities sitting around Spokane looking bored.

My path took me all the way across Washington, a little over Idaho, and mostly through Montana. During the night I decided to push to the next rest stop, and in a haze of sleep I passed into Montana without noticing.The next morning when I woke up it was like being in the Misty Mountains, and it took about 50 miles for me to realize I wasn't in Idaho. 

At my first rest stop of the day as I was getting back in my car and catching up on correspondences I looked up to see a sixty year old man who looked incredibly spry trot up to a picnic table with a little roof structure over it. He leapt up and grabbed the beams of the roof and started doing chin ups.

The cows all dropped their calves a few months ago. In Montana I saw a field with one mother cow and there were five calves with her, no other adults. Four of the babies were sprawled completely on their sides unmoving in the rain, while the mom and one calf stood under a tree. I feel like they may have been dead, I wished there was a number I could call up to alert the farmer he might want to check on them.

Taylor's room was right on the corner of the dorms, and outside it was a tiny stump, and under the stump lived a little burrowing mountain creature. Several times when I came outside I'd see it whisk into its hole quick as a flash and there was no way to express why this delighted me so much.

On the drive home I was passing under an overpass and the worst thing ever happened. It seemed some birds were nesting up under it, and as I drove under something fell in front of my car. I saw a desperate flutter, and it looked like two birds were interlocked, they couldn't fly and I couldn't veer, and they thunked sickeningly into my windshield and went spinning away. I love birds, I'm always watching them, even just gulls and seagulls, and the entire rest of the trip every time I looked up to watch them flying I felt painfully guilty.

A coworker had recommended I bring a jug of water in case of engine overheat, so I brought one and left it in my trunk. As I was in the mountain passes on the way home I heard a gurgle of water on my hard right turn. I winced and had to wait for about 20 miles for a rest area to stop and check it out. The jug had cracked on the side and soaked through a newsprint sketchbook in my trunk. Funnily enough it was the same rest stop I'd hit on the first night, just barely inside Montana.

Oddly one of the least scenic portions of the trip turned out to be Washington on the way home. The way I went on the way down was further north, and full of trees and valleys and hills. Following I-90 home was mostly just barren brown hills. It got prettier the farther in I came, and at one point the highway was the perfect bisecting line. On my left was perfectly peerless green fields, so perfect they looked like the photoshopped wallpaper under the blue sky. On my right was cracked, sere, brown wasteland.

I Made You Some Googly Eyes!

At STORE we carry some high end toys. One of the best is the JimmyJane's. They're small, powerful, and discreet. But their designs do look a bit odd at first glance. For instance, the form 2 looks like this:

I have people tell me frequently they think it looks like a tooth, but I've always seen it as more of a bunny. I've often been tempted to draw little eyes on it.

Well one day, a guy comes in. He's looking for a present for his girlfriend, and says she needs something high quality and powerful. I ask if it's for internal or external and when he said external I beelined to the form 2. "This one. It's the best." I tell him how the vibration goes back and forth between the ears, how it's fully waterproof, how it charges. He doesn't say anything, he's just looking at our tester model slightly confused. I'm used to it and grin, "Are you gonna say it looks like a tooth?" He laughs and nods. "I always thought it looked more like a rabbit. All it needs are some googly eyes." A really weird look flashes across his face. I tilt my head at him, wondering if he's offended or weirded out by thinking of a sex toy as being cute. But to my infinite surprise, he pulls out two perfectly hand-made googly eyes. They're cut from white cardboard, with little pupils drawn on, shine included. I look from them sitting in his palm up to him, incredulous.

"I made them. I usually carry some around with me, I like to stick them to random things, but when you mentioned wanting to put eyes on this I decided you had to have them." He tipped them into my hand, and proceeded to buy the form 2. I rang him up and looked at the eyes in my palm. I couldn't tape them to the toy since we have to show it off several times a day. Finally I decided to tape them to my scanner on the front register. They stayed there for months until finally one fell off and got lost.

Who Needs Shoes?

So STORE is right by the government aid building. The sad thing is that people will often get their money and come blow it on sex toys. Not that often but it's depressing all the same.

Today a small group came in, one short girl whose face looked hardened into bitterness. Her friend was taller and marshmallowy in build. They had a generic sort of wanna-be gangsta guy with them. The short jaded looking one came up to the counter while her friend looked at books. "Are you guys hiring?" I smile and say we're always accepting applications, which is nonsense, but it's nicer than just saying no. She asks for an application and as I'm reaching into my filing folder for one she asks, "what's it like, working here?" I shrug noncommittally, "it's just a retail job." She looks immediately suspicious, like I'm lying. "But do you meet a lot of creepers or weirdos?" I give her a blank stare with the application in my hands. "It depends on your outlook. You have to discuss really personal topics with people and be okay with that rather than judging them."

This girl looks like she judges everyone for everything. Her generic boy finds the batteries and says, "who's Doc Johnson?" I want to laugh but I just quirk a smile. "Doc Johnson is a toy brand. They make low power batteries that don't run the motors as hard as say Duracell or Energizers." The jaded girl is staring at me in horror and pushes the application back across the counter at me. "Never mind."

Batteries? Batteries were enough to scare you away? You see the 20lb ass and fully realistic legs behind me, right? But batteries? Okay. So they wander around, and her marshmallow friend begs her to buy Gabriel's Inferno which is basically just a knock off of 50 Shades. She asks me if I've read it. I tell her no, but that I've read Bared to You and all three 50 Shades books. She takes this as an opening to gush about it. My lip start curling back involuntarily in disgust as she raptures over how fast she blazed through them.

 I shrug, "I didn't really care for them, the author isn't a very good writer. I read a lot so I'm picky, and she just repeats words over and over. Like mercurial. It's good once, but y'know." I expect her to back off since I'm clearly not a fellow fan but she doesn't. "That's what I thought at first! But then you realize how dark his past is, with her innocence, and it's all just so complicated!" I am trying not to snarl or laugh in her face. 3/4s of those books are email headers and repeats of the same lines over and over, but yeah, super deep. Completely misinformed is the words I would have chosen but complicated works too. So she buys the erotic novel and then they keep wandering. She had begged her friend to pay for the book, and she asked if I took these, and flashed an unfamiliar card in my face. I tilted my head, and said I didn't know. She informed me it was government aid. I tried not to cringe. She then handed me cash instead.

So they keep walking around and the girl decides there's another book she needs, and promises to pay the embittered girl back tomorrow since it's payday then. The jaded girl then starts griping about how she can't keep blowing money cause her kid needs shoes.

The marshmallow offers to give her $100 if she'll buy whatever she wants now. She agreed immediately, her child's shoes put on hold for erotica.

The final nonsense they added to the morning was when the marshmallow was checking out for the final time. She said she would love to work here and her friend looked scandalized. I passed over the application. "Is it full time?" I shook my head, "No, only the manager or assistant manager are full time." She nods, "but like, I have another job, how would the scheduling work?" I try not to laugh at her presumption. "We're looking for mostly open availability at the moment" She hastened to assure me her other job was a night one, and as long as she didn't have to come in before ten it would be okay. Playing along I said that only key holders like myself can open, that the next earliest shift is noon, so she had nothing to worry about. Reassured on her fictitious scheduling dilemma they finally left and I went into the back to punch the inflatable boob to blow off steam.

Keyblade

The little blue truck didn't start out disreputable. My dad bought it and it was just a tiny light blue truck for odd jobs. When my sister was old enough it became hers, and then my brothers. And then my sisters again. Over the years it got stolen three times and it wasn't hard to see why. Having migrated through family members it picked up some quirks.

It stopped being able to lock when my sister and some friends had a tug of war on the door. It stopped needing a key when my brother taught me how to hot-wire a car on it. It probably kept getting stolen for both those reasons, but it always came back to us, smelling weirder than before. After a while my sister got a new car and the little blue truck meandered back home. My parents talked about giving it to me, but happily it never came to pass.

Even though it was never my vehicle there were some gems in our time together. My sister brought me into downtown Seattle and we clutched our seats with teeth clenched, sweating, wondering what cruel god made hills at a 90 degree angle with manual transmissions.

 But my favorite memory of the little blue truck was after it got all wonky. My dad and I were going to run errands. At this point the little blue truck didn't even have a key, on account if the fact that any bit of metal jammed in the ignition would start the disloyal thing. My dad had a saw blade he used for this purpose. He had just started playing Kingdom Hearts, and as he stuck the saw blade into the dilapidated ignition he turned to me with this huge goofy grin and said, "Look, a keyblade!"

 

I almost wish I could have gotten a chance with the little blue truck. I would have cosplayed as Sora every day and carried around a keyblade which with some finagling could have probably started the truck.

The Serial Killer

Ages and ages ago a guy came in. He's small, not much larger than me, with slicked back blonde hair, and has a particularly rodent-like cast to his features. When he speaks it's almost completely unintelligible, you can understand if you listened very very carefully, but for me it was singularly unpleasant. The first time I encountered him he held me hostage in the DVD room mumbling about his preferences for what felt like an eternity. Lest I extend the conversation I didn't ask him to repeat himself, and got the hell away as soon as I could. I pleaded with Crystal to take over with him, because he gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies, and she said she would. But when he came up to the counter, she was busy, so I was roped into helping him. He kept up a constant litany of his quiet unintelligible mumbling, but after a while I started to acclimate to his way of talking and understood some of it. From what I could surmise, he was asking me if semen stuck in my throat when I swallowed. My eyes blazed, and I would have loved to spit n his face and inform him I wouldn't know, but I couldn't be completely sure of what he'd said, and he caught my look and fell silent. He asked to be shown different toys, and asked questions that he had to repeat several times before I could understand him. When he finally had to pay all his cards were summarily rejected, and he handed over a small pile of unpleasantly damp bills. I snarled at his back as he left, and hoped never to see him again.

He came in yesterday. I didn't remember him immediately, it's been almost a year since our last encounter, but when the small blonde man came in I looked over at my coworker Christian in a way that says, "total creeper, please handle?" And he did. I remembered him as soon as he greeted us, his particular brand of psycho-babble is hard to forget. He headed straight for DVDs, and I filled Christian in on his last time in the store. He looked horrified by the comment and said he'd help the guy. I thanked him profusely, and puttered around the counter. But soon the man came up to ask for help. I was easily the rudest I've ever been to a customer. He was trying to catch my eye and  I physically turned my back on him and looked at Christian. He slid smoothly between us and led the man over to DVDs.

When he was finally ready to check out he came up with his movies and I walked away. But like last time his cards kept getting declined. Our counters are set up like a circle, with two breaks in them to pass through, and two registers, with a counter top and drawers in the center with a body-form mannequin. I stood behind the middle counter, shielded from the mouse-man by the body form. But as I glanced over I saw him leaning to keep me in sight. I immediately dropped to a squat on my side of the counter, behind the middle island. He was thus very effectively blocked from seeing me.

Christian patiently bore with him while he tried to arrive at a total that his cards wouldn't decline, and when the man was rung up Christian walked around the island to stand next to me. We exchanged grimaces, and he looked over as the mouse-man finally collected his bag and said, "Have a nice day!" But instead of just returning the pleasantry, the man came around to the side of the counter where I was crouching and leaned over it. I pretended not to notice, and didn't look up. To me specifically he said, "See you around, later."

 Me and Christian slowly looked at each other, my face set in an unhappy frown. He laughed at my expression but said, "That look he just gave you was a serial killer look, and it said, 'you're going to be my next victim.'" After I'd almost forgotten it later, when it was dark outside he added out of the blue, "If you'd seen the full look, you'd have nightmares tonight."

Mexican Easter

So my largest chunk of heritage is easily my Mexican roots which makes up 1/4 of my genetics. When I was born my Nana is heard exclaiming in the video, "what's all that red on her head?" My hair. My mom is a little darker, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, and she always got accused of kidnapping me when I was a kid. It's always funny to me, because I know I'm Mexican, that people forget so often. But mostly we don't do anything very traditional, my family tried to escape their roots a bit. But we have some crazy ass Mexican Easters. We go to a park in Seattle every year, in the same spot, for 46 years, rain or shine. It's all the extended family which is convoluted and not technically related by blood in most cases. I grew up thinking kids were my cousins when we didn't share any relatives at all. And since it keeps expanding throughout the generations it's really hard to remember who's who.

But it's fantastic, Easter is easily my favorite holiday. We play the same sorts of games every year.

First there's the pinata. A lot of people when thinking of pinata will think of little kids birthday parties, with the pinata hanging easily within reach, maybe someone gets blindfolded, but overall it's not too challenging. Those pinatas are for pussies. My Nana makes our pinatas out of cardboard and duct tape, and they're always incredibly ugly. But effective. When the pinata is hung up, whoever wants to take a crack at it lines up by size. The little kids are always quite hopeful, but I've never seen the pinata cracked by anyone under 18. Because not only is our pinata made of cardboard and duct tape, we go all in as far as sensory deprivation goes. You're blindfolded, spun 10 times, then unleashed in the correct direction. But that's still not all. Because the pinata isn't just hanging there. They get to most vindictive person at the gathering to hold the rope and the pinata is swinging up and down and all around you. The rope pullers try to make the pinata hit you, to add to the indignity of swinging blindly with all your might at nothing. And while you're flailing around trying to bludgeon the air, and this monstrous pinata keeps thumping into you when you least expect it, the entire Easter gathering is all screaming contradictory instructions that are usually too late by the time you understand it. And you only get three swings. It is a gauntlet, and really it's usually one of the younger guys with blood lust in his eyes that manages to crack it.

There's also the hay pile. This is probably the most red-necky thing we do in my family, and I don't know how it started, but it's a pretty strange game. We spread out a tarp, and put a bale of hay on it. We turn the bale into a loose pile, then fill it up with dollar bills, loose change, candy and small toys, and make the kids go nuts. The littlest ones go in first, and honestly most of them are just stoked to be in a pile of hay, which is only because they don't realize yet that they'll be finding straw in their clothes and shoes and hair for weeks. Some of the middling aged kids get really into it, they scope out their section and methodically extract coins, candy, and disdain the toys. The weirdest part of this game is the adults. Most of them will try to entice the kids into more fervent hunting by pretending to have seen a hundred dollar bill, but only the most gullible believe them. But some of the adults, when the kids have given up, are reluctant to see any money go to waste. My Nana is one of these. She'll bribe kids to keep digging, promising a dollar for every penny fished out. There was one who was more extreme this year, he spent about two hours on his hands and knees to fish out $16 in change. I wanted to tell him that was below minimum wage per hour worked finding the money.

Hours later:

 

But of course the biggest event is the egg hunt. We have a large portion of park to work in, with trees, bushes, and undergrowth to hide eggs in. But again, our egg hunt goes to an extreme. Because every year there's a Golden Egg. It's an oval stone painted gold, so it's a bit tacky, but it's the most coveted item at Easter, and the adults are absolutely sadistic in its placement. It's not like the prize is even that great usually, but you get the pride of saying you found it.  One year, Danny had it in his hat, and was a moving target. One year they hid it well under a bush, under a rock. The year I found it, they had climbed a tree, put the egg in a knot hole, and just in case that was too obvious, they covered the egg's shine with a leaf. Oh, and the tree was surrounded by sticker bushes. If it takes too long to find the egg (it always does) they start giving more definite hints about its placement. The year I got it, everyone was surrounding the tree it was in. Most everyone was digging tentatively in the sticker bush undergrowth. I looked up and saw the knot hole, and I got really bummed out because I knew I was the only one who was going to have the balls to climb this tree. So I waded into the bushes, which stand about shoulder height, and pulled myself up the trunk to grab it.  People rushed in after me, scenting victory, but I got the egg. The leaf pissed me off a bit, it seemed superfluous since the I'd had to climb the damn tree anyway.