floorpie

Another LA weekend Post, Effectively Punctuating How Pathetic Dave’s Life is Seeing as he’s Still Talking About It

On the drive down the 5 from the Bay Area to the LA Area, you go through parts of California that you forgot exist. They consist mostly of a whole lotta nothing, interspersed with random bits of absolutely zero. Little towns, created entirely out of fast-food joints, gas stations, and exactly one store named Mart do manage to randomly break up the monotony from time to time.

In one such Mart, there were the usual product offerings: sexist bumper-stickers, beef jerky (8 fun flavors), junk advertising the “city” you were now enjoying your afternoon in, and at the register was this:

Yes, that’s an individually wrapped dill pickle. The repugnance that spread across Lara’s previously pretty face was palpable and she turned to me to say something in that too loud voice she usually uses when she’s confronted with something that simply should not exist. I was able to barely restrain her with a quiet “I know, they also have Dwight Yoakam…on tape.”

I can only imagine what sort of situations call for a soggy cucumber floating in it’s own fluid sac. I see the stereotypical white-trash 30-something. He’s dressed in ripped jeans, a stained wife-beater, sweat-stained hat advertising oil, and an oversized belt-buckle with his name on it. He stacks his pack o’ chaw and 6-pack on the counter, and then grabs the individually wrapped dill pickle on an impulse. He pays the bill in mostly change, lumbers out to his beat up Ford pickup with primer-paint doors, rotting plywood tailgate, and his mangy dog tied in the back with a length of frayed rope. He opens the driver’s-side door to let the air in to the non-A/C’d interior, and sits with one booted foot on the ground, and the other on the running board. He opens his pickle with his teeth, spilling the juice down his shirt unnoticed. He then squeezes the bottom of the package like toothpaste, popping the glistening vegetable up an inch. A big open maw with missing teeth chomps down, leaving an exaggerated Ruffles imprint in the now headless treat…

*sigh* In scouring the Net for a picture of these things, I also found this stuff. The doll is a must have.

I spy with my little eye…

something cheezy…

Two things in Dave’s News of the World today:

The USPS is thinking of giving the hook to Saturday delivery! What’s up with that?! The 34 cents I give them isn’t enough to fly my mom’s meatloaf recipe to friends in Florida?

I can hear the Postmaster General whining now, “But jet fuel is so expensive!” Oh boo-hoo! Here’s two bits and a dime. Now, take this Lowrider Magazine subscription card and slog your ass through the snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night, and you can keep the extra penny to get yourself something nice.

In other news, Kmart’s Blue Light Special is back.

Three of my friends live together in a 3 bedroom apartment in LA. Two of them are engineers, one of them is an MBA-type, and they’re all guys, so of course there’s no food in the house. As such, we walked down Main St. in El Segundo in search of grubbage Sunday morning. Finding everything quaintly (and annoyingly devoutly) closed on a Sunday, we ended up at the glorious Chevron Food Mart at the end of the street.

Some of you may remember the days when gas stations were places you went to get gas.

Over the years, there has apparently been an explosion of need when it comes to food whilst getting gas. Perhaps it’s something about fueling your body and your machine. (I’m not sure how the “I (heart) LA” and Chevron car-mascot kitsch fit into this, but I’m sure they must somehow). At any rate, I’ve become increasingly fascinated with the products for sale (and presumably bought), at these little communist strongholds.

To continue, while failing to find anything I would consider palatable that early in the morning except for a thing of orange juice, I did succeed in finding a can of black pitted olives.

“Saints be praised, Mom! They have those black pitted olives we were looking for!”
mumbling a la the teacher in Peanuts specials
“What? No, they don’t seem to have any anti-freeze…but the olives Mom, the OLIVES!!!”

It amuses me to no end that the attendant/fine quality food service provider didn’t even flinch as I carefully placed my single-serving orange juice and 16oz can o’ olives on the counter.

I wonder how long that lonely can will sit on the coffee table in my friends’ non-descript SoCal apartment before they realize that it shouldn’t be there in the first place.

My friends think I’m weird. Luckily, it’s in a harmless way.

I brought my cameras with me to both: take pictures of friends as one is wont to do when with old friends, and take pictures of cars as per my earlier post. As I was explaining my intentions to them, they kind of looked at each other in the backseat, and then looked back at me blankly with polite friend-smiles. There mood turned, however, as they started to see how funny it was when we came up on BLKBTFLY (black butterfly [I think]) and indeed saw a sassy black woman driving her early 90’s MR2. Awesome. By the end of the weekend, I had my friends weaving wildly through traffic to try and catch up to particularly good ones.

Best one that got away:

The Lincoln Navigator with TUNA4ME

And I was sooooo close….

Back from a weekend in LA with friends. Had a great time, had some laughs, shed a tear of nostalgia, and now it’s all good. Very tired now, and somebody moved my clock an hour forward (damn April Fool’s). Will write more when am more cognizant…

Leavin’…on a jet plane….don’t know when I’ll be back again…

Well, actually, I’m driving, and, uhhh, I’l be back Sunday night, so…

Well, according to Freak Astrology: “Wisely-calculated risks can pay off in terms of coinage and resources, but only if you don’t suck.”

You gotta love the future predicted for you in SoCal verbiage. (via jessajune)

You know that guy with the khaki pants and blue button-down shirt with the rolled up sleeves? The clean-cut guy, youngish, and always moving quickly with a cell-phone glued to the side of his head and a half-drunk latte in his free hand? You always see him in his BMW, or in the lobby of office buildings, shaking hands with foreign investors and signing contracts. I�m sure you must know whom I�m talking about. Whenever you see him, you shake your head sadly and think to yourself how deluded he is, working so hard and so fast for so much money and so little life.

Today, I was that guy.

I started out my day with one long meeting, followed it by one fast lunch interrupted by phone calls, followed that by another long meeting, and another, and a telecon, and then went home to write e-mails and make phone calls and do more work and check responses to the first round of e-mails and make replies to those and before I knew it my entire day had gone by in a dizzying array of fake-talking and polite arguing and hurried appointments and coercive statements and buzzing PDA�s and ringing telephones and watering eyes and typing hands�and I never even made it into the office..

The best part, of course, will be tomorrow, when I finally do make it into work, and my fellow employees will give me their sideways smiles and say, �And where were you, yesterday?� That remark causing the bile of frustrated anger to rise into my throat before I even sit down, as I reply, �I was working all day.� To be met, of course with the inevitable, �suuuuuuure.�

I do take scant solace, though, in that instead of the Silicon Valley uniform, I wore cargos and a T-shirt; and instead of reveling in my over-working, I realize that there are better things in Life.

bluishorange says:

“junk is such a good time. even the used videotapes and dishes and knickknacks are interesting, as was the arbitrary blue oyster cult eight-track. i always wonder, though, how rob and i must look walking around in a thrift store. to the people who genuinely need to shop at savers, who don’t have the money to shop anywhere else, we must look exactly like what we are: parentally funded college students who drive out to the hood in their integra to laugh at junk.”

I must remind myself to learn that kind of humility.