January 03, 2005
Perhaps it is simply due to the fact that I'm cranky because I was kept awake for an unusually late hour of the morning today when I had originally intended on getting to bed early on a Sunday night and read but, whatever the reason, I'm having a major issue with the general population today.It was of no recourse when I stumbled outside into a Wisconsin winter and was accosted by large quantities of hail being flung downward at my head from the sky and nearly toppled over just trying to open the frozen door to my car. I only wanted to go to the store to purchase a few necessities, damn it; why did the weather have to strike at that exacting moment? Oh yeah, because it's me and the forces of nature have always had a problem with me merely trying to get down my sloping driveway without sliding direcly into the Jeep Cheroke ahead of me. Stupid weather.
And the weather always triggers three or four obnoxious bastards with four wheel drive who are certain they can do a 'quick' power doughnut right in the middle of the intersection they just turned onto. You're so close you can see the wide YEE HAW! grin on his face as his truck keeps spinning and that leads me to believe that he could, in turn, see the middle finger that I was pressing hard against my windshield. Not a mile from my apaprtment building and there I am, stopped in the middle of the street, with a small handful of other vehicles, cursing the fact that I even got of bed this morning. Stupid drivers.
And these types of drivers always seem to pull into the gas station that I prefer. It's not enough that they parked their truck so that two parking spots were taken or that they're still sitting in their vehicle, babblying to Lucinda on their cell phone and waiting until their cigarette is sufficiently burned, but they also have to have the balls to take their little socially demented scenes into the gas station. Somehow, they manage to squeeze in front of me in line so that I might be blessed with the echoes of the enchanting cell phone conversation still going on between Lucinda and this toothless, drooling sap of a man.
"Yeah, I gots the chile flavored Fritos you wanted, in fact, I'm in the gas station right now," he spews while blanacing three assorted bags of FAT, two super sized bottles of liquid FAT and one large, creme filled doughnut sprinkled with FAT. I'm sure it was of the utmost importance for Lucinda to know the exact location of her boob of a boyfriend and to have an accurate estimate of when her chile flavored fritos would be safely deposited into her great expanse of a lap. I sighed.
It did not, at any moment prior, occur to this man to hang up the fucking phone because he's the next in line and needs to get the brick of wallet out of his sagging back pocket in order to pay the nice man behind the counter. No. Instead, he simply requests that Lucinda hold on while he very briefly pauses his life to sloppily acquire ten dollars and the exact change of seventy-six cents from his person. I just stared at him. I tried to make that damned box next to his ear suddenly explode by willing it with my thoughts. Meanwhile, the pile of people crowded behind me are bitching about the weather as though all will turn sunny with a fine 65 degree gentle breeze if only they complain for another three and a half minutes straight. Stupid people with their stupid cell phones...
I made it up the driveway. I made it into the building without falling on the ice engulfed metal stairs and I made it into the door without dropping the plethora of mail I was desperately grasping onto. I managed to keep my wet shoes on the rug next to the door and thus there is not a drip of dirty water on my recently mopped floors. I should have been very content with that. This should have been a successful ending to a stupid story, but then I had to use the bathroom. Really bad.
I stumbled into the bathroom and untied, unbuttoned and unzipped my pants, wondering why in the world I bought pants that require this amount of concentrated effort, finished my business and reached for a few sheets of invisible toilet paper. Yeah, invisible. As in, non-existant, zero occupancy, zilch, MAY DAY, we are way the fuck out of toilet paper here. I just sat there, thinking back to the gas station where I had intended to purchase myself a roll or two of Angel Softy goodness for use in this precise sort of situation. I reached into the cupboard below the sink and grabbed a nice, rough peice of paper towel and cursed that damned cell phone babblying freak at the station and noisely granted him full blame for having caused me to forget that important purchase.
Whatever.