Set them free! Part 2

I’ve been thinking about this whole idea of letting the nips come out after dark, and I have to add a few points to my earlier plan. First of all, it can’t be just the ladies. It has to be everyone. Guys too. Yup, I think the guy shirts should come off at 8 along with the pretty ladies. If that doesn’t yank the in ear headphones right out of your head, I don’t know what does.

Except, wait… we need to adjust that a little. All men should have to take off their shirts except for those guys who are already pulling their shirt off after the second beer. Those guys should be punished for the inability to maintain after a glass and a half of Bud Light.

It’s seriously starting to make sense to you, isn’t it?

Someday I Suppose

Someday I’ll have a rustic cabin in the woods. I’ll write and drink homemade mead and have back porch concerts for the local wildlife. I’ll live on nut and wild berries and fresh made bread and imported cheese. (Can’t be 100% self sufficient). I’ll keep my gear in a white cedar chest and wash my unmentionables in a nearby creek. Every Wednesday I’ll take a drive to pick up provisions… and new comics. I’ll take up nude painting. Not the painting of nudes, but rather painting while nude. I’ll have lots of privacy, right?

Actually, I think I’ll skip the nude painting bit. There are lots of bugs in the woods.

Chuck E. Avoidance

I should state that I am not totally advocating a Chuck E. ban or boycott or something so silly, in spite of my recent post about Chuck E. parents and kindergarten birthdays in general. We have actually gone to Chuck E. Cheese on a couple of past occasions. We weren’t going to parties, just taking the boys for some ridiculous over-stimulation as a sort of summer treat. We’ve only ever gone on weekdays, in the summer, a little before dinner time. On those days the place was crowded, but nowhere near as bad as it was this past Sunday. For the most part, the parents are still dips. On those non-party weekday nights you see a lot of parents who hang out in the booths eating wings and pizza and ignoring their children as they climb on things that shouldn’t be climbed on and cause a general ruckus that goes way beyond public spectacle. I’m not one for ignoring my children when they tear a place apart, act completely inappropriate in public, or run around cursing at strange adults, but…to each his own, I guess.

There are also the people who bring their kids in, but don’t buy them any tokens or food. The adults just hang out in a corner, also ignoring the behavior of their offspring, while the kids scam tokens from other kids, swipe tickets from little kids, and pick food off the salad bar when the employees aren’t looking.

But then, there are anomalies. For one, I’d like to think we are an anomaly. We supervise our kids and play the games with them. We all sit down and eat cardboard pizza together. It’s a family outing. The kids love it. The parents long for margaritas and escape. It is…again…a family outing.

There are other anomalies as well. Occasionally there is a parent or even a couple with neither tattoos nor 300 excess pounds. Occasionally there are other parents actually playing the games with the kids. Occasionally you even get a whiff of globalization, french accents, trying to get wi-fi for their portables. Chuck E. Cheese – soon to have their own seat at the United Nations.

Happy New Year

Happy Happy Joy Joy. Ren and Stimpy has made a recent reappearance on TV and my kids are now watching the show I was watching in college. I remember when Billy West spoke at UMass in the early 90s and he had a standing room audience. I had a ball making a PSA cart for good old WAMH announcing the event. All my life’s a circle indeed.

I can even whip out my Christmas with Ren and Stimpy CD from back in the day. Or maybe I’ll wait until I have grand kids – you know it will come around again. Twice by then. Of course, by then CDs will be long dead, I’m sure. All the standard media will be gone – discs of all sorts, usb drives, even mass printed paper I bet. By the time my grand kids are wandering about I’m sure they’ll just get the personal bar code on their wrist scanned, payment will be deducted from their bank balance, and the media will be uploaded directly into their cranial storage drive.

Then again, bar codes? We’ll be way beyond black and white parallel lines by then I’m certain.

But I’m not here to talk about Ren and Stimpy or the holidays or being the Production guy for WAMH in the early to mid 90s. I’m here to talk about food shopping on New Year’s Eve. Yup. That’s my topic. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

I was at Shop-Rite picking up a couple of last minute treats on Friday morning (New Year’s Eve). As I left the store with my frozen cheese bites and avocados (the wife makes a mean guacamole) there was a family entering. It was a large family. Both in terms of size and density. There were many of them and they were all large. As they entered, one woman read the announcement by the door that said the store would close at 10pm. At the time it was about 9:30am…just for context.

So I listened to the ensuing discussion and pieced together the complaint of this family. They were here to purchase treats for their New Year’s festivities, which was fine. Their consternation came from the fact they did not feel they had adequate storage to purchase enough food and drink, and were planning to come back closer to midnight to lay in supplies for the duration of their partying – surely to last well into the morning. The thing was, they were concerned that they would have to come as earlyas 10pm for their last call of snack and bev.

This is not a big-people-eat-a-lot point. It’s the holidays – we all eat a lot. The only reason I mention the size of the family members is that they must have a homestead of reasonable size to accommodate 8 large people. But…not enough food and or beer? I mean, it was cold out. Let Mother Nature chill your Bud Lite for a couple hours. How much do you plan to consume between 10pm and 1 am that you are upset the store will be closed? I mean…damn.

Belief

Did I tell you about the Santa we visited this year? He was in this really dead strip mall in Poughkeepsie. His North Pole setup inhabited a Hallmark store that recently went out of business. He had a few decorations and wrapped cartons to make it feel sort of festive. And he was a one man shop – pretty cool actually. He had his digital camera all set up on a tripod, and he triggered it with a remote. When we paid, he swiped our credit card through an attachment on his iPhone. Santa has all the coolest new gadgets.

He was a good looking Santa too. No hat, but real hair and real beard and all around very convincing look. And he spent a lot of time talking to the kids, chatting with them, telling them to behave and such. He wasn’t a real “Ho HO HO” sort of Santa. He was way more mellow.

Waaaaay more mellow in fact. I mean, no freak vibes, and probably not running a hydroponics setup in the back room or anything, but if you told me Santa hit the chronic before starting his day at the satellite Poughkeepsie office of North Pole, Inc. I would totally believe.