Burning My Clothes

I have to write a thing for work about all the cool places around town. I have lived here for over three years and I have no idea what is around here. All I ever do is sit in my cold apartment and eat pasta. I could not think about a single real attraction to write about. I almost wrote about a spot on the road where you could sit and people wouldn,t bother you. I thought that would get me a big fat ,,You are fired,, though. Here are the three places I wrote about.

Henry,s Bar
I don,t know if the drinks are any good. I haven,t tried them. They appear to be around the average price, or just below, for alcoholic drinks at a bar. I do know that it is usually pretty empty and almost completely silent. Sometimes they will have NASCAR playing on a large, gaudy television set with the sound turned off. The people that I have seen there are usually middle aged or seniors that look sad or very drunk. The first time I went there, a man told me about how his wife died and how the Eiffel Tower is surrounded by trash and homeless people. This is my favorite bar.

MC Paul Barman - Thought Balloon Mushroom Cloud
Capital Park Café
This is a small, inexpensive restaurant that is adjacent to Henry,s Bar. They share a restroom. The food here is okay. It is generally frequented by seniors. The staff is often unfriendly and the service is sometimes slow but not all the time. I have heard that the coffee is very good. I usually purchase the grilled cheese sandwich with French fries. It is extremely inexpensive. The quality matches the price. Once, there was a big piece of lemon peel grilled into the sandwich. There is an old, stained picture of Sacramento hanging on the wall that I look at sometimes.

Blue Diamond Almond Growers
This is a factory where almonds are processed for the Blue Diamond® Growers. It is a large industrial building with very few windows and a lot of machinery and truck traffic. There is a small gift shop where you can sample different flavored almonds and purchase almond and nut based products. Every month they feature a different flavor at a discounted price. Near the gift shop there is a small television with a few rows of chairs set up. Upon request, an educational video can be shown to give the viewer a better understanding of the Blue Diamond® Growers history and day to day procedures. Tours are not given.

Coconut Oil

I have a pretty big list of characteristics that I find attractive in people. Girls, I mean. I actually don,t even find girls attractive. Everybody is equally dumb. That,s what our forefathers meant when they wrote that book about the United States. The butter of stupidity has been spread liberally and evenly over this great toast of a country. I referenced butter and toast because it is early in the morning right now and people eat breakfast in the morning. All I ever eat anymore are mandarins.

A lot of the things that comprise my things-about-girls-that-I-find-attractive list, let,s call it the ,,Heart Melters,, list for short, are super specific and kind of weird and might bum out a lot of people. Not really bad stuff like being a really racist girl or a girl that likes to set up car crashes to collect insurance money. I actually wouldn,t mind the insurance money thing though. That sounds kind of neat. Hopefully my dad doesn,t ever read this. He would not approve of insurance fraud.

The list includes wonderful characteristics like -

Short stature, absence of really dumb tattoos, slight speech impediments like a lisp, understanding more than one language, ability to play an instrument, way smarter than me, dresses like a rich bitch, and giant legs. Things like these are normal. Standard heart melters. Generally, if somebody were to possess several or all of these traits my heart would melt, hence the name ,,Heart Melters,,. Then there are a few weird things that I am not as ashamed to admit as I should be.

Some of these include -

Slight brain damage, noncommunicable terminal illnesses, high pain tolerance, crushed soul, hairy, addicted to something detrimental to their well-being, extreme religious beliefs, blind, fat, facial scars, physical deformity like a missing finger or clubfoot, works or has worked in a library, stutter, extremely wealthy, has a pilot,s license, former grade school teacher, former military, botanist, victim of a hate crime, broken ribs, descendant of a historically downtrodden people, royalty, abducted by aliens or ghosts, had acid thrown in her face because she lived in one of those places where that happens sometimes to girls because they are too pretty or won,t get married to some abusive banker, dairy allergy, big nose, perfectly straight teeth, sort of messed up teeth, and her father was a truck driver. Things like that.

Andy Dixon/Montag - Husbands
Keep in mind that these are not comprehensive lists. That would take minutes more to compile and god knows nobody is even reading this.

The strange ones are much more valuable to me because a lot of them are rare and don,t rely on the kind of person that the girl might be. You can,t really choose to have a lisp or be royalty of have a dairy allergy. That,s the real stuff. That's the stuff that is so good that it has to be chosen by nature rather than free will.

Now, I want all of you readers (yeah right) to go through the list and figure out how many of these qualities you possess. Give yourself one point for each one if it is in the top portion (normal stuff)and three points for each one in the bottom portion (weird stuff). Keep track of your total as you progress through the lists. At the end, add up all of the points and if the total is more than thirty, leave a comment at the bottom of this article with your address and your sleep schedule and I should be contacting you shortly.

Horse

I had three cars when I was in high school. Not at the same time, I kept breaking them so I would have to get new ones. Good thing I am a gigantic spoiled brat and my dad buys me everything. Thanks dad. My third car was not a car. It was a green van. Before I put a CD player in there, it just had a weird stock radio that would pick up a channel below normal radios. It was at 87.5 FM or something. My brother and I would listen to that station everyday on my way to school. It played the audio from PBS and in the mornings it was some children,s show that I had never seen. I think some of the characters in it were from that other show, Arthur. The main guy would go around and hang out with different people, real people, not cartoons. I don't know how the show would work if it were on television. The only one I remember is when he went to hang out with some Hispanic family that built low-rider bikes.

I would get to school fifteen or twenty minutes early everyday and listen to that show while I sat in my car in the parking lot. My brother would get out as soon as we got there because he doesn,t like me because he is better at skateboarding than me. It was nice, I could learn about low-rider bikes or some family from Germany that really likes ice fishing. I learned more in those twenty minutes before school then I normally would in the eight hours following.

One morning, when I was listening to my stories, I saw a girl get hit by a car. She was a mentally disabled girl. I don,t know her name, we didn,t hang out much. She was nice enough though. Sometimes she would pee her pants, but whatever. It,s not like that stuff matters. Sometimes when I pee, I stop too early and when I put my disfigured wiener back in my pants another ounce or two rolls out. I don't care. It,s just some pee. It dries in a little while anyway.

Talking Heads - Speaking In Tongues
The person that hit the girl was this punker girl with really white skin and ugly hair that looked like it was made out of the bristles from old toothbrushes. I think she knew that and that,s why she died it so many gross colors all the time. She wore red plaid pants sometimes. I will never forget her face when she hit that disabled girl. She was so shocked and probably scared that she was going to go to prison for a hate crime again. But she screamed and then covered her mouth but not the normal way that people do when they see somebody die, she covered her mouth because she was laughing. It was nuts. I was an even more horrible person back then than I am now and even I knew that you shouldn,t laugh when he smash into a short, disabled blond girl.

That girl just got up and walked away though. She already had a pretty strange walk to her - sort of a limp. So you couldn,t really tell how bad she was hurt. Probably pretty bad but she just had that ,,Whatever, I am going to piss my pants and get hit by a car and still graduate high school and probably be happier and smarter than most of these idiots" attitude. She was, and still is, the must punk rock person I have ever seen. In retrospect, I probably should have tried to get to know her more.

Organizing Photographs

I am so out of my mind tired right now. I stayed up so late last night. Later than anybody has ever stayed up before. Now I,m at work and everything looks blurry and my eyes feel like dirty raisins. My head feels like it is three quarters full of water so if I tilt it to one side at all it just falls over.

I went to the store today specifically to get some cash back. I didn,t even have anything I wanted to buy. I bought a couple of orange juices because (I just fell asleep for a second)I,m sure that this awesome sleep schedule is going to give me the worst diarrhea-flu ever. I can,t wait. Of course I didn't remember to get cash back and I was too embarrassed to do anything about it so I went home and threw my orange juices away. Then I realized that I left my house key in the apartment. I just sat in the dumb car that I'm borrowing and thought about the sweet sleep of suicide. Turns out my roommate was home so he let me in and I haven,t killed myself yet.

My roommate got a giant pack of toilet paper last Christmas and we are finally down to our last two rolls. We both decided that we,re going to try and make them last a full year so we,re trying to poop at work or just wipe our holes with all of the junk mail we get.

Gorge Trio - Open Mouth, O Wisp
Somebody destroyed my car the other day. They filled the gas tank with milk and I didn,t get the upgrade when I bought my car that allows it to run on a dairy/petroleum mixture. It,s my fault really. I should have planned ahead. There are so many suspects. I have made so many people mad and I have known so many crazy beasts. Now, I,m not pointing fingers at anybody, but some weirdos get really mad if you get tired of them trying to poison you and watch you sleep. Hi. How,s school this semester?

My nice old dad took my car to some shop and they drained the milk. They milked it, as it were. Much of it had turned to cheese and some of it had turned to butter. Luckily, the repairs won,t set me back too much because there is quite the thriving market for petroleum-based cheeses. All I had to do was take that bag of soft, brown curd down to the local farmer,s market and in about two hours I had almost six hundred dollars. Not bad for my first cheese sale.

My Trip To Romania

Last night I went and hung out with a friend. He asked if I wanted to go to a bar with him and this girl and this other girl. I didn,t know the girls and I know bars are dumb but I went anyway, you know, because friends are cool.

Those two girls picked us up. One of them was blond and quiet and hangs out with snowboarders and looked dumb but apparently isn,t that dumb. The other one was fat and had white teeth and talked too much and too loud and her giant boots were shiny and obnoxious. My friend is a handsome guy who looked normal with normal clothes and talks about normal stuff with a normal knife in his pocket. And me, well, I think we all know how fragile and ghastly I am; what with my pubic beard, size small sweaters draped over me like a knit parachute and feeble, weak wrists. We were a perfect little mix.

There was nobody at the bar other than maybe six sad dads watching a television that showed people standing in a field. There was no music, just the sound of tears and the occasional homophobic/homoerotic joke. The room was wet with sadness and dread.

My friend and the quiet girl sat quietly while the pig told me about how she used to live in the south and how now she is a hairdresser. I didn,t care. She asked me what I did and I told her about how uninteresting I am. She didn,t care either but she pretended to. She had fat hands.

Broadcast - Tender Buttons
The next hour went on like that, everybody not caring about each other - we were a real family. Then I got accused of being addicted to porn. I said I was. A little later things got weird when I said that I wanted to eat a dog. The quiet girl sat quietly while the big one degraded me about my diet. I didn,t really care what a twenty nine year old, bag of mashed potatoes hairdresser that dropped out of college and had pants tattooed on her Goliath wrist had to say. I then told her that I hated animals. The quiet one suggested that I eat the fat one,s pet cat. I was interested.

Things got very quiet for a while and then we left. Nobody really talked on the way home. I felt bad because I think my friend wanted to ,,raw dog,, the quiet girl,s butt and I could have ruined it for him. Luckily, he was invited over to her house minutes after we were dropped off at mine. The only stipulation was that I wasn,t allowed to come over.

It was a perfect evening and I could not have asked for anything more. Completely fulfilling and satisfactory in every way.