The Prison Sissy of Cell Block 12E

What I've Done - Linkin Park (mp3)
The Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon (mp3)

When it comes to my hair, I am a serial haircut monogamist. I find someone who cuts it well enough, who can carry on a conversation well enough, who charges a reasonable enough price, and I stay with her for a year or so. My current monogamous hair relationship is with a woman named Candace. Nice, uber-skinny blonde in her mid-40s who can fire off some seriously cynical quips. Almost as if cutting hair for two decades has made her bitter. Go figure.

Candace cuts hair in the mall. It's the only reason I go to the mall anymore. When I break up with Candace, I won't go back there for haircuts. Getting your hair cut in the mall isn't something to go bragging about.

So I park outside JC Penney and go in. I get my hair cut. I take a detour through Barnes & Noble on my way back to the car. Once in the parking lot, my car's not where I thought I left it. I look for a few minutes and start to worry that my precious Honda has been jacked. The Honda Accord is the most jacked car in the US, I recall hearing once. (It's actually the Civic, but still.)

What I do notice, however, is that someone in the next row has left their car out in the middle of the aisle. I chuckle. Did the moron park there accidentally, thinking they were in a spot? How can you not notice something like that?

I keep looking for my car.

Then, that horrible ominous sound goes off in my head. It's the sound of an evil light bulb. And I look back at the car in the aisle. It's blue. It's a Honda. It's got a baby seat in the back.

Yup. It's mine. I'm the moron.

I left the emergency brake off. It's a stick, and I left it out of gear. The lot apparently has a .01% grade to it, so as I walked across the lot to go in and get my haircut, my car was likely inching at a snail's pace back... back... across the aisle, until its ass bumped or nudged the car on the other side, a black Honda CRX from the early '90s, beat all to hell and with a paint job that looked like Mikhail Gorbachev's head would appear in a photo negative.

I grab a sheet of paper from my backpack, upon which I plan to write my name and number to stick under a wiper. As I'm placing said sheet in said wiper... up drives Paul Blart. Yes, the Mall Police were in hot pursuit of my pasty white ass.

After getting out to inspect the "damage," Officer Blart informs me that he has contacted the Police Department, and although he cannot keep me at the scene by any use of force, my choosing to leave the scene would be construed as leaving the scene of an accident. He also asks me to move my car back into a space for which parked cars were originally intended. So, I slump my Toonces ass back to my car, pull it into my original parking spot, and sit and wait 40 minutes for the po-po to arrive.

Because the descent into hell is a slow spiral staircase rather than a deep freefall, things get a little more pathetic when Tackleberry arrives.

It seems the insurance card in my glove box expired in March. My darling wife had applied for a change of address and was waiting for the new one to arrive before handing it to me. Not only that, but because this all happened on Memorial Day, the company's contact line was closed for the day, so I had absolutely no way to prove to this officer that I was presently covered.

The officer then engages in a lengthy diatribe about how he could technically arrest me for this. As he's talking, and as I'm saying "Yassuh" and "No'suh" and nodding a lot, I drift into an alternate LOST-esque universie where I've been sentenced to life in prison for expired insurance. I became the Prison Bitch of Cell Block 12E and had my ass traded around more than Pokemon cards in the '90s all because of a piece of very important paper.

Fortunately, at the end of his lecture, the officer did what he didn't have to do: he let me go. He left the accident report information in the dude's windshield wiper. He bid me adieu. He chuckled, I'm assuming at the thought of just how pitiful anyone with a penis must be to fail to put their car in gear or hit the brake. And the event was over.

I am not your run-of-the-mill moron. I hope your Memorial Day was less pathetically amusing than mine.

To conclude, here are my wife's words of comfort and love at the conclusion of my story: "It's still not as bad as driving away from the gas station with the pump still in your tank."

Thank you, honey, for always having the right words.

Malled to Death

Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad - Def Leppard (mp3)

I went to the Chattanooga's primary mall today for the first time in at least two or three years. In the imaginary movie of my life, in which I'm playing the main character in real time, Hamilton Place Mall was once a central character.

The mall wasn't quite of the supporting actor category, but then, if Judi Dench can win an Oscar for six minutes in Shakespeare in Love, then the mall should get some consideration for its role in my adolescent years. It was, for me, the Central Perk of Billyville.

The movie analogy is only important because, having not been a regular at the mall in almost two decades (so help me God), and having only gone a handful of times since I became overwhelmed with children, I somehow managed to convince myself that the mall was losing its popularity. How could something survive if people like me, who used to go all the time, no longer go?

Yes, I know how foolish that seems, but I think most of us do it. We go to this restaurant everyone is talking about, and we don't know why everyone loves it, so we don't go back. And whaddaya know, six months later, the restaurant is closed. Coincidence? Sure. But we get the luxury of believing we have that kind of power, because it's our movie, dadgummit.

Yet there the mall was on a Saturday, just where I'd left it.

Because it was only two blocks from my house, I walked or rode my bike down there frequently, at least two or three times each week. I was not, however, a Mall Rat, because rats congregate in clusters, and I was a solitary explorer most of the time. I was more of a Mall Declawed Wolverine.

As a teenager, the mall was about possibility and variety. I would eat lunch there every Sunday after church. Dad would hand me a generous $5 for lunch, so my goal was to eat as economically as possible so I could max out the spare cash for use in the arcade, at the movie theater, or to help purchase a cassette or a book. I discovered the best stores to hang around to observe the alien species that was the Teenage Girl. If I wanted to try accidentally bumping into a GPS student, I milled around outside the Laura Ashley store. If I wanted to run into your more standard upper-middle public school girl, the Gap was my best bet. (There were no Abercrombies or Eddie Bauers in "Hammy" at that point.)

When I wasn't busy repeatedly viewing a single movie ("Young Guns" and "Die Hard" come to mind), the mall was mostly a venue for fishing. I was fishing to catch some incredibly attractive, lonesome teenage girl who was searching for some awkward boy milling around alone, one so appealing that she felt compelled start a conversation with me, maybe invite me to continue with her on her shopping adventures, offer her advice on how she looked in various outfits, maybe even get married and have a brood of children.

This was fishing in the same way it is for thousands of drunk males in the South. Which is to say, they have to call it something other than "sitting in a boat and getting shitfaced," because that sounds pathetic, so they call it fishing even though they don't ever care to catch anything. Likewise, I was "shopping," but mostly I was shopping for something that was neither on sale nor even of the real, non-imaginary world: a spark-lit relationship built on nothing but a sideways glance across the food court.

If this comes across as agonizingly, uncomfortably pathetic, imagine what it must have been like to live as that person. Maybe that's why I don't go to the mall much anymore. Because I see the Old Me -- or actually the Young Me -- there, and I feel so damned sorry for him.

But maybe he'd feel sorry for me. All I see at the mall now is overpriced crap, old people sitting around staring into the ether, minimal numbers of rowdy teens, and no Frank & Stein's, where I could stare at the beer taps and long for the day I could legally purchase a beer and drink it in the mall (ohhhh, Glory Day!). But Young Billy saw potential, promise, hope. He saw fun in the arcade, possibility in the bookstore, adventure in the movie theater, and beauty in all the stores. He got nervous when the girl at the movie concession stand was cute, because maybe he could buy some popcorn and then invite her to share it with him, and maybe she'd say yes! He would walk around imagining the conversations that were never going to happen.

What is it in our natures that allow us to look back at such embarrassing, awkward, isolating and confusing times and think, "Geez, sometimes I miss those days..."? Whatever it is, I somehow think we oughtta be grateful for it. It probably shaves years from our lives.

The sad reality is, I'm very very grateful that the Internet didn't exist when I was a teenager. I don't know for sure what kinds of problems would have sprouted for me from the computer, but I'm damn sure I was just naive and desperate enough to locate my fair share.

Had the Internet been thriving in the late '80s, the video below would even more painfully mirror my own ineptitude:



(Yes, this is linked from a place called GodTube. And yes, apparently this song has deeper religious implications, although I can't seem to find them.)

To continue the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the above, I will admit to enjoying my fair share of Def Leppard, but I won't go promoting what album this song came from or how to best get your hands on it. If you liked Def Leppard, you prolly already have this. If you didn't, you prolly don't and hate me for using it in this post.