Amvets again again?

Yes, and here’s why.

Whenever a fellow traveler deigns to accompany us along on one of our doomed voyages into the secondhand aether, we usually extend them the courtesy of letting them choose the destination, or at least pick from a few suggestions, and on this outing we were joined by our delightful friend Jen:

Who after some deliberation, selected good old Amvets on Elvis Presley Boulevard as the target for this particular tactical strike. And while one’s initial reaction to the thought of plumbing this particular well again so soon after another recent visit could be panic, fear, or trepidation, please, bear in mind –

IT’S A THRIFT STORE. The whole IDEA is that it’s never the same twice. You could go back every day straight for a week and find something new every time. The very notion that there’s ISN’T going to be something new and surprising there is so antithetical to the gestalt of the thing that it’s preposterous to even entertain it. Nonetheless, as the sign says… “Use at your own risk.” I briefly thought about pulling that off and attaching it to my lapel because trust me honey, it assuredly applies to your humble narrator’s deranged ass just as much as it applies to an only intermittently functioning vending machine. I was tempted to throw a couple quarters in there just out of solidarity with the f*cking thing, but I thought better of it. I digress. Let’s get our hands dirty.

I love you Amvets but you REALLY gotta try harder with the mannequins. I mean throw a button up on there or something? Even if you really only wanted to showcase the pants, you can do better than a dilapidated bitch-beater for the top half. It just brings down the whole ensemble. Plus I think it might be on backwards.

CLAM PIE! Oh wait no Glam Pie. Wait, that’s not any better. What the hell kind of message is this? What is a “Glam Pie?” Oh, ok, Google is telling me it’s some bullshit line of pastry themed footwear cooked up by Reverend Run’s stupid kids. You know, I really didn’t need to know that. I hate to get off on a tangent (blatant lie right there) but it often strikes me that one of the weird things about my generation’s particular point in history is that we’re some of the last people (in the privileged, first world environment we live in, I recognize it’s not like this for everyone but still, bear with me) who are going to remember what it was like before the rise of the internet, and smart phones, and google’s facilitation of the insane ubiquity of information that we all now nearly take for granted. 20 years ago, hell, even 10 years ago if I saw these stupid shoes I would laugh at what a nonsensical phrase “Glam Pie” is (and it REALLY is), and but then if I wanted to know anything more about it I would really have to DIG and go and do some research, it would either have to be this dumb thing that I just laughed at WHICH IS TOTALLY FINE if it only ever existed on that level, or if I really wanted to know more I’d have to TRY and find out instead of just opening up another browser tab and typing the letters in and hitting “return.” Finding out that another member of the Simmons clan decided to put some more ugly garbage out there in the world doesn’t make these shoes any more hilarious or remarkable, and in fact taking away the delight of just wondering about what would drive someone to create something so ill-concieved actually makes them LESS interesting instead of more. I don’t know if saying that makes me sound like Andy Rooney or if any of this even makes sense but I just wanted to share that moment because it occurs to me a lot. Anyway, Clam Pie it is.

I love the hyperbole. It can’t just be “The Search for Canada’s Secret Animals” or “The Secret Animals of Canada” or “Holy Shit Can You Believe All These Animals Were Hiding in Canada,” it’s gotta be the MOST Secret Animal in the ENTIRE nation. Who decides that? Who judges what the SECRETEST animal in the whole of Canada is? I mean first off clearly it’s not this dumb wolf on the cover, wolves are just running around willy nilly up there from what I’ve been led to understand, maybe it’s that little manatee or seal thing or whatever that is in the little inset picture in the corner of the cover and sorry it’s a blurry photo, I was a little dazed by the idea of secret animals in general, but really this is just stupid. If Canada really had anything interesting to offer in the way of wildlife they’d have coughed it up by now. I’m sorry but when you say “secret animal” to me I’m thinking in the cryptid ballpark, know what I mean? Give me a chupacabra, a yeti, hell, I’ll even take a freaking orang pendek, I don’t care. THOSE are secret animals. Your jersey devils, your mothmen. NOW we’re talking. Btw next time you want to kill some time at work just start running down this page, I guarantee you it’ll reignite at least some sense of childlike wonder about the world even in the most jaded of grownups. Moving on.

I have a confession to make: I have become a terrible reader. An unintended side effect of my disastrous efforts to open up a book store (some of which were detailed in this space and elsewhere over the years) was that I’ve fallen out of the habit of regularly reading. I still read online a great deal, and watch a lot of movies and take in what I would consider a staggering amount of mediated information, but I used to be one of those people who always had at LEAST two books going at once, if not more, and magazines and newspapers and whatever I could get my hands on. I was voracious, and my home was lousy with lazily thumbed-through tomes. But the stress and irritation of accumulating, transporting, caring for and then eventually DISPOSING OF around 4000 books just beat it out of me, I still love to read but try as I might I can’t get that rhythm going again, BUT. The only reason I bring it up is because this neat little piece of YA fic seemed like it might be a fun little bite sized way back in, so I bought it, which, me buying a book these days is a remarkably rare event, but it’s got all these cool Edward Gorey style illustrations, and every chapter is prefaced with some kind of obscure fear (Chapter 16: “Helminthophobia is the fear of being infested with worms.”) and it just seems fun and bite-sized enough that I could blow through it in an afternoon. So we’ll see how that goes.

In other news, Jen was on a TEAR and found a ton of awesome dresses, several of which were in decent shape and actually fit, which I have to say is probably the reason I end up coming back to Amvets over and over again, is their clothes are just so much better than pretty much anywhere left in town. Sure, some of the suburban Goodwills might have MORE clothes, or the Salvation Army on Kirby Whitten might have cleaner stuff or whatever, but none of it is half as cool as the things you find at Amvets, because, drumroll please…

The suburbs are fucking boring. I know most of this goes without saying but if you want the real swag you have to go into the hood and get your hands dirty to get it, and in that regard nowhere else in town holds a candle to Amvets. There WERE places that had that (Thrift Town, Salvo on Danny Thomas) but guess what, they all closed and moved to the suburbs, or Summer Ave! If you put a thrift store in the middle of some bland subdivision in the middle of nowhere guess what, the store’s inventory is going to reflect that. But if you have a place like Amvets that’s in the middle of this funky, crazy, totally gnarly and hairy neighborhood guess what you’re going to find when you go into the store!

SHIT LIKE THIS! This “handmade” (read: stitched a bunch of random shit on the front of) purse, with like 9 buttons and random pieces of fabric and crap attached to it in what’s supposed? to be some kind of… scene? Is it Christmas? Is it a cake? Are those legs? Who can tell. Point is… it’s INTERESTING. Granted, I would NOT want to take that home and display it for my guests, but it’s a hell of a lot more interesting to look at and be around then some rich lady’s 2000 dollar bed set that she donated to the Salvation Army on Kirby Whitten because she scratched the headboard and didn’t feel like getting it refinished. Yawn city. I can’t do anything with that.

Is this a cat… house? I don’t really know what I’m looking at here. I’m not a cat person, don’t hate em by any means but I’ve never owned one and I have some serious reservations about the prospect so anyway a lot of cat-related things just sail completely over my head. Are they supposed to… scratch it? I guess? What do cats really do to anything aside from that? Oh wait…

I’m a moron. “Try looking at it from the other side dude.” Yeah, the things that don’t occur to me until several minutes later. I’m standing there like “this thing makes no sense” but you know I could always maybe walk about to the other side and look at it from that perspective, but… no? I just stood there for really like a couple minutes being like DUHURR I DO NOT GET IT and then yes of course it’s a house, it’s a little fake house for your cats to run around on and you can look at it and pretend they’re in a little house. Check. Solved another one. All in a day’s work for Sherlock Nielsen over here. Put that one in the books. Next!

I have another confession to make: these entries are getting out of control. I took almost fifty pictures at the Amvets on this random Sunday which was at the time of this writing a week ago, and it’s taken me that long to even get this far into this entry, which is not even a quarter of the way through. I’m going to have to make a serious effort to be more concise in my picture taking and my writing, or else these things are going to take me a month to crank out, and be so long and bloated and digressive that NO ONE is going to read all the way through them, and barely anyone does that already as it is. I just can’t help myself, I find all these things genuinely interesting (like this odd recliner with two… ports? in the back? I have no clue what that’s for. They’re like little crank things or something. Why do you need to crank a chair) and I want to save them and show them off later and it’s become this situation where the more I go, the longer I stay, and the more interesting things I find, and I can’t help it if they make me want to rant about them for three paragraphs at a time but either I’m going to have to find a publishing deal so I can have the ten hours a day I’m apparently going to need to keep doing this or else I’m going to have to quit my job and just blog full time and try to live on donations.

You know, I said that as a joke, but… hm.

This is hilarious. This is an early version of the treadmills they have at a lot of gyms now with little flatscreen monitors on them so you can watch CNN or whatever while you go through your intervals or whatever. But the screen tech hadn’t quite caught up to the impulse to “hey, let’s throw a TV on this bitch” so they just had to drop like an old clunky TV right in front of you, and I can’t quite put my finger on exactly why, but the sight of this thing just tickled me. Maybe it’s funny because it’s so outdated, like if someone picked you up to go somewhere and still had like a “car phone” from back in the day, or maybe it’s funny because I keep picturing someone running full tilt on this thing, like really hauling ass, and then the power suddenly cuts out and they just fly forward and BURY their head right in the picture tube, and three weeks later when the neighbors start to complain about the smell the police finally kick the door down and there’s just this bloated corpse in a pair of track shorts and a lycra tank top just dangling, suspended by its head which is completely shoved inside of this tiny television. And then all the paramedics take pictures before they pull it out. Did you know they do that? They ALL do that. Ask one sometime.

Speaking of hilariously outdated technology, we used to get these HUMONGOUS old ass big screen TVs donated to the MIFA store all the time, and usually they still work okay but people just get rid of them because well, the picture quality is basically garbage compared to even like the cheapest plasma or LCD on the market, and of course even if it wasn’t, people just gotta have the new hotness and show off their new 72 inch colossal flatscreen that they’re going to be paying for for the next seven years but hey! It’s worth it, to be the envy of the neighborhood, right? What’s a little crippling debt between friends (and by friends of course I mean private citizens and massive multinational corporations, which apparently qualify as people now, according to our current campaign finance laws. Did I just get political? I think I did. I’m officially running for president in 2012 as the lone member of the Thrift Party. Our slogan? “Why Vote For Something New When You Could Vote For Something Used”) right?

People make me sick. We’re all a bunch of animals. Dumb beasts. Anyway the only reason I even took a picture of this admittedly pretty busted TV is because listen to this sound

Isn’t that amazing? I could listen to that all day. It’s like nails on a chalkboard, but soothing somehow. Like if nails on a chalkboard was giving you a blowjob.

Ooh I think I just summed up this whole blog in a sentence. Trademark that shit

This… I don’t even know where to start. One of my favorite pastimes as a kid was taking apart old radios, just cheap battery operated ones that ceased to function because maybe my parents left the same set of batteries in them for, I don’t know, a couple YEARS or so after they were already dead and the power connections completely corroded and it was useless because they were too baked all the time to remember to swap them out (love you mom and dad)? I’m not complaining, it gave me a lot of fun toys to play with when I was little, and but something like this would have been like CRACK for me. I don’t think this picture does it justice, hang on

That is a NINE BAND RADIO. NINE. I didn’t even know there were nine bands of transmissions flying through the air at any given moment (many of them passing through your body as we speak, in addition to microwaves, cosmic rays, magnetic currents, and pretty much every other type of energy that isn’t heat, visible light, or sound. Try not to think about it too much, you’ll freak out. And people wonder why we all have cancer now) let alone that there was a machine in existence that could access them all. Ok so we’ve got AM and FM those are the easy ones, but what the hell are the rest? If only there was a handy dandy guide on the back of the thing that explained what all the others were…

BAM. ZOW. Take that shit to the bank and smoke it only guess what? There’s no smoking in the bank and even if there was they’d probably take a pretty fucking dim view of you trying to actually smoke feces in their financial institution. I mean what kind of a twisted freak are you anyway. I think you need to leave.

Where was I. Oh, so you’ve got your Marine Band! You can listen to BOATS TALKING TO EACH OTHER ON THIS SHIT. You’ve got your Short Wave! Is that a thing people do any more? You’ve got your VHF television broadcast audio which okay, that’s definitely not a thing that people do any more but still! The fun never STOPS with this thing. You’re talking 19 transistors! 12 diodes! We’re even throw in a freaking THERMISTOR (thermistor? I barely know her) to sweeten the pot! So do we have a deal yet or what?

Call now, operators are ;laksjdf;lkasdjf;laskjfdalsdkfjalksjfa;lsd

Bear with me…

[nerd]

Ah, the Dreamcast. Sega’s last real attempt to stay competitive in the console market. The little cube that could. Don’t ask me what it was but something about the Dreamcast really managed to capture people’s hearts and imaginations (I never owned one, but to this day if I go to someone’s house and they have one I’m always always tempted to fire it up and play a few rounds of “Jet Grind Radio” or “Crazy Taxi”) but did you know! Did you know… there are actually people out there still developing and releasing games for this 12 year old platform? That’s UNHEARD of. It would be like if developers were still sitting around cranking out games for the Virtual Boy, or trying to reprogram the Power Glove so you could use it with your Xbox 360 (not that there probably isn’t someone working on that as I type these very words), and it really says something about the goodwill they managed to engender. God love you Sega. The SNES was always better than the Genesis and it always will be, but I love the fact that you never stopped trying. SEGA!

[/nerd]

Anyone who knows me at all well knows I have a globe fetish. I love them and I don’t feel like I have a home unless I have one around. I can’t put my finger on why and I won’t attempt to, but suffice it to say that during my last round of “am I moving in three months or not” I got rid of the last one I had and I’ve been regretting it ever since, so I picked up this snazzy little number which was originally designed to be a lamp but the wiring was all borked because it’s cheesy and it came from a drug store so I just pulled it all out and now it’s a smart little globe on a pedestal that lives in my kitchen. About nine feet off the ground on top of a cabinet because my kitchen is the size of a closet. Scratch that, my closet is actually BIGGER than my kitchen. Not even kidding about that. Midtown apartments are weird.

Oh when I was talking about taking apart radios before? This is the one I was talking about. I swear to god I disassembled this exact radio one summer when I was about 9 or so, and picked over all the little components and looked at all of them (didn’t quite put it together in my head that it’s a lot easier to pull a capacitor OFF of a circuit board than it is to put it back ON, at least not without a soldering iron which I didn’t have, but still) and was totally and completely rapt. That’s the kind of kid I was. Rapt by capacitors.

OK. Vintage appliance lightning round GO!

There HAS to be a piece missing from this thing, right? Some sort of guard that keeps juice from flying all over the room the minute you shove some poor unsuspecting piece of citrus half down on this whirling spike of death? I should have inspected it a bit closer. Because it LOOKS, to me, like this thing is basically designed to just SPLATTER anyone who tries to use it to make juice from a fruit. Maybe Gallagher built it. Is he even alive still? I can’t even be bothered to google it to find out.

Boring picture, only posted here to point out how much I LOVE that color scheme that 70’s appliances all seemed to have. That combination of oranges and browns and yellows that fairly well BELLOWS “shag carpeting in the basement rec room” at you. I see those colors together and I see flared jeans, insanely skinny women with super long super straight hair, and what the hell maybe even a coke booger thrown in for good measure. Ah, the 70s. Spoken of with the kind of affection only a person who didn’t have to actually experience a single second of it can have.

Boy, they’re really trying to sell THIS thing, huh? Confidential to Panasonic: it’s just a whirling blade in a little plastic pitcher. Listing 47 different things that you can do with it isn’t going to go very far towards distracting people from the fact that it doesn’t do anything you couldn’t accomplish fairly easily with a good kitchen knife and a fucking whisk. At least the Cuisinart we had when I was a kid was unpretentious enough to only have two buttons on the front and dispense with all the educational captions. Oh you can chop ICE with this thing?!?? Holy stinking hell! Will wonders never cease! A machine that… chops ICE?!??!?!

WOW!

I literally had NO use for this thing what so EVER, but it broke my heart to put it back because I have a deep love for old analog video processing equipment. Those VHS dubbing machines with all the little knobs and controls? Gasp. Slide projectors? Swoon. I even get a kick out of how they used to use overhead projectors with different colored liquids in them to do the little light shows at “happenings” back in the 60s. It always made it hard to take them seriously in school. I just kept expecting one of the “sock it to me!” girls from laugh in to run out and start doing the hippy hippy shake in the middle of math class. Why did that never happen? Anyway, this thing is SUPER simple – video input and output on the back, and controls for intensity, chroma, burst, and hue. That’s it. I could literally kill HOURS playing with this thing. Perhaps that makes me strange. It definitely makes me want to get a public access show and just mess around with random old tapes I find. Are there still public access networks? Did that fall by the wayside along with saturday morning cartoons and everything else good in the world? Who the hell are you people?

I had to retreat to the restroom facilities which are located in the back of the sorting room, and on the way back out to the floor I noticed this odd little juxtaposition, which I’m not sure I can exactly put my finger on WHY it tickles me so much but it really just does. Perhaps it’s a generational thing but for me, having grown up in the 80s during the rise of Nintendo (I had a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine and I read every page, even if it was about a game I was never going to buy – I was THAT kid) the Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge might as well BE the bible. So it seemed wholly amusing to find them conveniently stacked up like that. That’s not just any bible either mind you, anyone who stayed in a hotel for the last 30 or so years of the 20th century can tell you that’s an honest to goodness Gideon Bible like you used to be able to find in every single hotel on the planet, but apparently no more. I guess they gave up. Or maybe I stole them all, as I started to make an obsessive habit of that after staying in so many hotels on road trips AND, I discovered they’re the perfect size, shape, and weight to kill damn near any variety of spider or roach or other horrible insect you might encounter in your home, so I tend to keep one at hand at all times. It’s fun, actually, you get to say you “smote” them if you kill them with a bible. I’m tempted to try to say something else funny about Gideons, but I’m afraid I have to defer to the master on this one…

Ninjas?

Did anyone NOT have some version of this as a kid? I trace my lifelong love of both donuts AND rainbows back to my childhood experiences with my own (I believe mine was playskool) take on this… thing. Whatever it is. Is it a game? I don’t even know what I used to do with mine. I guess maybe you play ring-toss with it? I think I used to just take the rings off and look at them. Which is what I would have done with this thing except a couple of the smaller donuts were starting to come apart at the seams, which was disappointing. But then again this thing is probably about as old as I am, and some of MY smaller donuts are starting to come apart at the seams as well (I have no idea what that means) if you get my drift, soooo…

Or maybe it’s just that donuts and rainbows are awesome. Who knows

Continuing with the theme of stuff I had when I was little, my version of this was once again playskool if I recall correctly and was brown plastic with darker brown buttons (my parents preferred a more reserved color palette than most) and didn’t have a microphone but it was the same basic principle. It takes a truly brave parent to give a five year old a functioning cassette deck. I imagine that for parents, sizing up any toy that produces any type of sound whatsoever is basically a decision making process based around the question “will I be comfortable hearing whatever kind of sound this thing makes blaring incessantly around my home literally ad nauseam for at least the next six months if not longer?” and if it’s just a little xylophone or a talking power ranger or whatever that’s one thing, but when your kid can literally put in any tape they want (or can get their hands on anyway) and pretty much walk around with it playing at any volume they want (until you put a stop to it, of course) well… let’s just say that as time goes on I only have MORE respect for the people in my life who have kids on purpose, not less.

Gnip Gnop!

I already spazzed out about the 70s once in this post (I think, I honestly can’t remember, I started writing it almost a month ago and every time I try to read back through to see what I’ve written I slip into some sort of weird fugue state and come to standing outside a gas station with a half-eaten “Whatchamacallit” in my hand) but I flipped my shit when I saw this – leave it to the decade that gave us puka shells, quaaludes, and almost the entire recorded output of Sid and Marty Krofft to be stoned enough to come up with the idea of “reverse ping pong, maaaan” let alone market it to kids. No wonder everyone I know in their 40s is deeply disturbed. Oh but wait…

DAMMIT! SELL OUT! This is how long it’s been since I started this damn thing, I was looking at the previous picture honestly thinking to myself “wait, why didn’t I buy that, that’s actually pretty awesome and would make an amazing conversation piece and is a good excuse to get a table anyway (I live in a hovel)” and seeing this picture actually caught me just as off guard as originally discovering it did. That’s some sad shit right there. Who stores their damn fake legos in a Gnip Gnop box, anyway? That’s just wrong. What the hell is with some people

I don’t know what to say about this, I just thought it was badass. Little ebony fake “Skipper” doll with a HUMONGOUS skirt. Oooh gurl

I believe I’ve recounted the tale of my pet mouse that I had when I was a kid in a prior entry so I’ll spare you, suffice it to say I found this box hella depressing. I’m sure someone bought it and probably had a real use for it and everything but I look at this and all I see is a giant box of a little kid crying about the fact that his fucking hamster died.

SECONDHAND UNDERGROUND GETS GRIM

Oh god, where am I? I’m at a thrift store, right. Damn. Ok checking back in with Jen, she is still on a tear, snagging this awesome white cotton frilly doily dress which if memory serves (it rarely does) actually fit and she actually bought. I may be wrong about that. Nonetheless, it’s a find. This is why I bring the lady energy with me to these places as often as I can. I wouldn’t have spotted this if it was just me and I wouldn’t have known if it was any good even if I had. Yay women!

Scouted this out (and eventually ended up passing on it, but still) as a potential addition to my arsenal in the one-man fashion war I’m fighting to establish a new trend. I’ve brought this up before in this particular internet blogging yelling space, but just on the off chance there are new readers here, here goes… Hear me out: so you’ve heard of skinny ties, yes? And skinny jeans?

What about a skinny scarf. What about it? There are so many possibilities! We have the jaunty cold weather look:

The traditional:

And my personal favorite, the handmade:

People like to poke fun, people outright laugh, but you know what? They laughed at the guy who thought up the Hindenburg, and look at how THAT turned out.

Wait… bad example. Point is: Skinny Scarves. It’s a thing. Deal with it.

What you SHOULDN’T have to deal with is this… thing? Is it even a thing? I don’t know what the hell to call this… this. Is it art? Is it driftwood? Is it polished? A totem? Sex toy? Doorstop, paperweight, weapon, appendage, obstacle, freight train, marzipan, calculation, exigence, clemency, fabrication, pustule, misanthrope, completist, anorexic? WHAT THE HELL AM I LOOKING AT. It actually kind of looks like the pink sludge that swarmed up out of Sigourney Weaver’s bathtub in the second Ghostbusters movie which is pretty rad but I still didn’t want to touch it.

This was actually kind of awesome. A little chocolate whipping pitcher thing. I avoid buying appliances like the plague because my kitchen is the size of the word “small” written on the back of a postage stamp and put into a garbage compactor and this is one of the instances where that tendency serves me well, because I’d probably buy this and never use it, but come on, who doesn’t want the option to be able to make a pitcher of whipped chocolate (or whatever the hell it is this thing actually does, I never really figured it out) whenever they so choose? It’s America, people. Wake up and smell the freedom. Rock flag and eagle.

[nerd]

Hanar dog?

[/nerd]

This cracked me up SO hard. Skip this one if you don’t care about basketball, but for the NBA fans in the audience, anyone remember when Stephon Marbury thought he was enough of a star to have his own line of fifteen dollar shoes and now he plays in the fucking CBA and his whole career was a joke? I’m not knocking the idea that a pair of decent ball shoes shouldn’t cost as much as a car payment, I’m just saying that no one’s going to brag about wearing a line of shoes bearing the logo of a guy who in his best season put up 23 points and less than 9 assists a game. That’s all. Could be worse I guess. Could be like AI and have to play ball in Turkey.

“Turkey? Practice? Practice, man… practice? Turkey?”

And then you come across an article of clothing that is so amazing that it makes reading over 5000 words to get to this point totally worth it (yeah right). This is a “Malone and Hyde Drug Distribution” jacket with the black polyester exterior, elastic collar and cuffs, and cotton lining so you could actually wear it when it was cold as shit outside but you want to know the best part?

OH MY GOD I bought it. I SO bought it. It’s in my closet as I type these words and I just looked over at it (I usually write in bed) and said hello. Hey there, guy. Did you know you’re awesome today? Because you are. “Beautiful” indeed.

Something about this illustration struck me as particularly beautiful, so even though I can’t hang any framed art in my apartment because my walls are made of this weird plaster mesh shit that refuses to hold nails and I’m too lazy to go out and get anchors because I constantly rearrange my wall art anyway, SO what I did was buy this thing and just take it out of the frame (it was only stapled in there to begin with) and now it’s sitting on my piano, and I love it and I think it’s beautiful and I have a distant notion that I might write an album of solo piano instrumentals just about this imaginary woman in the picture and of course I’ll get around to that when I have a ton of extra time on my hands which when was that supposed to happen again? Oh, right. Fucking never. Great.

Crocodile Dentist.

Any board game I remember from when I was a kid automatically gets the youtube commercial treatment. That is just a rule of this blog. Sorry.

Speaking of board games, now… I don’t know, but it seems like in the echelon of “things that were begging to be transformed into a board gaming family experience fun time,” People Magazine was not exactly hovering right at the top. Maybe it’s just me, but has anyone actually ever read people magazine when they weren’t sitting in a lower-tier dentist’s office’s waiting room, or in line at the supermarket, or some such activity?

You know, for less than it would cost me for a hot meal at Denny’s (I’m sorry I guess “meal” should have been in quotes… as should “hot” and maybe even “Denny’s”… hell, why not put “quotes” in “”quotes””… wait, what the fuck am I talking about?) I could have walked out with this entire sweaty stack of board games and why didn’t I? Is it because I’m a miser? Is it because I hate the idea of hours upon hours of fun? Is it because I don’t actually own a table of any kind on which I could play, say High School Musical Mystery Date (fake Mystery Date from the 80s), or Payday (fake Monopoly), or Upwords (fake vertical Scrabble)?

No. It’s because all those games are really stupid.

Oh shit guess what Lou Gramm and the rest of Foreigner whose names I could never ever be possibly even bothered to learn even if it meant a full scholarship to the Sorbonne and a lifetime’s supply of Pistachio ice cream? I figured out what Love is. It’s a lopsided wooden star with some sort of hideous illustration in the middle that you find at a run down thrift store and almost immediately discard because it’s ugly and awful. Now, Lou Gramm and the rest of Foreigner, ask yourselves… was that so hard to figure out? And was it worth singing that stupid godawful song about, over and over and over again? I think not. Perhaps now you can stop. The next time I see you at a local state fair I’ll check in personally and make sure you’ve received this message and complied. I look forward to seeing you then.

OH CRAP MATCHING FLYING MONKEY JACKETS

BA NANT BA NAAH BA NAAH NAAH

If anyone’s read this far along to actually reach the closing benediction, I’d like to personally thank you for sticking around during this especially exhausting endeavor. I’ll shoot for more conciseness in the future but it was also sort of fun in an odd way to spend damn near a month crafting this thing, patchwork though it may be, and I’d like to extend special thanks to my wonderful friend Jen for accompanying me on this trip and just being a delight in general, and to everyone who put up with my refusal of social invitations over the course of the last month so I could crank this fucking thing out, and keep an eye peeled on this particular internet space through whatever method you prefer (RSS, email subscriptions, facebook, obsessively dialing up this URL every day as if your life depended on it) for a VERY exciting announcement in the very near future. Until then, my lovelies, my dears, my one and only(s)…

Stay golden, Pony Boy.

love

d