For years the young hero Brand Robins lived in the lost and
forsaken realm of Hell known as the
No, not Mormons, though we have lots of those too, Morons. Yes, with the capital M. Perhaps it’s my schizotypal personality showing again, but the last couple days have caused me great alienation from the trained monkeys that share my valley home. I swear to heaven that I want out of this asylum for deranged, incompetent, slack-jawed, cousin-humping, artiodactyla-worshiping troglodytes. Simply knowing that I live in geographic proximity to these people causes me to fall into a depression which leads to eye-gouging with spoons and the writing of angsty poetry in which I express my desire to BLOW UP THE FUCKING WORLD! It would be better to live a life making sure that hot-dogs have the right amount of rat lip to make them plump when they cook than to subject myself to further doses of AV cultural life.
Why, you may ask, why are you so pissy?
It is because of my odyssey of the last two days. Like Ulysses Everett McGill I
have wandered the country of the common folk. Unlike our hair-pomading friend,
I did not encounter the quirky, the funny, the
selling-their-soul-at-the-crossroads, or
beating-the-crap-out-of-you-with-a-tree-branch residents of the
It started when my computer, built by a local “specialist,” crashed on Monday night. One second I’m typing away in escapist bliss, the next the most ear-piercing, horrific sounds you could ever hear outside a Mariah Carey concert blast from my speakers. Every dog in the neighborhood started to howl and the glass of milk that was sitting on my bed exploded. I tried to shut down the computer, I unplugged the speakers, I pulled the power cord – and still the ungodly howling continued. By this point my bladder was starting to convulse with the kind of primal terror that normally comes from being chased by wild dogs. In the moments of irrationality brought on by that hideous sound my brothers all woke from their sleep and begin to dance about the house like mad Zulu warriors, taking up brooms and mops as spears, and chasing our cat about the house while chanting in some horrid, gibbering tongue. Fearing for my sanity, as well as the life of my cat, I used the Herculean strength born of desperation and pulled open my computer to locate the source of the screaming – a fan gone wrong. Not wrong as in “oh, it just isn’t working anymore” but wrong as in “Rosemary’s Baby” wrong. Screaming in raw terror, I bashed the fan with a ton-load of AOL CDs (all 3,000 of which had come in that day’s mail) until it went silent.
One of my brothers came over, released from the Zulu spell, and said, “Gee, I guess you’re going to need to get that fixed, huh?”
Now, let me tell you something. My brothers used to be intelligent. There was a point at which they were capable of carrying on logical debates about the nature of subjective purpossiveness without a purpose and could calculate imaginary numbers in their heads. But now I looked up to see my brother, my brother that I love, walking around in his wife beater shirt, scratching his ass, and looking at the ruin of my computer amid the shards of 1,000 broken AOL CDs saying, “Gee, I guess you’re going to need to get that fixed, huh?” with a slightly befuzzled and baboonish look upon his slack-jawed face.
Oh the humanity.
I left the computer, and the devolution of my brothers, to the morning. I crawled into bed and pulled up the covers, trying to hide from the wicked world. That, of course, is when I got my ass cut open by the broken milk glass. Now, when I say “my ass” I don’t mean “the area semi-near to my butt” I mean MY ASS. Like the whole damn thing. Trust me, that is impressive, because I have a mighty huge ass. And yet ALL OF IT was bleeding.
Needless to say I had to go to the hospital. With my ass cut
open and hanging out of my pants. My brother drove me while I lay facedown on
the back seat of the car praying to God that we’d die in a car accident on the
way over. God, who has cursed the
It was at that point that I developed the facial tick. I assured him that his medical diagnosis was spot on, and enquired if he’d need me to have a CAT scan to be sure that my ass was, in fact, cut open. He considered it for a full minute, scratching his chin and looking at his chart. Tick tick tick went my face. Finally he said no, I just needed stitches. So I spent the next hour and half having my ass sowed up like a football, save that I had an MD rather than some poor Sumatran child applying the stitches. This is important because the Sumatran child probably would have made the stitches straight.
When I finally got home, and carefully cleaned the glass, milk, and ass-blood off of my bed, I went to sleep, face twitching the whole time. I had lovely dreams, dreams of places where nurses don’t want to pork the garden gnome that runs our country, and where milk and honey flow. Well, to be specific it was about milk and honey flowing over Salma Hayek , but let us not ruin image with vulgarity, k?
The next morning I set out to get my computer fixed. I drop
the computer off at the house of the tech that built it, and then go to the
library to check out some books while he’s checking over the damage. Now, what
we in the AV call a library is what most of the rest of the world calls an
Arboreal Exhibit. Yes, that’s right, it’s a big building full of monkeys who howl
and fling poo. Dodging the flying feces I wended my
way between the Palmdale chimps and the
These particular gibbons looked like a pair of attractive young college girls. But looks are deceiving, for they were really evil harpies sent to drive me mad. Both of them had a stack of books about T.S. Eliot, and were carrying bags that proudly displayed the AV Community College logo – a chimp with a thigh-bone in hand standing over the dead body of another chimp. I too was carrying two books about Eliot, and that was to be my downfall.
The evil destroyers of sanity turned their hazel eyes upon me as I came into line behind them. They noted the books, and then one of them struck up a conversation. She started talking about Eliot, and was obviously excited and enthusiastic about the subject. Hesitantly I responded, hoping for an intelligent conversation. This is why hope was the last thing in Pandora’s box, not because it was a gift from the gods, but because it is the most horrible curse of all. Had I just let my soul die and put my head down in the dirt, I never would have suffered through what happened next.
The girl I was talking to made an obvious error of fact, namely stating that Eliot wrote most of his poems in the Victorian age. I laughed it off and gently corrected her, making a joke of it. Then she and her friend both turned on me, eyes blazing, and her friend said, “You obviously don’t know anything about poetry.” The original girl then held up her bag and said, “Yea, we’re college students, we know what we’re talking about. Don’t act like we’re dumb.”
Now most days I would just have ignored them, checked out my books, and moved on. Not this day, however. I blame my crankiness on the fact that the lopsided stitches in my ass made it impossible for me to stand straight, which put terrible stress on my lower back. As that’s where I keep my brain, said stress made me quite cranky. So I exploded. “Ah yes, I’m obviously the ignorant one. So while we’re on the subject of your collegiate level knowledge, tell me: who do you think had the better reading of “The Hollow Men?” Russell Kirk’s analysis of the condemnation of vanity, or David Spurr’s paradigm shift nostalgia?”
I share this lesson with you all, that you will not repeat my mistakes: You cannot use sarcasm against primates. Girl #2 snorted at me, “That was so lame” quoth she. “Yea,” interjected her companion with the kind of steely eyed scholarship that community college students are so revered for possessing, “You totally just made those names up.”
Tick, tick, tick went my face. Before I could be goaded to explosion, however, the girls got called to the counter, checked out their books, and left. I staggered to the counter after them, fuming and twitching like a wet dog, when the librarian said something to me that I shall never forget. Says the head librarian, an educated woman, one in a position of knowledge and control of vast learning resources, “You really should learn to admit when you’re wrong. If you just looked at the shelves you’d see that Eliot is stacked with Victorian writers. Making up things doesn’t make you sound smart.”
I staggered out of the Library, red rage a haze in my vision. It’s one of those days where you pray for a pedestrian to walk out in front of your car. Not so you can actually hit him, but so that you can get that vicious thrill of thinking about hitting him. But no such luck. My trip back to Wally the Computer Guy’s shop/house was uneventful. I limped my crookedly-stitched-ass way up his stairs, and he greeted me with a fixed and operational computer.
I was so happy. Something had gone right. Something in life was good, and decent, and competent. Someone had done their job right. It was a sign from the angels, as pure and clear as a chorus of “Hail Mary, Holy Mother” that there was hope for this Neanderthal infested wasteland.
The Wally the computer guy says to me, “You really should have had a dust-filtering fan installed in the first place. Any tech in the Valley could have told you that.” Now, remember: Wally was the guy who built the computer. Wally was the guy who installed the non-dust filtering fan. And now Wally, five-foot two, coke-bottle glasses, can’t-grow-a-real-beard-so-has-a-half-assed-goatee Wally, is looking at me like I am an inferior species of mold because I DON’T HAVE A FAN THAT YOU ONLY NEED IN A PLACE THAT GOD HAS CURSED!
I hated. I hated and I twitched. “Why thank you.” I said, “Why the fuck didn’t you put it in the first time?” He blinked, offended that I said Fuck in that way that small town fundamentalists who have no place out of the bible-belt blink and get offended when confronted with real life. “I assume you put one in this time?”
I’m sure you can all guess, by this point, what his reply was. Can you? Can you? Or do you who do not live in a place controlled by mutant-chimps who sacrifice their children to geckos, not have the requisite anger and despair with the world around you? Well then, I’ll tell you. He says, “No. Did you want me to?”
I repeat, “No. Did you want me to?”
I don’t think that I killed him, though to be honest I don’t remember much between that point and the point when I carried my computer into my house. It is possible that soon the police will start questioning people in relation to his murder. As the police here are as stupid as everyone else, I have no doubt that they will end up arresting a stray elephant for the murder. (Yes, we get stray elephants all the time, donkeys too.)
At any rate, I got my computer home, hooked it up, and was
happy for a moment. But I could not get on the Net. I could not get on because
my DSL was down, yet again. Why was it down? Well that’s simple. It was down
because it’s hard to get a DSL signal out to the butt-fuck noplace
that I live. Things requiring intelligence and civilization do not work here.
There is an entropic field, a moron causing radiation, that seeps out of the
Actually, as it turned out the DSL was down because a raven had committed suicide on my telephone lines. I can’t really blame it, poor fucking omen of death was trapped in the AV. Really, it’s a very sad state for an animal that was once Odin’s companion to be forced to eat day old Taco Bell out of the dungheaps the local monkeys keep in their back yards.
So anyway, one of my brothers tells me there is static on our phones. Bad
bursts of it, bad enough that they couldn’t “like hear, you know, what the
other dude was saying and stuff.”
So I go outside and look at the line. Guess what? There is a dead raven hanging from the point where the lines meet the box up at the top of the telephone pole. Apparently it’s tangled in something, and when the wind blows it fucks up the connection.
Does this seem wrong to anyone else? A huge black bird is hanging, decomposing, from the telephone pole in my back yard. Every time the wind blows (and the wind is always a blowin, here where chimps rule the earth) it flutters back and forth. When the wind doesn’t blow at the right angle, it just sort of hangs there like the surreal pall of everything wrong with the AV.
The phone company is going to come out and fix it tomorrow. Or Tuesday. Or never. Or maybe they’ll show up tomorrow, but hit me with sticks rather than fix my line. Cause they don’t really care. They’re the phone company, they don’t have to.
Weeping and twitching I hobble back into my room, hoping to at least be able to get some peace and quiet. Then my brother comes in, in his wife-beater and boxers, scratches his ass, and says, “So, I guess you got your computer fixed, huh?”
When my dad got home he found me chasing my brother around the house, using a broom as a spear, and screaming Zulu curses in some strange and gibbering tongue.
So that was my two days. How you doin?
In good news, the phone guys came today and got rid of the dead raven. The phone-chimp gets out of the van, looks up at the telephone wires. Chews real slow. Spits. "Ya got a crow up thar." Scratches at his ear for a minute. "I don' think yer covered fer crows. Lemme check the manual." He then jabbed it with a pole till it fell into my neighbors swimming pool. Then they fixed the damage to the line with duct tape. Like 7 whole rolls of duct tape.
Is this normal? I mean I know I've "fixed" things with duct tape in the past -- but mostly boxes and my brother's broken bones. Is it normal to do it with high tech equipment that controls my ability to call 911 when the monkeys finally decide to come for me? Really though, I feel worse for my neighbors, as they still have a giant dead black bird floating around their pool….
I went to the
Post Office today. I know that right at this moment you are all asking
yourselves, “Yea, so? Why should I care that you went to the Post Office? I do
that all the time.” You forget one fact: I went to the Post Office in the
Antelope Valley – also known as the VALLEY OF THE APES! Icecreamemperor once
said that he suspected I lived in an alternate universe where the forces of
chaos and insanity fought a daily war against everything rational and sane. He
was correct. So for you going to the Post Office is just a normal jaunt to mail
things, to me it is a quest through the land of insane animals, butthole
surfers, insane harpies, and deaf loco bastards that work the counter at the
Post Office.
It all started happily enough. I was looking over my shelf
of RPGs the other day, all 1250 of them, and realized that there were many
games that I was either never going to play, or that I had multiple copies of.
I also realized that being a hopeless RPG-whore (much like a crack whore, but
without the media coverage and the added onus of being a geek) there were many
more RPGs that I wanted. So I had a bright idea, a remarkable idea, a bright
remarkable wonderful idea! I would go online and trade some of my RPGs for
other RPGs. (In retrospect the idea doesn’t seem so very wonderful or cutting
edge. I wonder if the idiocy field surrounding the Valley is finally getting to
me?)
So I made up a list of games I could get rid of and never notice their loss. I
made up a short list of games I wanted. I posted it to RPG.net’s auctions and
trades forum. Within 24 hours I had a half dozen offers of trade, all
reasonable, all done by polite people who wanted to work out a good deal
without ripping me off. These were good people! These were rational people!
These were the kind of people that all of you probably get to deal with every
day. Life was good. All I had to do was mail these people some books I no
longer wanted, and they would mail me books I wanted very much. So I got all
the addresses, I got all the books in order, and I headed off to the Post
Office.
It started the minute I got out the door. Now, in the normal world birds
sometimes poop on your car. (Though I understand it isn’t actually poop so much
as a solid form of piss – or possibly both together.) It sucks, but really,
shit happens right? Well in the AV the birds aren’t content to just drop little
white blobs on your car. They explode. That’s right, I walked out of my house
to see my car covered in the most horrid collection of … things… that the human
mind can conceive of. Apparently sometime in the last day or so a kangaroo rat
had eaten some gun powder, then the rat was eaten by a snake and washed down
with a long drink of gasoline, then the snake was eaten by an owl. The owl then
went to smoke a joint, and exploded all over my car. Or at least that was my
first impression from looking at the mess of feathers, blood, rat parts, snake
parts, bird poop, and unidentifiable but unpleasant liquid that covered the
windshield and hood of my car.
I put the books down, and went to clean off my car. But the moment I did an
avenging owl swooped out of the trees and attacked me with beating wings and a
horrible hooting. Apparently no owl had actually exploded; it had just puked
all over my car and now was claiming the whole mess as its private domain.
Thinking quickly I screamed like a little girl and ran and hid on my porch. My
brothers, alerted by my dog, who was alerted by the ultrasonic frequency that
my scream had risen to, ran out to help me. Thus reinforced we ventured forth
against the Avenging Owl. We had baseball bats, tennis rackets, a hose, and a
boot. (Yes, a boot. No, I don’t know why Zach had a boot.) Like noble knights
we ventured forth to do battle against the poor, outnumbered owl.
Have you ever seen Monte Python’s Holy Grail? The part where the rabbit attacks
and kicks the ass of the Knights of the Round? Yea, that’s what the next 5
minutes of my life looked like. We charged forward and down swooped the owl.
Zach promptly swung, missed, and hit me in the face with a boot. He and Ian
then started to flail wildly while the owl swooped around, pooping on
everything in sight. (The owl was pooping. Ian wasn’t. This time.) I tried to
get back to my feet, and Ian hit me with a tennis racket. I sprayed everything
in the area with the power nozel on the hose, and then made a break for it.
Bruised and beaten, I ran for the safety of the porch once more. My brothers
followed behind, both screaming like little girls.
Apparently our screams scared the owl, which being attacked with a baseball bat
hadn’t done, and the crazy bitch thing fled for its life. Off it went, into the
wild blue yonder, leaving me and my brothers soaked, bruised, and wondering
what the hell had just happened. Eventually I worked up the nerve to wash off
my car, and then gathered up my books and headed to the Post Office.
The Antelope Valley was not done with me, however. On the way to the Post
Office I was waiting at a stoplight in the left-most lane that was not a turn
lane. Next to me, in the far right lane, is a big assed old pickup truck – the
kind that the guys from Deliverance might drive. The light turns green and I
start to drive forward, when the truck swings out in front of me, swerves into
my lane, and then turns left across traffic. I nearly get hit when he swerves
into my lane, having to jerk left and out of his way, then I nearly hit him
when he turns left, having to slam on my breaks to keep from plowing him. Only
my l33t skilz kept there from being an accident. He goes gunning off down the
road, and I get my ass out of the middle of the intersection. By the time I’m
through the Deliverance truck is out of sight, and as no one actually got hit I
decided to keep going.
Now, that kind of idiocy can happen anywhere, right? Dumb as it is, it is not
peculiar to the Antelope Valley. What happened next, however, nearly destroyed
my brain. I drive about 3 miles from the scene of the idiocy, then pull into
the parking lot behind the Post Office. A car pulls in right behind me, parks
right next to me. I get out, the driver of the other car gets out. It’s a
little old woman, looking like she’s probably in her 80s and should have a
walker. She approaches me and says, “You nearly caused an accident!”
I blink, too stunned to even be pissed off. Then I start to think that maybe
she’s gonna claim whiplash and try to pin it on me. That would have been
annoying, but it would also have been normal. So, of course, she didn’t.
Instead she reaches into her purse and pulls out this thickass sheaf of
leaflets. She looks me right in the eye and says, “If you had died in that
accident, you would have gone TO HELL!” (Yes, she spoke the caps.) She holds up
one of the leaflets, those dandy things printed in 3 colors that has the word
HELL in large letters with an image of sinners writhing as they are set on fire
just below it. “YOU MUST REPENT AND BE SAVED!” She yells loud enough that
people on the other side of the parking lot turn and look at us.
Now, I’m all for people talking about religion. I’m even generally supportive
of proselytizing. But this was a whole new thing, to be chased 3 miles by a
crazy woman who blames things clearly not your fault on you, then shoves images
of people being burned to death right into your face. (And I mean right in. I
could have snorted a line off the pamphlet, it was so close up to my nose.)
“JUST THINK HOW CLOSE YOU CAME TO THE FIRE!” She continued to bellow in a voice
that would make an army drill sergeant green with envy. Everyone in the parking
lot was looking by this point. I did the only thing I could do when confronted
with a situation like that.
I screamed like a little girl and ran away as fast as I could. (Well okay, I
walked very quickly. It felt like running though.)
And here’s the real rub – the old woman RAN AFTER ME. She chased me all the way
across the parking lot screeching “HELL! HELL! HELL!” like a ghost of the
demented avenging owl from my driveway. She chased me all the way to the doors
of the Post Office, but when I went through she didn’t follow. It was like on
an episode of Buffy when a vampire tries to get into a house she hasn’t been
invited into – the old woman almost physically rebounded from some invisible
wall of force, and glared at me through the door. She stayed there for at least
5 minutes, pacing back and forth like a caged tiger and staring at the door
with hungry, insane eyes.
Trembling and resisting the urge to shriek again, I stumbled deep into the Post
Office and tried to hide while I filled out the address and delivery
confirmation slips. At this particular Post Office there are no Priority boxes
set out, you have to get in line and get one at the window. So into line I go.
There I stay for 15 minutes, only to be told at the end that they have no Priority
boxes, and I’ll need to go to the other Post Office.
So I head hesitantly back outside, scanning for the gorgon, and thankfully
finding the way clear. When I get back to my car, however, I find it plastered
with “HELL” pamphlets. I mean plastered – the front and back windows, the side
windows, the tire wells, the license plate holders, all COVERED with HELL. It
took me so long to strip them all off I had to wonder how the harridan had
gotten them all on in the 20 minutes I’d been inside.
Car once again HELL free I drove to the other Post Office, about 15 miles away.
Getting there I once more stood in line, only to be told that they had no
Priority boxes. The clerk then added, very helpfully, that I should “go to the
other Post Office, they always have lots of boxes.” For his time and effort I
gave him a HELL flyer that had been stuck to my ass on the drive over.
So home I come, watching for asshole drivers, gorgons, and owls the whole way.
I search about the garage till I find some old Priority Mail boxes, and package
up the books in those. Then, not having had enough abuse, I went back to the
first Post Office.
This time the line was 45 minutes long. Before me was a 16 year old girl with
her two daughters, ages 7 and 4. She popped her gum constantly and flirted with
the 60 something guy in a Navy Seal sweater in front of her. Behind me were
Billy-Bo and Jimmy-Bob, who I’m almost sure were the guys driving the truck
that had nearly rammed me way back at the light. BB and JB talked about the
best way to clean a bloodstain out of the back of your truck, and I desperately
avoided making eye contact with either of them. Meanwhile the 7 and 4 year old
girls screamed “FUCK” at every person who came in the doors, and amused
themselves between greeting the guests by hurling gummy bears at random people.
(They only threw them at me once – because they found out that I was willing to
throw back much harder than they could. And no, their mom paid no attention at
all to any of this.)
When I finally get up to the window, the clerk there smiles at me all friendly
like. It would have been a lot more reassuring a sight had he not been missing
at least half his teeth, or even if the half that were there had not been
yellow-black like year old candy corn. Wheezing like he really needed a big hit
off the oxygen tank, he took my packages and started to weigh them.
“These both Priority?” He asks.
“Yes. They’re auctions.” Says I.
He nods, asks if I want any optionals. I give him the delivery confirmation
slips, and he attaches them both. He then puts one package ontop of another and
tries to lift them both at the same time so he can dump them down the chute.
Only problem is the two packages together weighed about 10 lbs, and he had
trouble lifting them. I felt kinda bad for the old guy, cause I know how hard
it is to slowly lose your physical strength. But then one of the women that
worked there came over and tried to help him. Reaching for the packages she
said, “Here, I’m on my way over, I’ll just take those too.”
Sweet of her, right? Little insensitive maybe, but all good in the name of
getting the line moving. Apparently Mr. Fossil Man didn’t think so, because he
gave a wheeze like a whistle blowing and the started to hit the other clerk
with his cane! I shit you not, he started smacking her in the butt with his
walking stick! Whack! Whack!
The woman screams, drops my boxes, and yells something incomprehensible
(luckily for my poor virgin ears, I’m sure – after all I don’t want to know any
more words that will make me go to HELL) and runs to the back. The old guy, all
pumped on adrenalin, manages to hoist and dump my packages. By this point he’s
so out of breath that he can’t speak, and so just points to the computer
display of how much I owe. A bit in shock I pay, get my receipt, and stumble
out, hurling one last gummy bear at the 7 year old on the way.
It’s only when I’m on the way back to my car that I look at my receipt – which
lists one package Priority and the other Media Mail. Cursing, I head back
inside. By this point I was mad, and so I skipped the line and went right to
the Mr Oldy Oldson’s window. Only thing is he wasn’t there anymore. A young
black woman had replaced him. She told me to go to the back of the line, I said
no and explained that I’d just shipped two boxes and one had been sent Media
instead of Priority. She asks who’d been my clerk, and I say, “The old guy –
the one with the cane.”
She replies, “I’m sorry, he’s been fired. What did he do with your packages?”
This less than 5 minutes after I'd left him standing at the counter.
“I think he put them down the chute.”
“Well then, there’s nothing we can do – they’ve already gone to sort. If he was
here he might have been willing to go down and get them, but like I said – he’s
been fired.” She then looks past me and screams, “NEXT!”
I probably should have made more of a fuss. But at that point I felt the
madness seeping in. I could hear, in the back of my mind, the mad and jibbering
zulu tongues calling me to murder, calling me to howl, calling me to pick lice
from other people’s heads and smash them with a rock (the lice or the head –
either way). It took all my will and focus to not kill, to not give in, and to
stagger out the door and into my car without starting to howl “HELL! HELL! HELL!”
Now I sit, hunched over the keyboard, trying to fight back the voices.
I’ve been told by Dorcus and Thededine that there are commercials that try and
sell houses in the AV to people living in LA and Santa Barbara. Do not listen
to these commercials, for they are of the DEVIL. If ye watch them and repent
not, ye shall be consigned and here in HELL ye shall burn along with this poor
wretch.
HELL!
HELL!
HELL!
Hello, my name is
Brand and I’m a rageoholic. I’d gone without rage for nearly two months, but
today I was weak and gave in to my impulses. All of you know about my struggles
with my internet, and about how much I hate the bubble of stupidity that
surrounds Lancaster. Today all that rage and hate came to a full boil while
talking on the phone with “Marcus.”
A bit of back
story. The company with whom I’ve had DSL for the past 6 months is now going
out of business. I secretly hope that this is because wild wolverines broke
into their head office and ate the eyeballs and brains of all the people that
owned the company, but I publicly suspect that it is because they are stupid
and incompetent beyond the normal meanings of the terms. In fact, I need a new
term, something like “cheese eating monkey fucktard nazi” but preferably
mono-syllabic. The one syllable is important, you see, because it would be the
longest word that the people working there could comprehend. If I were to call
them a cheese eating monkey fucktard nazi, by the time I got to “monkey” they would
have forgotten about “cheese” and thus would not be sufficiently insulted. Plus
multiple word insults are harder to howl in insane rage. It would just end up
coming out “chyainafuaunyufffffffFUCK!”
Anyway, the
monkey-butt-fart-faces are going out of business, and in January I arranged for
my DSL to be transferred to Verizon. Now Verizon is a huge mega-corp, but it
was not the main branch that I was dealing with. It was the Antelope Valley
Branch of Verizon, also known as Simian Central. It is now February, and my
service has not yet been transferred. So I called Simian Central, and then
spent the next hour on and off hold.
I explained the
situation calmly, multiple times to multiple people who passed me on up the
line because they couldn’t figure out what the problem was. I have no problem
with that, and they did their jobs well enough for monkeys with headsets. But
finally I got transferred to “Marcus.” Not Mark, mind you, Marcus -- like the
Babylon 5 character, if the Babylon 5 character was the kind of guy who burped
into the phone. Yes, this is correct, Marcus started our conversation by
burping at me. It was the high point of intellectual exchange in the rest of
the call. Marcus went on to tell me that he had canceled my DSL request because
DSL was not available in my area.
“Okay,” says I “I
wish you would have told me that before, but I’ll just have to go with someone
else then.”
“No you can not”
blurbles he “Listen closely to what I’m telling you.” This in the tone you use
to speak to a three year old with a crayon shoved deeply into its brain, “DSL
is not available in your area – no one can provide it for you.”
“Actually, I’ve
had DSL for three years now.” This here à THIS IS MY PATIENCE WEARING THIN.
“No, it isn’t
available in your area. You just have high-speed dial up. Trust me.”
I think that is
when the explosion actually started. I distinctly remember a flashing light
going off behind my eyes as part of my brain burst like a hotdog put in a
really powerful microwave for hours. I’m fairly sure that everytime I sneeze
part of my cerebral cortex is leaking out. “No, actually, I have had DSL for three years.
Trust me, I know more than you do about what is in my house. I know you deal
with morons often, but I have a degree in computer science and a modem that
says DSL MODEM in large letters sitting right next to me.”
“It isn’t DSL,
you just have two phone lines.”
“It is DSL, and
nevermind, I see that you are useless. I’ll be taking my money elsewhere.”
“Wait, hold on
one second, okay?”
I should have
hung up, but he sounded suddenly contrite, and I thought maybe I could finally
get a DSL provider that wouldn’t go out of business in 6 months, so I waited.
Back he comes to the phone and says, “It looks like DSL will be available in your
area next month. Would you like to switch from dial up to DSL?” He then starts
telling me the advantages of doing so.
I try to stop
him, he talks over me. So I yell “I already have DSL, I just want to switch to
your company being my provider!”
“Oh.” He says,
“Are you sure you have DSL?”
“Yes.” Fuming,
trying to stay calm.
He burps, then he
says, “How long have you had it?”
I don’t for the
life of me know if it was the burp or the tone, the patronizing, oily,
self-righteous tone that only a moron speaking to someone he considered dumber
than him can take on. I don’t know if it was just him, or if it was the
combined frustration of 7 years in this hellhole. All I know is at that point I
lost the ability to stand upright. In order to walk I had to use my knuckles,
which conveniently dragged on the ground. I thumped my chest (it hurt, left a
big brusie, because I don’t have massive monkey resistance yet), and I howled.
“THREE YEARS!” I
screamed, “THREE! THREE YEARS! THREE! THAT IS ONE MORE THAN TWO! IF YOU PUT UP
TWO OF YOUR FINGERS AND THEN PUT UP ANOTHER THAT IS HOW MANY YEARS! THREE! YOU
FUCKING MONKEY!”
Just about then
Ian came into the room and wrestled the phone from me and hung it up before I
got our service shut off (again). It cost him though, cause I bit him twice.
That’s my sad
story. I’m afraid that being surrounded by monkeys is turning me into one of
their ilk.
I still need a
better curse word.
After the
foulness and degredation of the past several days I felt the need to cleanse my
soul and get back with that old time religion. By which I mean Mormonism, of
course, my chosen faith: church of saints, of missionaries with white shirts
and dark ties, potluck dinners wherein people bring cassorols topped with
potatoe chips, and plays about how lying hurts your spirit. (“Ouch, it hurt me
in the spirit!”) In order to try desperatly to stop my own spiritual devolution
into an ape of a most foul type I signed up to go on splits with the full time
missionaries.
“Splits” is a
term that most churches don’t use, just like “unrighteous dominion” to mean
“being an anal retentive ass” and “turkey jerky” for what most human beings
refere to as some varient of “fucktard.” Going on splits means going out with
one member of a pair of full time missionaries while another local member goes
with the other. That way the missionaries can cover double the ground in one
night. The fact that it gets them a free car and gets the lazy locals involved
in their own community is only gravy. Or it would be gravy if it wasn’t for the
fact that interacting with Lancaster is, even in the service of God, a
surrealist farce.
I met the
missionary I was splitting with, Elder Young at around 7 pm. Now you’re all
probably snickering over the name “Elder Young” – but the name doesn’t quite do
justice to the fact that Elder Young is actually about 7 years old and looks
like he was grown in a vat in some secret lab in deepest, whitest Utah. He’s
all blonde and grinning and fully of a bubbly enthusiasm for life that makes me
want to punch him in the head. He’s also the senior companion, and so is
responsible for his junior collegue – Elder Handcock. As it turns out, Elder
Handcock was to come with us that night, as his split had ditched him. So
rather than having two perky young Latter Day Saints in my car, I was to have
two.
So off I go with
Young & Handcock, out to deliver a video casete to someone who had
requested it after seeing one of the Church’s commercials at 2 in the morning
and deciding that he really needed a “Lamb of God” video to fill the gaping
hole in his pathetic life. We drive out to the address given, miles and miles
out into the desert past alphalpha fields (the AV produces like 40% of the US’s
alphalpha, don’t you know) and joshua trees. We go past the bounds of
“civilization” as it exists in the valley. We get out to the address and all
that is there is a little tiny tin shed that is rattling in the wind, two large
padlocks prominantly displayed upon its front.
By this point it
is pitch dark, and the desert night wind is getting mighty cold. I look at
Young & Handcock and then at the shed. They look at me and at each other.
“Go on” says I, “knock and see what happens.”
Elder Handcock
says in a little tiny voice, “Isn’t this how the Texas Chainsaw Massacre
started?”
“You shouldn’t
have seen that movie, sinner.” Says I, being a bastard, “It’s R rated.” Elder
Handcock promptly turned bright red and started to sputter like a broken
sprinkler head.
Elder Young then
breaks in to say, “I don’t think Jesus wants us going to that shed. It feels
evil.”
At this point
Elder Young should have been mocked, and mocked mightily at that point. The
problem was that the shed did feel wrong. It exuded the same feeling that Lovecraft
describes with phrases like “tenebrous cthonic eldtitch gibbering” and other
subtlities of languge that so delicatly and without excess ornimentation
describe the existential horror of realizing you live in the AV.
“Right.” Says I,
and start to turn the car around so we can get the hell out of there. The
problem is that the road is narrow, the night is dark, and there is no
shoulder. There is instead, right up against the edge of the asphault, a 5 foot
deep farm ditch. Which the car promptly falls into.
It happened
really suddenly. One second I was driving, the next I’m kissing the steering
wheel. Elder Handcock is behind me, squeeking like a baby duck being stomped by
a rhino, because he can feel the car moving around underneath him. He unbuckles
his seatbelt and promptly falls out of the elevated back seat into the front
seat, landing on Young and making a noise come out of the both of them that
should have had them excommunicated.
Carefully I get
out of the car and look about. We’re deep in a ditch, the sides of which are
loose dirt and pebbles. I know we can’t get out, and I know that we need a tow.
I look at Young & Handcock, who are now huddeled deep into their white
shirts. They are huddled into their shirts, you see, because they were too
stupid to bring jackets. They were both from Utah, and felt that if they could
survive in the untamed wilds of that primeval land of snow and cold they would
not need to fear the desert.
I promptly
slapped them both upside the head harder than you should slap anyone who isn’t
a 40 year old middle class whiteperson who just said “Fishnizzel”, and told
them to stay with the car where they could get shelter from the wind. I then
hiked a mile down to the nearest intersection, where one godforsaken farm road overlapped
the godcursed access road we were currently on. With great trepidation I then
waited to see if I could flag down a passing car.
At this point I
should explain an interesting facet of the ever invovling socio-economic wonder
that is Lancaster: it’s the methlab and body dumping one-stop-shopping center
of Southern California. Gangs from LA come up to the desert to dump the bodies
of people they’ve chainsaw murdered, and the skinhead gangs that live in the
desert brew up meth and crack which they sell to the bangers while they’re up
for the night. Corpses come in, hard drugs go out. It’s like the Marines but
not.
Back to me,
standing by the side of the road, imagining what the headlines are going to
look like the next day. “Mormon Found Shotgun Murdered!” was the most
frequently seen, but “Mormon Killed By Bunnies with Guns!” also occurred with
unnatural frequency. Just as I’m about to lose my nerve a car pulls up, a
massive Chrysler 4 door. The window rolls down and I’m greated by a billow of ganja-smoke
right out of Cheech and Chong. As the smoke clears out (and made me much
happier about the day, despite the fact that I was about to wet myself) I see
sitting in the car 4 Black Peace Stones.
The Peace Stones,
for those not living in corpse-burrying monkey-land, are a Chicago gang that
was making serious inroads in LA for several years. They were pushing the Crips
and the Bloods out by being more violent, sadistic, and unpredictable than
either of the older and more established gangs. They were known for running
pogroms against interlopers into their turf, and not at all known for helping
Mormon missionaries stranded by the side of the road.
I, brave man that
I am, make a sound like “MEEEEEEP!” Then the door of the car opens and one of
the BPS says, in a voice right out of the Excorcist, “Broken down?” I repeat my
earlier “MEEEP!” and the voice says, “Get In.” One of the Stones gets out of
the car and points me into the back seat. Lacking control of my legs (all my
willpower was going to keeping control of my bowels) I got into the car.
The BPS then drive me about 10 miles up the road, out of alphalpha farm
teritory and into the middle of the desert. Just as I’m finishing a prayer to
God that they not rape me before they kill me the car stops, and right next to
us is a little bar surrounded by Harly’s. I swear to God, the Saints, and
Monkey that it looked exactly like the bar from “From Dusk Till Dawn.” The BPS
say, “You can use the phone there.” I get out of the car. One of the Stones
tosses me a quarter, and then they drive off.
So now I’m in the
middle of the desert, cold, a little buzzed from the smoke in the car, outside
a vampire bar, alone, and so happy to be alive that to celebrate I go take a
piss on a cactus before going into the bar. (I know it sounds odd, but
cactus-pissing is a holy and respected right in Lancaster. Of course, so is
tree-pissing, car-pissing, and cat-pissing, so….)
I then go to the
bar. My first warning, because I was SO STUPID that I had missed the 50 Road
Hogs parked around the building was that the door was about 7 feet high and 7
feet wide, dark wood bound with iron straps. It looked like the door that every
D&D geek knows because it’s the door to the Orc Captian’s room in every
dungeon ever made by man (or Gary Gygax, who isn’t quite a man but is close
enough that he would probably be worshiped as a superior being in Lancaster.)
I open the door,
and a wave of death metal and cigar smoke pours over me. The music only lasts
long enough for me to realize that the band playing makes Metalica and
Megadeath look like N Synch before it cuts off. Not a sound is made in the bar
as every face turns towards me, every set of eyes falls upon my person.
Did I mention
that I was wearing a white shirt, blue tie, and dark slacks with a missionary
tag on my left breasst pocket? Clean shaven, suburbran, Mormon, blond me all
standing there in the door….
One of the bikers
walks forward from around the pool table. The guy is the size of a gorilla,
with a beard that could safely have housed a whole family of racoons, and a
tattoo on his arm that says, “I kill bitches for Satan.” He walks a couple
steps towards me real slow like, the floor rattling under his booted feet, and
looks me up and down with exactly the same look on his face that I get on my
face at Cold Stone.
“You need to use
the phone?” He says, his voice setting off a chain reaction in my bladder that
made me infinatly grateful to whatever divine province had seen to it that I
pissed –before- I came into the bar.
“Yes.” Meeps I.
“It’s right over
there.” He says, and points to the corner where a busted up phone booth is. “Do
you need a quarter?”
At this point
I’ve decided that it’s all a game, and that they’re just trying to see if they
can make me relax before the wrenches and blow torches come out. “No,” I say,
“I’ve got a calling card.”
He nods to me and goes back to the pool table. The music starts up again and
everyone ignores me. I creep back to the phone, call my dad and tell him where
I am, and ask him pretty please to PICK ME UP RIGHT NOW BEFORE I DIE AND AM
LOST IN THE DESERT AND NEVER GET TO EAT PIZZA AGAIN!
I finish my call
and head for the door. The waitress, who looks like she could knife the big guy
who’d shown me where the phone was and eat his liver before he hit the ground,
comes up to me and says in a voice that would make Martha Stuart writhe with
envy from the pure sugary goodness of it’s dulcet tones, “Would you like a coke
honey? It must have been real dry out there.”
I wonder breifly
if I’ll look good when I’m wearing my pancreas as a hat, and answer no, that I
need to get back to my car, and I head out the door as fast as I can. Just as
I’m closing the door the big guy hollars over the noise, “If you need a jump or
something, come on back, ya hear!”
At that point I
had a Hee-Haw flashback that scared me more than the Peace Stones, and I took
off running up the road. I got about a block up and then waited for my dad, who
got there in about 20 minutes. We then went to get the missionaries, deciding
on the way we’d get a tow truck for the car the next day.
We get to the car, and there is no sign of the missionaries. I call out to
them, and still nothing. So I go over to the car and open the back door. Elder
Young falls out, right at my feet, screaming like a girl, while I hear Elder
Handcock scramble out the far door screaming, “I’M A SERVENT OF THE LORD! IF
YOU RAPE ME ANGELS WILL KICK YOUR ASS!”
I yell at them
both that it’s me, and my dad’s here with the van, and finally get Elder Young into
the van. It took us about 5 more minutes to get Elder Handcock, who was hiding
behind a cactus and crying. When we’re in the van I ask them why they’re so
freaky, and Elder Young replys,
“There was this
guy in an El Camino who kept driving buy us. He had eyes that bugged out of his
head and his car smelled like caroseen fumes. He’d drive by and stare at us,
then drive off really fast. Every 10 minutes he’d come back, staring at us and
cursing at us through the window, and then drive off.”
I got a shudder
down my spine and was glad we were headed back to the land of the Apes. Much as
it was full of monkeys, it was at least a place where rejects from Steven King
novels don’t tell you to “come on back now, ya hear.”
The next day,
when we went to get the car towed, there was no shack, no sign of a shack, and
the tiretracks of an El Camino that had pulled right up to where the shack was.
I try real hard not to think about what was in that shack.
I need to go to Canada. Things like this don’t happen in Toronto.