alread-and-me-go-to-walmart
Title: alread-and-me-go-to-walmart
Author: Geoff "gsiva" Snider
Date: Mar 3, 2001
so i eat some meat, joe gets a burger with stuff, and lumsden gets some fish stix which he devours while covered in mayonnaise (the fish was covered in mayonnaise, not jason). so i unwrap my "blarney blast" tag that had been used for my silverware...and BAM!!! i win a "blarney blast hat!" with this cap on i look like an old man who’s going fishing. gotta love it. i’ll use it tomorrow morning when i get up at 8am to get mcdonalds for breakfast just to keep my nappy un-showered hair covered up (this is not a regularity for me, ’cause YES i shower every day and i can’t stand smelly people unless they have a damned good reason for it or they’re at least european).
so i win this hat, and i say to the waitress (who’s by far the b1tchy-est waitress i’ve ever had and i manage to get her every time i go there) "i get a hat?" and she’s like "good work!" and i think to myself "i did a damned good job winning that hat." this is like..THE highlight of my day (it was a pretty sh1tty day ’cause i had to listen to alread b1tch about the mustard that someone put on his burger...’cause he is picky about that kind of sh1t...but that’s not the only reason it was a sh1tty day...my uncle died that morning, and i’m really good about bottling that sh1t up for a long time).
so my day is bad because of alread’s burger, my uncle, and that i have this 80 lb. set of shelves that i really have to get around to putting together (’cause they’re just sitting in the middle of the floor in my apartment and i keep tripping on them...and i just can’t manage to find time to do anything anymore since i’m running the store full time now).
so i’m wondering how it is that i’ve done "good work" by winning this damned hat at bennigans. i’m not a hat person. i don’t EVER wear a hat. they don’t fit my big-a$$ head. this one, however, has an adjustable strap on it, so maybe you’ll all see me wearing the blarney blast hat when i go to vegas in april. i’ve only ever owned like...4 hats EVER (5 actually).
hat #1: chicago cubs hat
my uncle bought me this one a LONG LONG TIME AGO. this is not the uncle that died wednesday, but the one that died like 11 years ago. he was pretty cool ’cause he looked kinda like Luciano Pavarotti and liked to sing opera (not unlike Luciano Pavarotti) and also liked to make pizzas with anchovies....so if you can imagine your classic big fat italian guy singing opera while wearing a white shirt and tossing pizza dough in the air, then you can imagine what this late uncle of mine (the one who died 11 years ago) looked like. it didn’t fit all that well, but i wore it anyways..and it was the kind with all the mesh on the back like they used to be like 10 years ago. i don’t know what happened to it, but i suspect that it got lost in the shuffle when my parents moved from chicago to boston about 4 years ago.
hat #2: chicago white sox hat
my SAME uncle (fat italian...that’s what i’ll call him from now on...well...maybe not. i’ll call him Dennis ’cause that was his name) Dennis bought me this stupid-a$$ white sox hat while we were at lincoln park zoo in chicago when i was 6. this was like a double whammie insult to me because when i was 6 i not only hated lincoln park zoo (brookfield zoo was so much better...plus they had tropic world asia), but i also was a die-hard cub fan. i’m sure that if i had been 21 at the time i would have been a die-hard Bud Man as well (for those of you that remember the whole CubFan-BudMan slogan that Harry Carey was famous for). so anyhoo...the white sox sucked a$$. so my uncle (dennis)was married into the family by way of my aunt (mom’s sister), and he also had several other nephews that would come and hang out with us back then. they weren’t blood relatives, so i didn’t really consider them REAL cousins, but oh well. anyways, they used to make fun of me (their names were Doug and Darrell), and call me names. i don’t know why, but doug used to call me Beff (instead of geoff) because it rhymed or something gay like that. so i gave them the hat and i haven’t seen it since 1988.
hat #3: stupid floppy wax print thing that i got at a head shop.
in high school i was all sorts of confused about how i was "supposed to be" and although i had this ultra-conservative background that my parents had provided, i had friends that were so much cooler than my parents...ex-specially those friends that i was in a band with. one of them had a goatee, wore these silly stocking caps, and drove this a$$ station wagon, while the other three were definitely odd characters of their own ilk. ronnie, jeff, bill, and marty...and me. so we used to drive around in our friend scott’s mini-van and steal fire extinguishers from local hotels...and proceed to drive past people on the street, open the mini-van side door and shoot them at people. needless to say these people weren’t very pleased and i’m sure more than one of them got scott’s liscense plate #. so anyways, i always wanted to be cool like the guys in my band were cool...so i bought this damned silly floppy-a$$ hat with a weird blue-wax print on it. i wore this sometimes...and sometimes not...but the chix liked it and always borrowed it from me, so it wasn’t all bad. so i wore this hat when i went to germany the summer before my senior year in High school, and everyone there thought it was the hippest thing they’d ever seen...and germany is an entirely different story. but as the life of all hats go, this one got kinda smelly and kinda limp in the brim, and it now rests on the shelf in my closet.
hat #4: cleveland indians cap
now i know that i said that i was a die-hard cubs fan, but that was when i was like...6-12 or something like that. i hate watching sports, and about the only time you’ll ever see me watching them is like...during the super bowl or something holiday-esque like that. so about 6 years ago i decided to go to college (more like i was told "go to college and we will be proud" so i really had no choice), so i decided to go to school at Illinois Wesleyan University. IWU is a private school in Bloomington, Illinois, and has only 2000 students. this, as i would find out, really sucks because it’s just like being in high school again except they don’t give you a suspension for smoking. all the classes have an attendance policy, so right away i was in trouble. don’t get me wrong... i wasn’t a bad student at all, just completely unmotivated to do anything because i figured that i was like THE smartest person ever and that noone could tell me what to do or when to do it...so i only ended up with a 3.5 gpa (on a 4. scale). so i picked music as my major because in all my infinite wisdom i’d figured out that it’s the only thing that i’ve ever really been good at. my instrument of choice: the Oboe. other instruments i’ve learned or dabbled in: piano, guitar, bass, trumpet, sax(of 3 varieties), flute, and a bit of french horn....not to mention filling in the rhythm section for several occasions that the marching band needed someone (ya see...i was the band president back then and i had to make things work, make ends meet, and all that good stuff). so now you all know that i was king of the geeks, i’m kinda embarassed...so fu ck you all. but i digress...
so my roommate was a total f uck and i hated his guts, but i liked to play windows solitaire on his computer all the time so i was at least polite to him...that f ucking freak. so anyways, i lived with 7 guys...four rooms adjoined with 2 people in each and a "common" area. i was in the common area one day and there was this cleveland indians hat just sitting on a table, so i left it there for like ...a month, and then another month...and noone claimed it, so i took it and wore it on the days that i didn’t shower because as everyone knows "in college, hat + deodorant = shower" but i guess not everyone knows this so blah. so to this day i still have that damned hat, and it’s suffered the same fate as the floppy head shop wax-print blue cap from 1993.
hat #5: stupid blarney blast hat.
this hat has alot of future in store for it. i’m going to make it my "paddington bear" hat. for any of you who know anything about Paddington bear, he had a hat that he wore all the time, and on that had he had his "stain collection" and it was his way of remembering certain events in his life (not unlike danny devito’s character’s coin collection from "throw momma from the train"). he liked marmalade (paddington that is).
so anyways, i guess i did a good job at winning that stupid blarney blast hat at bennigans. joe says i look like an old man, so i’m going to start actively recruiting for "Team Old Man" for the next team event. Jim Sells has been listed as "OLD MAN MATERIAL" by steve, and so jim, i hereby recruit you to join TEAM OLD MAN!!!
we get dessert, and i almost vomit from eating that crap.
alread and i part ways with lumsden, who is pretty cool for paying for dinner (i owe him the next one), and as we get into the car, i say something like "blah" and turn the car towards walmart. yes this is the same walmart mentioned in the aftermath of the DPC reports.
i have to go and get a Bait-and-tackle carrying case (not that i do any fishing or anything like that...) for my warhammer 40k figures because i do alot of mini’s gaming sh1t and i own alot of eldar, space marines, and chaos stuff...not to mention a smattering of orks...among other things.
so we walk into walmart and alread is like "dude...i can’t f ucking believe that homan and the canadians like DEFILED our walmart" and i’m like "yeah no sh1t."
we go to the bargain movie bin, and alread finds some warren beatty film called shampoo and tries to turn "shampoo" into some kind of gay joke for the night, but i explain to him that there’s something much better than shampoo.
BAD TRANSLATIONS OF JAPANESE TO ENGLISH!!!
i relate the story of steve lewis’ DPC report to alread, including the part about this 11 year old girls calling clint on the phone...and i get this mental picture in my head of chu on the phone with these 11 year old chix...and clint just grabs the phone and screams "somebody set up us the bomb B1TCH!!!" and i just start laughing....and alread laughs.
so i get my bait and tackle box/figure carrying case and after a lengthy search for some foam (yes, i said foam) we get to the checkout line. some hottie is in line behind us, and i enjoy staring at her chest while joe and i are talking about stupid sh1t....the old man at the checkout counter is busy closing the cash register because it’s like 12am exactly, so we wait for like 5 minutes.
then the old man rings up my tackly box and it pops up as 39.96 on the monitor and i’m like "WHAT??? this newspaper add that i saw said 29.96!" usually i’m not ever picky about anything EVER! but this is like...$10 for walmart. if it was for a children’s charity or something useful i might not give 2 sh1ts about it, but i’m not going to dish out any more than i have to for sam F UCKING walton’s retirement fund. i have to fu cking argue with some old b1tch for about 5 minutes about this thing, and she finally turns to "old man" and says " just put it through already!" so i’m like "cool" and we leave. joe got razors because he is anal about shaving or something like that.
i get in the parking lot and notice that this particular tackle box is really the $39.95 model, and not the one i thought it was originally...so i feel pretty good about f ucking over walmart...but i still can’t imagine Tj and hodur, and yannick and all the others playing around in MY walmart. it makes me mad. noone defiles Normal Walmart unless i’m there too!!! i want revenge. i will have it.
so my day ends with another beer, and it’s up at 11am the next day to open the store. blah
geoff