Two Mild And Not-So Crazy Guys

It was rather gloomy and overcast when I woke up this morning, and there was a much cooler breeze than yesterday’s blowing in through the open window, so I considered simply staying where I was, but ultimately I decided to get up.
After sitting around doing my usual not much of anything, I IMed Kathleen to see if she wanted to meet for lunch, as I was thinking about heading to Ashburn to gas up the car and over to the Wal-Mart in Sterling.
She was too busy to manage it, so I considered not going and just holding off until tomorrow, but finally decided that I might as well get it over with.
Now that school is out, Wal-Mart was even more filled to overflowing than usual, making me especially eager to get what I needed and get the hell out.
Every line was inordinately long, but by sheer chance I spotted a self-checkout register that had only one person at it.
Further, said person was buying one item.
So I thought, foolishly, that this was my lucky day.
The person ahead of me was an older, bald, grandfatherly type, buying some sort of ointment, who probably shouldn’t be allowed to leave the home unattended, and certainly shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a piece of technology developed after 1960.
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that it took him ten minutes to pay for the one item that he’d bought. Thank god I’d gotten there after he’d managed to scan it (which I’m sure involved blind, random chance).
It took him quite some time to read the screen and figure out how he was going to pay for his purchase, ultimately deciding to go with cash.
He took several bills out of his wallet, put one in, looked at the screen, fumbled around in his pocket and dug out a bunch of change, and then began feeding coins to it like some blue-haired retiree playing the nickel slots.
After finishing that, he put in another bill, paused, read the screen, put another bill in, looked at me as if to say, “Screw you, you impatient young whippersnapper,” read the screen, put another bill in, put the remaining bills in his hand back into his wallet, put his wallet in his pocket, scratched himself thoughtfully, and then, and this is the part that baffled me, collected all of the coins he’d received in change. WTF? What was the point of loading the thing up with coins if you weren’t giving it exact change and were going to just get a bunch of change back?
Though I had seven times as much stuff and paid with a credit card, I was done in under a minute once I finally got my turn.
After finishing up at Wal-Mart, I considered my next move. It seemed like lunch was a decent idea, but I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go, and I wasn’t especially hungry just yet.
Unless it’s something I really want to see, I don’t often go to movies by myself, but as I was sitting in my car thinking about what to do next, I thought about how I’d kind of like to see that Prairie Home Companion movie (I know; I’m a nerd) and thought, “What the hell; I’ll go see a movie.”
After all, it seemed like a waste to go out into the world just to get gas, stop at Wal-Mart, and get lunch. Why not do something outside of my routine?
Besides, one advantage to seeing a movie was that I could get myself a snack to tide me over while I watched the movie and decided what I wanted to do for lunch afterwards.
Of course, I hadn’t checked to see showtimes before heading out – the dangers of doing things spontaneously – and I didn’t have my cell phone with me to use for that purpose, as during the night the battery had died, so it was sitting at home on my counter charging.
Still, I figured that there was likely to be a showing soon enough, and if nothing else, I decided, maybe I’d check out The Da Vinci Code.
I got to the theater and found that not only was there not going to be showing of Prairie Home Companion anytime soon, it wasn’t playing at the theater at all.
I didn’t really feel up for The Da Vinci Code, and realized that I’d rather wait until after I finally manage to force myself to finish reading the book before I watch it (If I ever decide to watch it at all).
So, deciding that there’s a reason that I don’t engage in acts of spontaneity that are outside of my routine, I opted to simply head home and see what I could scrounge up for lunch.
Along the way I decided to give spontaneity another shot and turned off toward the Dulles Town Center to get lunch from the food court, but as I neared it I realized that the food court of a mall, in the summer, at noon, is the last place I would ever want to be, and so drove past, deciding, ultimately, to stop at the Uno’s located on the perimeter of the Town Center.
Though there were several cute young waitresses working there, as is invariably the case I ended up being waited on by the one male employee working the floor.
Every time that happens, which is pretty much every time I go somewhere to eat, I’m reminded of my pre-Smart Tag days when I would stop at the toll booth to pay the toll (which at that time was $.35), and if I had just one penny amid a dozen dimes in my pocket, I would grab the penny every single time.
I’m convinced that I could go into a Hooters and still manage to somehow not be waited on by a cute waitress.
Not that it really matters, given that at Uno’s the waitresses were undoubtedly teenagers, and even if they weren’t it’s not like I would suddenly turn into some smooth operator or something.
Still, it would be nice to be able to interact with a pretty girl every so often.
After eating I headed home, though I needed to pick up some milk, so I stopped at the Giant that’s along the way.
Once I got inside I was annoyed because someone decided that it was a good idea to have the layout of this Giant be the exact opposite of every other Giant I’ve ever been in.
While I was there I decided to pick up a bag of apples as well.
Getting what I needed, I headed to a self-checkout that wasn’t in use.
I didn’t feel like digging out my card, so I keyed in my phone number, to which the register responded, “Bonus Card accepted.”
After multiple attempts, which were beginning to annoy me, the apples scanned, the registered said, “$2.99. Scan next item or press Finish and Pay,” and I put the apples on the belt and turned for the milk. At that point the register said, “Please remove item from belt and try again. Credit $2.99,” and voided out the apples.
Annoyed and dismayed, I tried scanning the apples again, with no luck, so I decided to key in the UPC. I did so, set the apples back on the belt, and the register said, “Bonus Card not accepted.”
I sighed, left the apples where they were and decided that I would scan the milk and the bottle of Sprite I’d grabbed, then get back to the apples.
However, because I hadn’t taken the apples off the belt, the lady overseeing the self-checkout decided that I must be planning to steal the apples and came rushing over yelling, “Hey, wait a minute!”
I said, “I was going to get to the apples in a minute. I just decided I’d scan the other stuff first.”
She grabbed the apples and started trying to scan them, blocking me from trying to scan the milk.
“I don’t know what the hell the problem is,” I said – she objected to my use of the “H” word – adding, “It scanned them once, then voided them. Then it wouldn’t accept the UPC.”
She said, rather snarkily, “Well, just wait a minute, we’ll see,” at which point she keyed the UPC in, exactly as I had, and this time it worked, which caused her to look at me with a smug smirk of satisfaction, which made me want to say, “Ah yes. You’re the smart one, which is why you’re in your fifties and working in a grocery store,” but I understand how important it is to feel superior to the people you deal with when you work in a shitty customer-service job, so I simply scanned the milk and Sprite, paid for them, and walked out resolving never to shop at that store again, suddenly feeling a little bit less irritated at the old guy at Wal-Mart.
But then I remembered that his problem had been actual retardation and not some weird issues with the register, and went back to believing him to be an idiot.
And that was my exciting day, filled to the brim with half-assed attempts at spontaneity which the Universe still managed to slap me down for even though they were incredibly lame instances of being spontaneous.
After I got home I decided to look up where Prairie actually is playing and decided that I still want to see it, after finding some theaters showing it, and gave Scott a call to see if he wants to catch a showing tomorrow.
We don’t have definite plans yet, as he has to talk to Stacy, who decided to come home as originally scheduled rather than staying in Utah a while longer.
Which brings me to a point I’ve been meaning to bring up.
Last week, when Scott told me that Stacy and the girls were staying in Utah a while longer, I asked him what he was going to do with the time to himself. He talked about finishing up some projects around the house, to which I responded, “Wow, bachelorhood is even more wasted on you than it is on me.”
Toward the end of doing more with my bachelorhood, I had tried making some bacheloresque plans for this week.
One day shortly after moving here I found myself looking through the Leesburg version of the freebie “newspaper” that got crammed into my mailbox every week in Ashburn, and amid the pages filled with ad after ad for real estate agencies, I spotted an ad for a strip club.
What was significant about it was that it boasted daytime hours of operation during the week with dancers.
Now, back in Tucson I learned, to my surprise and sorrow, that going to a place full of naked women actually isn’t as much fun when you’re sober (I’d hoped that it would be, though I suspected the truth all along), but even so, I couldn’t help but be intrigued.
It’s more of a curiosity thing than anything else; I just can’t help but wonder what daytime strippers, particularly daytime strippers in West Virginia, are like, so I suggested to Brian that some weekday we should head out to see if the daytime strippers are anything like the “daytime hooker” on My Name is Earl.
Last week I decided this would be the week that we would finally get around to going, but Brian had some prior commitment that prevented him from going.
So instead of going to a strip club I’ve decided to take in a movie about a radio show.
I suppose I could just go to the strip club by myself, but who wants to go to a strip club alone?
Okay, granted, I used to go to the strip club alone all the time when I lived in Minnesota, but that was a very different Jon, one who was not quite so accustomed to sitting at home alone doing nothing, and the strip club there was a lot closer to where I lived.
(Just so it’s clear, even if Stacy weren’t returning this week, asking Scott to go to the strip club wouldn’t have been an option, and I don’t want people to think that it’s a matter of preferring to spend time with Brian. Scott just plain can’t go to a strip club. Sure, Brian is also married, but I don’t think Kathleen would care, and it’s not Scott’s marital status that prevents him from going, it’s his religion.)
Scott just got the go-ahead, so I guess we’ll be off to the Prairie tomorrow.
Maybe I’ll slip a single to the usher just to liven things up…