Got a Light?

I have told you before about my building, neatly tucked between the really seedy Walmart and the municipal bus transfer station. Since our building is home to a couple of in-bound call centers, we have the perfect storm of oddballs roaming the premises. Our very large parking lot is adjacent to a main throughfare which connects directly to the highway, making us an easy mark for gangs of marauding car thieves. Something is always happening at our place. I park behind the building because that location allows me access to the building via the back door, rather than having to walk around to the front entrance. I prefer to come and go as inconspicously as possible. Plus, it affords an extra layer of protection for the Sneed Family Junkster. The downside is that I have to run the gauntlet of smokers to get into the building. It has been in the 30's F. these past few mornings and this makes the smokers crowd the back door for some reason. They think it is warmer there, I guess. I am a smoking bigot and proud of it. I have no use for smokers and their disgusting habit, so ridiculing them is a kind of hobby of mine. There is no good reason to smoke and a hundred good reasons to stop. Besides, it is not that I am belittling them for something beyond their control. Stupid is stupid. Some of the smokers are fat, so smoking ups likelihood that they will have serious health problems later. Some of the smokers are attractive young people, who will look bad in about twenty years if they don't stop. My mom was a beautiful woman in her twenties, by the time she died at sixty-three, she looked like hell. Smoking ravaged her health and her appearance. I've always wondered what would happen if I whipped out a before and after picture of Mom to show them. I'm guessing nothing. My mom never smoked until she was 33 year-old. Like most things in her life, she started smoking to get back at my dad. I remember they day she started smiking clearly. I was six and we were standing on our porch in Guam and looking at the waves. Mom had been arguing with my dad about money, specifically his drinking and smoking, she went and got a pack of my dad's Raleigh cigarettes and lit up, saying, "If he can smoke, so can I." I'm not sure how she thought that would help the family finances, but she did. She never stopped until she went to bed and woke up dead in 1988. My favorite among the smokers in the back of the building is this 60 to 70 year-old woman, who is evidently working to have something to do, rather than just needing the money. Everything about her cries out that she is a member of the horsey-set. She wears a lot of the tacky silver and turquiose jewelery that was popular in the southwest here during the 1970s. Her smoking isn't just a habit, it is an event. She takes up her post, sitting on a planter wall, right by the back door. She has a blanket that she puts down to sit on, summer or winter. In winter she has another blanket that she lays across her lap, covering her legs. In addition, she has an umbrella, laid on one shoulder, like Gene Kelly did in the movie, Singing in the Rain, to block the wind. This is just too much equipment to support an addiction, if you ask me. There is also an overweight, sloppily dressed and badly groomed woman among the throng, who is missing one of her front teeth. Why smoking is more important than teeth is beyond me. Five bucks a day for smokes buys a lot of dental care in a short time. Another abundant source of inappropriate behavior, at least in my opinion, is the constant cell phone use in our building. People will say things on the phone for the world to hear, that they wouldn't say aloud in any other public setting. I heard a woman today in the elevator telling someone on her cell phone about how she backed her car out of the garage without openning the garage door. Then she pulled forward and crashed into the furnace. She told the person on the phone that she was embarrassed to admit that it happened. It makes a guy wonder why she was telling the story in a packed elevator. Then there is the garden-variety conversations that we shouldn't have to hear. Last week there were two women in the elevator discussing how one was going to stop the foreclosure of her home, complete with how it happened and whose fault it was. This gal's big concern was having to pay a bunch of money to keep a house that her good-for-nothing, soon-to-be ex-husband was entitled to half of. Nothing is off-limits to these people. The best part of the day today, was when the lovely Mrs. Sneed and I were leaving Starbucks. As I pulled into the street a guy on a bike yelled that he was "coming through". It was pitch black and since he was 50 yards away, I had trouble finding him in the dark. I could have just pulled out and never been aware he was there. There was also no chance that I was going to hit him. Things would have been fine, if "coming through", hadn't been followed by f*ckhead. I yelled back that he should get a light, which may have been followed by A-hole. I pulled out and he pedalled furiously to catch up, the whole time screaming. I put down the lovely Mrs. Sneed's window and we had an animated shouting match at 20 mph, complete with hand signals. I think he may have been crazy and he probably thinks the same of me. Too bad he's both crazy and wrong. Merle. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor