jynxed's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Back to Big Bear - Part Six Cousin Vicki: "I'm going steady and I French kiss." So, Saturday, July 3, circa noonish. At the craft fair, we found out where county fair carnies do when they get too old to run the Tilt-o-Whirl or seduce young boys into throwing darts at balloons to win cheaply framed photos of scantily clad women. *blushes sheepishly* I was a sucker as a kid. Anyway, once their remaining three teeth fall out and they can no longer bark at passers-by the way they used to, carnies end up working craft fairs up in little mountain towns. Every booth was manned by people that scared the bejeezus out of me. I swear one guy asked me to squeal like a pig. So Amanda, her dad and I burned through the small collection of freaky bric-a-brac booths in about 20 minutes. We then hit the snack bar and got a ridiculously priced hot dog and a soda. Two dollars for the soda, and the grizzled old retired Dog Lady handed us a cup and a can of Diet Coke. Two bucks. For a can of soda pop. Hotels don't even rape you that badly. As we finished up, we found Amanda's mom and she told us she was only about a quarter of the way through the fair. Jeezum crow, man. The woman is a shop-o-holic. And don't even get me started on how many hundreds of dollars she has spent on craft fair junk over the years that has fallen apart within a week after bringing it home. You want quality, you go to Wal-Mart and buy shit made in Pakistan and Mexico built by children for pennies a day. You want shoddy shit that's built from rotten goat nuts and'll fall apart within hours, buy stuff made by old freaky carnies at craft fairs in mountain towns. Scary. Amanda's dad tries to keep her mom away from these places, but it's as fruitless as a dead apple tree or a Young Republicans meeting. *ahem* Sorry. Anyway, we sat around and listened to a singer who really wasn't half bad, even if we sort of expected him to break out the banjo and start picking "Duelin' Banjos" while the rest of the cabbage-smellin' folk surround us and and begin to stuff our cornholes with their shivelled old cocks all rotted black a oozing pus from open lesions. *shiver* Frightening. We finally pulled her away, and then hit downtown Big Bear. It's a nice small mountain village full of crafts and tourist shops. Amanda and I were in for an afternoon treat, so we stopped at a smoothie/ice cream shop and I ordered an M&M chocolate ice cream bowl. "We're out of ice cream now, sorry." I decided to forego supporting the mountain town economy and go across the street to Jack-in-the-Box and get an Oreo milkshake. But Amanda wanted a Pina Colada smoothie before we left the little mom and pop stand. "We're out of Pina Colada smoothies," the guy said. I resisted the urge to ask him if they did, in fact, have anything for sale, and Amanda decided she'd have an Oreo shake too. We spent the next hour and a half roaming the shops of Big Bear village, nearly all of which are the same shops we've spent hours at each and every time we come up there. Why? Because Amanda's mom likes to shop. Is obsessed by it. She needs her fix. Visa is her crack dealer. Trinkets and knick-knacks call to her and she feels her fingers quiver and her blood begins pounding in her head. She begins to salivate. Amanda's dad went to the bar and had a beer. I would have joined him except a) I can't stand beer--the only times I have a beer usually involves either nekkid boobies or crooked blurry pictures of renaissance faire chicks, both of which are nothing if not the impetus for a marital spat; and b) walking into a bar filled with biker dudes wearing "PUSSY MARAUDER" t-shirts and glistening black leather chaps while you're holding a pansy-ass Jack-in-the-Box Oreo milkshake is a recipe for getting your teeth pounded through the back of your skull on general principles alone. So I wandered along behind Amanda and her mom like the obedient bitch I am. I did, however, notice that two types of people inhabit Big Bear, or at least work in the shops. On one hand, you have the older, retired people, most of whom are grumpy and bitter that you've come to muck up their quiet mountain existence (but more than eager to sell you hand-made Christmas ornaments for the price of refurbishing the spires of the Taj Mahal). On the other hand, and more importantly, you've got the smokin' hot chicks, fit and trim from hours upon hours of mountain biking, skiing, and snowboarding. I'm thirty-two years old, comfortable in my marriage, still crazy about my wife and faithful 'til the end with her, but I was nothing but a walking hard-on that afternoon. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. A few of the amazingly gorgeous girls even sort of flirted with me, which I suppose I ought to offer condolences for, because if you're desperate enough to bat an eyelash at a chubby ugly ass shitbag like me, you're town is in desperate need of men. So I didn't know whether to feel good about that, or like complete shit. I chose to stick pretty much to the latter, since it's the status quo. That evening, we ate dinner at a steak joint, and the food was surprisingly good. Of course, a twenty-dollar filet mignon had better be pretty fuckin' tasty. The service was good as well, and the waitress had a nice sense of humor. All in all, I guess you could say Saturday was pretty okie dokie. Pretty boring, particularly if it weren't for the abundance of hot, hot, hot girls, with the only real disaster being that Amanda's dad almost ran her over. I went to bed Saturday night feeling better about the trip, but still having that nagging bitch in my skull that likes to sit in the back of my brain in her rickety old rocking chair clicking her tongue at me. "This is costing you three hundred dollars, Nathan," she told me. "Three hundred dollars to roam around and watch your mother-in-law shop." "Tomorrow is another day," I whispered back. God knows, I didn't want anybody to catch me talking to myself. I'm sure they already all think I'm pretty fucked up anyway. "Tomorrow is another day," I repeated. Independence Day, as a matter of fact. The fourth of July. Let's crank this party up, eh? To be continued... 11:00 p.m. - July 17, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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