Dear Mr. Sarcasm,
You’re class of ’92, like me. Can you believe it’s really been 15 years since we graduated? Man, where does the time go?
— Nostalgic in Newport Beach
Dear Double-En-Bee:
Thanks for reminding me of my otherwise completely transparent mortality. As if those big raccoon circles under my eyes (no longer obscured by my glasses — thank you very much, LASIK), the popping noises I make when I get out of bed and the cultural references that sail right over the head of my significantly younger “child of the 90s” girlfriend aren’t enough of a daily bulletin that I’m inching ever closer to my inevitable shallow, unmarked grave. I really needed the likes of you to remind me that the hot teenage girl I’m checking out might very well be the child of that girl who was pregnant my sophomore year. And that teenager is a legal adult now.
I have, admittedly, become a bit nostalgic for the early 90s since realizing that 2007 marks a decade and a half since graduation. And sometimes listening to Angel Dust or Sailing the Seas of Cheese just isn’t enough. Sometimes I have to roll up the sleeves of my Champion sweatshirt, put down my Crystal Pepsi and do some good old-fashioned reminiscing. (Note to readers: I never owned a Champion sweatshirt or tried Crystal Pepsi. I’m just trying to paint a picture here. Also, Amanda honey, I know you don’t know what either of those things are. Just roll with it, all right?)
So, yeah. Graduation was in May of 1992. Rather than running off to college or the military like my more “responsible, career-minded” classmates, I instead chose to pursue a single goal, at the cost of everything else: getting the hell out of the small town in which I’d grown up. Mind you, I could have done this while simultaneously furthering my lot in life, but I’ve always chosen to do things the hard way. It’s just who I am. And it’s why people communicating with me via instant message are baffled when I respond to a joke with “I am laughing out loud at that” or “seriously, I’m rolling on the floor and peeing in my pants. I can switch on the webcam if you prefer.”
So I headed to a suburb of Philadelphia, to live in a crummy apartment with a couple of friends. Once my graduation cash had run out (it lasted a surprisingly long time, considering I was eating at restaurants three times a day and buying up CDs, comic books and computer games like an eight year-old who’s been told he only has two weeks left on earth), I realized I’d have to get a job if I didn’t want to end up crawling back to my parents in “Hell.” (This was the clever name we’d constructed for that small town. See, because we hated it there.)
I should emphasize again that I was young and extremely stupid. This was long before I realized that I was too good for a mall job, so I ended up taking a job at Spencer’s gifts. For those of you unfamiliar with Spencer’s, allow me to briefly encapsulate. You know how certain stores in the mall sell specialty items like cutlery or accessories for one specific, not especially popular, role playing game? Spencer’s is like those stores. They deal almost exclusively in whoopie cushions, sexy board games and the like — an entire store with hundreds of items, not a single one of which has any practical purpose whatsoever. (When challenged to pick an item in the store and sell as many as possible, I chose a pillow emblazoned with then-popular TV hunk Luke Perry’s image. In the context of that place and time, it just seemed like the right choice.)
One particular product that, for some reason, I’ll never forget, was this “talking insult box” featuring the pre-recorded voice of Jackie Mason. It really needs no description beyond that — it was a small device that featured a button that, when pressed, would say things like “you’re a shmuck, and so’s your friend!” using that inimitably garbled greeting card speaker technology that hasn’t changed a lick since those heady days that summer in 1992.
This mall in particular loved its specialty stores. They even had, for a time, a store that only carried oversized novelty versions of common items — giant novelty pencils, giant novelty beer cans, and so on. I never got to work there, so consequently I cannot claim to have worked in the most useless store in Willow Grove Mall. Spencer’s was definitely below that one on the useless scale, and may also have been inched out by the food stand (I hesitate to call it a “restaurant”) that sold only pretzels. I never did get around to asking out that cute pink-haired chick who gave me her number. I wonder what the statute of limitations on that sort of thing is.
It wasn’t all Luke Perry pillows and me being too much of a pussy to call girls though. I worked in a newsstand at that mall for a time as well. Well, I say “newsstand” because they had newspapers and magazines and the store was called Quality News. But it was mostly there to sell people cigarettes and lottery tickets. Years before I was wasting your tax money on killing machines for the Department of Defense, I was charging you idiot tax and selling you cancer sticks.
But I learned some valuable skills in those days — like how to instantly label a person with a handy stereotype based on the brand of cigarettes they smoked. Your average Mall Dope, age 16-24, with the baggy pants, the flannel and the backward baseball cap, smoked Marlboro Lights. Old ladies smoked Virginia Slims and Viceroys. Black guys (and white guys who wished they’d been born with just a little more melanin) smoked Newports. Wannabe college hipsters smoked filterless Camels. And gay guys smoked Parliaments. This was all based on months of careful observation. You may call it a form of profiling; I just call ‘em like I see ‘em.
As for the lottery folk… well, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the most pathetic and frightening folk I’ve ever met in my entire life are lottery folk. You know those old people who are there when the mall opens, engaging in a bit of life-prolonging aerobic exercise in their smart little tennis shoes? Yeah, the thing most people don’t realize is that they’re not there for the workout — they’re there to squander their fixed income on a one-in-ten-million chance at unimaginable wealth. And they get really angry when you don’t sell them a winner.
My lot in life eventually improved when I got hired by Electronics Boutique. Really, what better fate is there for a 17 year-old geek than the place that lets you take home video games to “test” every night, and then talk to people about them all day at work? Well, that, and they made me wear a tie. And insisted, for some reason, that I wear socks. And not yell at the fortieth person that day to ask me if Street Fighter 3 was out yet. Eventually, I left that place because it was cramping my style. Or maybe they fired me for forging credit card receipts and pocketing money in an extremely ill-advised embezzlement scam. Who can remember?
Speaking of “remember,” you had a question, didn’t you? Excuse me a moment while I scroll up and remind myself.
Ah, yes. There it is. Where does the time go?
Listen, dumbass: time doesn’t go anywhere. It’s an abstract concept, or possibly a dimension, if you can wrap your head around quantum theory and that whole mess. But it’s not like your car keys, in the same way that the Internet is not a big truck. It doesn’t go anywhere. Man, you’re really getting scatterbrained in your old age.
Thanks for writing!
