BNormal, Illinois

June 1, 2020

I just made a police report that I was threatened by some ostensible "protesters" but more likely plain ordinary assholes on my way back home tonight from Front Street in Bloomington. I had gone down there because I had heard a bunch of people shouting and I'm a curious guy by nature. This group of people - a combination of black folks and white folks and all about in their early twenties, I would guess, didn't do anything down at Front and Center. Didn't protest once they got there, just muddled and blabbered among themselves. then after a while they dispersed and some walked directly across the street to where I was standing talking to a neighbor. She left in one direction and I turned to follow the group back down to my place.

Well, one guy turns to me and says, "Are you with us?" I said no, I was going back home to hit the sack. The guy says, "If you're not with us, then you're part of the problem!" I just kept walking. Then the guy turned and said, "You're just wanting to get positive I.D. on us!" I said no, I'm just going home.

The guy got progressively more belligerent and the rest of the group started yelling at me too. I was getting a little ticked by this point, so I said, in so many words, fuck you, motherfucker! Well, the guy didn't like that, and he said “Fuck *you*! If it wasn't for my crew, I would beat the fuck outta you!" I thought, "Ya know, I think he could very *easily* beat the fork outta me," so I turned down the street in a direction away from them.

Among this group, there were one or two who looked like peaceable people who might have gotten hoodwinked into this deal, but on the whole, this was just a bunch of wankers - *dangerous seeming ones,* though and bent on destruction. On the basis of what my more knowledgeable neighbor said, I'd say these people were not from Bloomington and they were indeed the outside agitators I'd heard about.

Whoever they are, they sure as hell are not bent on a mission of reconciliation and instead are making shambles of a peaceful protest.

You Know Where a Man Can Get Some Help?

The other day I was coming out of the library when I ran into a guy who asked me where a man might get some help. He began by telling me a story about a guy (him) who got thrown out of his apartment. He actually whipped out a piece of paper certifying that he had been thrown out of his apartment, but I was in a hurry and I said, "You need some money?" and he said, "Can you help me?" and I said "Probably - lemme see what I got" and I sorted through a moderate wad of cash and pulled out a five.

I handed him the five and he said, "Actually I need $7" and I said, "That's all I can spare," so he took it and left walking pretty fast. I was right behind him because I had to get somewhere, and then I thought, "I don't wanna freak this guy out, like I'm following him, so I switched to the other side of the street, but he had just switched to the other side of the street too and therefore I was right behind him again, and I ended up chasing him up the hill, with him looking nervously behind him. It was getting pretty intense, then he broke off to the left and it was a huge sigh of relief for both of us.

The next day I was walking down the street and I ran into the same guy and I said hi and he said, "You know where a man might get some help?" and I said, "Nope," not to be a wiseguy but rather I just didn't have any dough to spare.

Boomers and Buttheads

January 19, 2020

This weekend has been a low-key one, as it's been pretty freaking cold and windy out, thus a certain laidbackness has been in play whether I like it or not. In fact, whether I like it or not has been the overall theme.

On Saturday I made a trek to Walgreen's to pick up a prescription that I had previously gotten closer to home but which got transferred to the new place because the old place had been shut down. Previously there had been no charge for the Rx, but at the new place there was a charge of 60 cents. But what for?

A youngster was behind the register - let's call him a Millennium just for fun - and I asked what the 60 cents was for. He peered at the receipt and looked something up and said, "Looks like it's some kind of deductible." I said, "Well, that's kind of odd because there was no charge at all at the last place." He says, "Well, just look at it like this: You saved $47.50 because your insurance covered that." The implication was I *could* have been charged $47.50, so what the heck was I griping about, Fool?" (The kid didn't seem to be overtly nasty about it, so I threw in the supposed "fool" on my own. Maybe it was a Trigger Point for me, as they say.)

Well, I thought about that, and I figured there some generational thing going on. To us old Boomers it's somewhat of a big deal - or at least a biggish deal - to all-of-a sudden have to pay SIXTY CENTS more for something that used to be free. Didn't this kid know that? Well, no, he did not. And you know why? Because this Butthead did not have the Boomer's perspective. And why not? Because he had the Millennial perspective, which is he was thinking, "How long will I have to keep this stupid, stultifying job where I have to listen to these old boomers jabber about 60 cents?" When I am I gonna get those damn student loans paid off??" In contrast a fellow Boomer would commiserate and say, "Sixty cents? Jesus Christ, those Big Pharma bastards are *always" trying to get more out of us! Sons a bitches oughta be *shot*!" Now, with a little generational education, those Millennials and other younger generations could interact with the older generations and learn to say. "Son of bitch Big Pharma! etc." I would gladly hand over sixty cents - maybe even a DOLLAR - to make it a feel-good experience. Until that time, the Millennial ceases to be a human being and instead becomes a Butthead.

You see how that works? To put the icing on my thoughts and to develop the overarching theme, I had another encounter right after the one at Walgreen's: I went to get a 40 at a gas station, and I went to the counter with the bottle. I was hoping they wouldn't force me to take my purchase in a separate non-disposable bag, as I already had a non-disposable bag to dispose of from Walgreen's, and this place always made me take another bag of theirs, as a non-varying Policy - the same kind of Policy we Boomers have faced all our freaking lives. But the cashier was an older guy, nearly my age, so I asked, "Can I just stick that in my (environmentally responsible) bag?" Well, son of a gun, this wonderful guy, a fellow Boomer for sure, replies, "Sure, man, a bag's a bag." He must not have imbibed the policy yet, and hopefully he never will.

Down south, at one time, it was the Hatfields and the McCoys. Back in my hometown, it was the Murphys and the Hjerpes (JER-PEAS). Nowadays, everywhere, it's the Boomers and the Buttheads.

To come: People who tell you you'll take it and like it versus those who say, "Aw man, lemme help you with that."

"So if you see a neighbor carrying something, help him with his load, and don't go mistaking Paradise, for that home across the road."

https://youtu.be/f5ZFNkZwx_0?list=PLBvqbYh1QjTStMmURpUqp5XRaOWuh05bV

Nice and snooty

At Wally World yesterday and today, I had run-ins with a couple of people who I call “snooty.” The one yesterday was a Walmart employee I asked to help me find some specific granola bars because there were tons of varieties and I needed a certain special bar. But instead of leading me to the granola bars, or explaining anything, she just kind of sneered at me with a screwed-up expression, like she had just bitten into a lemon, and she grunted and pointed down the aisle and I had to figure it out myself. It was hard, too – sheesh!

Then I needed to find something else, and I asked the same woman where the air fresheners were, and again she said, “Over there!” and jerked her head in the general direction of another aisle. I wondered if it was me and my essentially evil nature had been discovered and the whole fraudulent enterprise of my life had been revealed, and the jig was up, so I might as well say Sayonara, suckers, and make the final sign-off. But I thought I would try to find what I needed before doing any of that.

Then I absolutely flummoxed by the astonishing variety of air fresheners and was to the point of thinking I should just throw out the garbage rather than getting some air freshener, so I asked another Walmart employee for help, and that woman spent a lot of time with me and I got what I wanted. She was really nice about it too, as if her life's validation didn't ride on her Facebook feed.

Then my sister and I were walking out to her car, and I related my story, and I said perhaps I should go back and politely tell the first employee that she was being rather snooty. She replied, “Yeah, you should go back and politely tell her she’s a BITCH!”

As per the Internet

I went to Wally World today to get this and that, and I was in the paper goods aisle when I heard a woman announce that she was spending more money on the comfort of her butt than on anything else. I guessed that this gal was maybe 70 years old.

I said, "Is that right?" and she said, "Yes! Do you know what people used to use to wipe their butts?" I suggested corn cobs. "No," she said, "Pages from the Sears catalog!" I said, "Did you wipe your butt with those catalog pages?" "No!" she exclaimed. "Well," says I, "how do you know that people wiped their butts with catalog pages?" She answered, "I saw it on the Internet!" as though that put an end to the discussion. (In fact, my dad often said that: "Case closed!")

Apparently direct experience has been overruled by the Internet. At this rate, *anybody* could put *any* kind of B.S. on the Internet - moon made of green cheese, sun rotates around the earth, Elvis is alive and in a nursing home - wait! I saw him in a movie about that (Bubba Ho-tep), so he must still be in that nursing home.

Oh well, I wrassled with some other folks over the remaining Christmas tree stars and got out of there. JK! (that's Internet talk, Boomer).

Reference

“Don’t look at me, Boomer!”

Yesterday when I couldn’t find the store I was looking for, I went into a store called 5 Below, which was like a dollar store but more like a 5-dollar store. (That must be it: everything is 5 dollars or less.) There were a lot of Christmas things, and I got a 5-dollar tree because the tree I have is kinda big for my apartment and I can’t figure out how to connect the different strands of bulbs together.

While I was walking around with my 5-dollar tree I saw a big table of various types of journals – mindfulness journals, activities journals, probably a couple-few devotional journals, etc., and I saw a couple of simply blank, lined journals with nice hard covers, so I got one of those for my sister Beth. While I was looking, this gal was looking at them too, and she asked a friend how much they were.

I saw immediately that the gal – maybe in her 40s – had blond hair and a face that was similar to that of Angie the Barber, so I was drawn to her immediately and started to develop a sympathetic hard-on. That’s probably why I said, “Looks like they’re all five bucks.” She looked at me for a second, then looked away. I was really attracted to her because of the resemblance factor and then I saw she had a nice set of jugs that were set pretty high on her chest – maybe higher than Angie’s and poking right out at a horizontal angle. 

I made my way around the store and ran into the gal another time or two, but I certainly wasn’t stalking her. I ran into other women, such as moms who were with their kids, and I checked out their faces and racks too, but I kept running into and looking at the first woman. I think I might have met her eyes once or twice, but she wasn’t interested in me and she might even have looked a bit annoyed. So I got the idea for a vignette called “Don’t look at me, Boomer!” 

BOOKS AND ANTIQUES

I’ve been having lots of adventures, and one recent one was pretty funny. I was walking home from the library and I could see the back-alley sides of a line of buildings I knew from my last semester at ISU in 1980. A sign on one building said BOOKS AND ANTIQUES, and that place was right next door to the apartment building I lived in at the time. Back then the building was a rickety old mess. I had a spacious high-ceilinged apartment with a bay window and it was right across the street from a big noisy bar called Central Station that had some really good music. In later years, there was a good book store next door where I sold a lot of books I brought back from Nebraska in 1995, and I figured that’s what the BOOKS AND ANTIQUES pertained to.

I could see the back door to the book store, so I figured I would just walk in, as it looked to be open. I did that, and there was a coffee setup for the staff with a hallway off to the right and an office to the right also, so I just walked down the hallway to where I figured the books were. But in every doorway I passed, there was a person working away at a desk, so I figured I had walked into an office building and not a bookstore. I figured then that I would just continue through and walk out the front door. I saw what I figured to be the front door and I turned the handle and there was a nice-looking woman working at a desk inside.

I immediately apologized and said I was looking for the bookstore. She laughed and said, “This is the bookstore but the bookstore went out years ago and the place is all remodeled.” It was really a nice office suite, with the original brick walls exposed and nice fancy wooden floors – kind of subdued and opulent. I told her I used to live next door and she said the old apartments had been converted into expensive condos. I told her how crappy the place used to be and what a jag the landlord was, and I also mentioned the big bar across the street, which has been converted to a somewhat fancy restaurant called Epiphany Farms (“Farm to Table”). I knew a little about Epiphany Farms because I had talked to one of the farmers at the farmers market, but she knew a bit more about them and told me they had a place in LeRoy too. Besides that they have a speakeasy type place – The Cake and Pickle - right around the corner from me across from the natural foods store. I think it’s also a restaurant with expensive food, and this gal said, “It’s a real nice place, but you ought to just go in there and have a drink at the bar.” She was very friendly and easy-going, and she repeated that business about going to the bar for a drink, so I said I would and maybe I would see her there. She said sure and said her name was Ronda – Ronda Glenn – and that was her name on the window. I couldn’t see the window she was alluding to, but I told her my name was Bond – James Bond and asked her how I could get out of the place. She said the receptionist would show me out, so we signed off.

All the time I was talking to her there were people hovering around, and when I turned there were *three* young women waiting to show me out. They seemed a little nervous, kind of like “There’s the door; now get out!” but very sophisticated about it and thanking me for visiting, though I suspected they were kind of freaked out that I had just walked in from the back door unannounced. I asked if the place was a real estate office and they said, “Law firm.” I stepped outside and saw the name on the window Ronda Glenn - Attorneys at Law. It turns out this gal has a big divorce practice.