Nevada is the New California
This is the story so far. Heaven knows what the future holds.
But here it goes.
You get a lot of strange folk in when you're camped out, working in a feed store out on the highway. Not camped out literally. Camped out, as in settled into a certain job, like.
Depending on who you are will determine how accurate that previous statement is. Strangeness is all relative, after all.
I worked in a feed store that had stopped stocking just pure 'feed' ages ago. Now we had people feed, as well, as it were. We were a regular store of all feeds: chicken, cow, pig, goat, plant, and, as I've said, people feed.
When I was a little kid I had a tshirt that was from Del Monte, and it had a giant, photorealistic picture of a green bean and said underneath "Human Bean." If I knew where the hell I could have gotten some of those tshirts I would have stocked them, too. I don't know why, but anytime I thought of having 'people feed' I always thought of that tshirt. Which was a good marketing by Del Monte, I have to say.
I met a man from California once. He was very angular.
It was the most apt way of putting it, how he was. he had a face like a spade, side-on, tilting away, turning over earth and rocks.
I didn't even notice him come in through the door, the ting-a-ling of the door smacking off the bell muted when he gently eased the door back into its frame. I just caught him, over by the fruit and nut bars, idly fingering a few of the shiny packages.
"Hey there, stranger," I said, as calmly as I could. I reached under the counter, pretending I had a gun under there. I didn't believe strongly in guns, but I did know they could convey a very powerful message along the lines of "Get the hell out of my store if you're going to cause the sort of trouble that might hurt me." And pretend guns, so long as the person who was the intended recipient of the message didn't know, were just as good as the real ones most of the time. "Didn't hear you come in."
He continued to paw the healthy bars. In silence.
"Sir? You all right? Want a nature bar? I like the blueberry best, though it doesn't really taste like blueberry, more like blueberry with a chalk coating, but it's not too bad for somethin' healthy for you."
The man turned and looked at me, and he still looked pretty damned angular to me. His arms were akimbo from his body at angles that made it look like he was either in the middle of the chicken dance or he'd burned his armpits. Either way, it didn't look comfortable. It would turn out, later, I suppose, that it was from bicycling too much. Not so aerodynamically after all.
He took a step towards me. He kind of squelched. I couldn't believe I hadn't heard that earlier. I said as much. "Hey, I can't believe I didn't hear you earlier. You squelchin'?" As soon as I said it out loud I felt it may have sounded a bit... well, idiotic, was all I could think. But it was out there, on the airwaves. "Need a towel? I have some down the aisle over there--" I pointed down the third aisle, which started out down this end with spatulas and larger than life forks, "-- not too bad a price for a nice towel." The guy was creeping me out. He was like the ancient mariner, only, well, less talkative. And sans massive bird hanging off his neck.
And almost as soon as I thought that, of course, he started speaking, his jaws creaking with the unfamiliar action. Or perhaps that was the tiles underneath his squelchin' boots.
To be continued next week...
disclaimer:
Hopefully you didn't experience too much hardship trying to read Sane last week, especially if you use it as your weekly wind-down, a nice intro to the weekend.
So far as anyone in the office can tell there were no problems, but Cupertino lost power throughout the whole town last Friday. And as the city is very, very close to where Sane is hosted and the head offices are now located, there may have been connectivity issues for a large portion of you, as the internet, apparently, requires electricity, amongst other things.
If there were no connectivity issues, or even if there were, don't panic. No, really, it's okay. We're currently looking into disaster recovery plans, so you don't get your feed of Sane Magazine as soon as you want it you can be almost 100% guaranteed to get it a couple seconds later. When our disaster recovery solutions kick into action. When we've implemented them. Which will be shortly (or longer) after we come up with an idea about how we'd like to do it. Or we may not.
What you can do, though, is talk amongst yourselves at the handy dandy forums we've put up, since they're not hosted in Cupertino, which is probably a good deal more sensible of us.
Here's a topic:
Why do birds sing, whenever she walks near? Why do squirrels scamper, whenever she mumble mumble?
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