transmothra - signs of the collapse

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. Please leave any comments there.

Tonight, after i’d picked up Holly from her car pool in Bellbrook, we went to the Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant there on Wilmington Pike to grab a bite to eat.

Wow, was it icy out! Unfortunately, the worst ice we’d have to deal with was in their parking lot.

Have you ever seen one of those science videos explaining black holes, or gravity, by showing you a marble spinning around a drain? That’s exactly what it was like.

Their parking lot is so uneven. Iced over, it is absolute hell on earth. Naturally, there was not one speck of rock salt to be witnessed anywhere. Wet glass, indeed.

When we first pulled in, we started sliding immediately. We slid to a stop after a good 30 feet, narrowly missing other parked cars and the concrete-lined edge of the lot, which could have done a real number on my wheels and undercarriage. Mind you, i had been doing less than10mph!

Spinning my wheels was the only way to get any traction at all. But no sooner than i would start moving, but the car would start descending down the hill, sideways. We very scarcely managed to avoid hitting curbs and suchlike, but i don’t know how.

This lasted for around twenty minutes.

Did the manager come out to offer to help? Nope. Did i feel like risking life and limb to walk uphill in that unholy, slick, uphill mess of solid, wet ice to ask for help, or tell them off for not salting their Mt. Fuji-like parking lot? Well, yes, but i knew that i’d absolutely certainly slip and hit my head and kill myself at the exact moment the next motorist suffered a similar fate and ran over my still-warm corpse.

Helpfully, the drivethrough window offered employees a hilarious view, which they took in turns, laughing and pointing.

So if you ever see me at a Big Boy restaurant, especially a Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant, please shoot me in the face for it, because i declare unequivocally, right here, that my money will never again come into contact with their filthy, greasy (and very likely cockroach-infested) registers.

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

Well, it finally happened. We have been robbed. Our nice Samsung flat-panel LCD television set is now sitting in the parlour of one who never deserved it. Along with the remote. I wanna murder a mothafucka. 

Somewhere out there is a scruffy hillbilly prick basking in the warm blue glow of my bad-ass Samsung. I can’t drive around to find them, because without the car here, they’ll just waltz right back in. I know it’s somewhere in this very neighborhood, but i daren’t take my eyes off of those items which they curiously left behind, for they will surely be back for them.

They took nothing else - which actually kind of sucks, because we just know their swift but short-sighted Possession Relocation Services are going to be rendered again. Everything was in plain sight! Guitars, keyboards and recording equipment, media devices, laptops, desktops, a camera, mp3 player, tons of DVDs and CDs and games - all right there. No more. I am putting them all away, since i apparently don’t deserve to have them any more.

Incidentally, this is the second time my life-space has been robbed. Several years ago I had all my CDs and my TV set taken from me. You work your life away - blood, sweat & tears and all that - and then some rotten, moronic asshat thinks they deserve it and you don’t so they just come in and take it. I partly blame this stupid gimme-gimme society we have so proudly built for ourselves.

We need: 

• a fucking big man-eating dog with built-in violent aggression towards intruders, 
• a shotgun (god damn i hate that i need a gun), 
• someplace to stash our remaining valuables, 
• moving-away cash - fast!, and 
• a different, less crappy goddamned city. FUCK YOU, Dayton, Ohio.

I have a real bad feeling about my short-term future.