I-Mockery Chat (Lube up those lips)

[Kitsa]

We needed some towels. Target was one of the places we stopped to price them out.

Fucking Target. Never again on a fucking Saturday. I don't know where the hell all of these wannabe-hipsters came from but I am not impressed by the TJ Maxx designer jeans and ridiculous pleather heel-boots. And the women all have the same haircut.

They park their cart and spread out all over the place searching for deals. We couldn't get anywhere near the towels, because some Baby Phat-wearing woman in her late fifties was literally climbing a clearance endcap to get at some discounted sheets.

People strolled down the aisles with Starbucks lattes in one hand, parking the carts in the middle of the damn aisles to chat, completely oblivious to those around them, while little Connor and Morgan (I'm sorry, but those were the names I kept hearing), ran wild.

Heard at least 5 times (at least) by someone on a cellphone...."Hello? Yeah, I'm at Target."

We went to return our cart only to be thwarted by a throng of people all trying to get to the dollar bins at the front of the store. You'd think willy wonka's golden ticket was in that shit.

We went out to the car, had a fight about it, and ended up buying our towels cheaper at the abandoned mall two towns over.

[kahljorn]

im bored ;/

[10,000 Volt Ghost]

Kitsa, you should have rammed the throng fullspeed with a shopping cart
lingpinsnoise

[10,000 Volt Ghost]

That didn't work out too well

should have read

: bowlingpinsnoise

[Fathom Zero]

:bowlingpinsnoise

[10,000 Volt Ghost]

Yeah, doing that doesn't work for me. I even tried quoting yours and it comes up with the : bow

[Fathom Zero]

magic, fuckers

[10,000 Volt Ghost]

Carnie games!

[Shyandquietguy]

I think I want to get a get a get a get a chat program!

[Aaarg]

Abandoned malls are awesome. There's one in Fairmont, WV. The halls were converted from store-fronts to shitty murals depicting various stupid shit. I'll assume they were done by high school art students. There are a few stores left in the mall--an awesome pet store, a goodwill, a used video game store that still sells NES games, and I think a GNC.

[Kitsa]

Yeah, that's pretty much what this is. We call it the Nonmall.

Same shitty murals covering up storefronts. They have a JC Penney's, a Sears, and an Elder-Beerman (generic "upscale but not really" department store), a GNC and a Claire's, and then random halfassed little stores owned by locals. Even the cellphone kiosk fled. I don't know how they stay in business, because I never see anyone there, not even before all these economic troubles.

There's a weird mall in Ithaca where all of the stores are back-to-back in a square, like a wagon-train, and you walk around the periphery in a weird little enclosed sidewalk. It's also a nonmall, or at least it was when I was last there 6 yrs ago.

[Aaarg]

Hahaha, Elder-Beerman. There was one of those in the Morgantown mall. Had never even heard of the store until I got to Morgantown. I had only heard of BELk like a year earlier when I was at a mall in Winchester, VA. We don't have these country things in no.va.

There was also a Belk at the MOrgantown mall and I offended my friend from Ohio when we were there and I said of Belk "it's like a Bloomingdale's for white trash" and she said "hey I like Belk!"

She also got upset when I walked into some store and said "it smells like poor people in here" I was having a bad day and now I am poor. I guess it's karma. I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about I have money that I have othing to spend on right now. Goddammit.

I decided that sleeping was a useless idea so instead I'm staying up and drinking but the bad news is I have to be at work in two hours! The good plan would be to stop drinking but here I am continuing however now I am using CRAN-RASPBERRY JUICE as a chaser as if that will prevent me from feeling the effects of Eagle Rare kentucky straight bourbon whiskey.

My chaser earlier was a moonpie, and then nothing.

I hate my life.

[Kitsa]

moonpie and whiskey, eh? I'd make a West Virginia joke but I lived there for 7 yrs

I bet you've also seen a Goody's. I couldn't freaking believe that store the first time I saw one in a WV mall. It was like this mini department store, only everything got back to Jesus. It was like if you slapped a Christian bookstore and a dept store together, Goody's was what you got.

My boyfriend, in a moment of comic genius, named it "Jesus Christ Superstore" and that's what I've been calling it ever since.

We used to have one here, next town over, but it closed. I guess Jesus (or his self-appointed reps on earth) must be feeling the crunch too.

[Aaarg]

goody's goody's goody's I'm drawing a blank. All I'm coming up with is those hair brushes and ties and stuff. I think there's a Goody's brand of that.

West VA isn't bad. I'd rather be there than here right now. Well not right now but once the weather turns nice. I'd rather be anywhere than here, so whatever.

Jesus Christ Superstore, that's pretty sweet. I remember this kid from high school worked at the BIBLE FACTORY OUTLET at the local mall here and he had long hair and he didn't strike me as the type to work at a place like that. i asked him about it once and he told me he was an atheist. what the fuck?

But I guess not being familiar with the shitty department stores makes sense when you only been to the high-end shit. I remember when my friend was still pretty new to the area and he wanted some jeans and I had to go to Tyson's Corner for something (like a fancy-fuckin'-dancy mall up here) and it was the first time in his life he had seen a pair of jeans with a $200+ price tag.

i made a comment about how we should have gone to the even higher-class mall nearby and i think he nearly shit his pants

I hate this shit, fucking stupid shit.

Sorry, I ramble.

[Kitsa]

Goody's popped up in the 90s and just went out of business last year. Big orange sign. Claustrophobic and weird inside. All of the t-shirts had something about Jesus on them.

Working in a low-profile store isn't all bad. When I was going for my music degree I worked at a piano store in a strip mall. My shift was from 4 to close on weekdays and usually all day Saturday, or Sundays during special sales. The only time we ever had people was when kids were in the store for lessons. The rest of the time you'd be lucky to get three customers a day.

Theoretically we were supposed to be selling pianos, and I did, but the owner/boss always found a way to dick us out of commission. He'd either come up with a rule that exempted him from paying us ("oh, no commission on used pianos", "no commission on anything under $2000", "no commission on anything above $2000", and so on), or he'd try to take over the sale himself, so it didn't come up often.

It was so not-busy that my coworker, who had the day shift, frequently closed the shop, put both phone lines on hold and left for hours at a time. Conflict arose between us when she began taking "loans" from the register to finance shopping expeditions and using the store account to rent videos, which she spent the day watching. (The account was supposed to be used to rent kids' movies, to entertain kids waiting for lessons and keep them from messing with the pianos). When it became apparent that she was going to try and blame register-deficits on me, and would probably end up getting away with it, I quit. She and I weren't speaking toward the end there.

Not long after I quit, that location went out of business. But it was an awesome job while it lasted. I made minimum wage, but basically got paid to sit on my ass and do homework (nothing beats having 3 steinways available when you've got piano homework to practice).

[Aaarg]

Haha, sweet. I worked at a cave and I don't know if I can top that. I worked at a family-owned pet store and that sucked cock-ass-and-balls.

On Thursday I will have worked for Safeway, Inc. for four years.

[Kitsa]

One of the laziest jobs I ever saw was at a cave here in ohio.

One of their big attractions was "the old pump" or something like that, some stalagmite that looked vaguely like an old water pump. They had big pictures of it everywhere in the gift shop. Maybe it was unreasonable, but I went down there thinking it was this gigantic thing.

So we go through the cave tour and the guide pauses to grandly point out "the old pump". We look to our right and here's this sixtysomething guy with a flashlight, shining it on the spectacular formation as we passed. "here it is. Here it is. Old pump. Here it is. See it? here it is. Old pump. See it?"

That's literally all he did, sit beside it and shine a flashlight on it for us as we passed.

The big formation was all of about 2 inches high. I was surprised he never sat on it by mistake.

[Aaarg]

Hahahaha awesome. Luckily at the cave I worked at, we didn't have any cool formations anywhere in the developed section of the cave, so we actually had to learn some real information to tell people on the tours. History and how caves are formed and stuff like that.

Then we'd go to the ridiculously popular show caves in Virginia and listen to some girl talk about "now we are in front of the Shaggy Dog. It is called this because it resembled a large shaggy dog." FUCK YOU. We asked how large the cave is and she said "it takes about one hour and fifteen minutes." She later found out we were tour guides at another cave, and being that we were the only English speakers in that tour group I guess she tried to start a conversation and asked us "what grade" we were in.

[Kitsa]

When I was a little kid, my parents took me to Old Man's Cave. This was early 80s. It is, or was (it's become hideously developed and consumerized since) a beautiful place with rocky overhangs and gorgeous waterfalls.

Except when we went they were doing a Playboy shoot there.

I gaped for a moment at the naked chicks under the waterfall with the enormous breastseses before my parents hustled me back up the stairs and out of there.

Last time I went there were assholes everywhere with their asshole kids, the waterfalls were dried up and there were no naked playmates.

[Aaarg]

Where is that one at?

Wait is that the one in the Hocking Hills? If so I didn't think that was actually a cave.

They filmed a horror film at the cave I worked at, but they did it in the winter when the cave is shut down.

[Kitsa]

Yeah, I wouldn't call it a cave in the strictest sense, it's more of a series of rocky overhangs.

There's also Rock House, which was supposedly a bootlegger hideout but now primarily houses dead pigeons.

[Aaarg]

Ah, the Hocking Hills were somewhere I was supposed to go to for the duration of Ashley and I's relationship. We just never got around to it. She went to school at Hocking College and loved the park or whatever. There's a waterfall somewhere in there that she fell off of. Had some nice scars from it.

One of those things we talked about often, but unfortunately never came to pass.

[Kitsa]

It's pretty, but when you do go, go on the off season when it's not clogged with tourists.

Also, I don't believe it's a dry county, but we had to drive quite a way to acquire alcohol, so you might consider bringing your own.

[Aaarg]

Eh I don't think I'll be going anytime soon. Like I said, it was going to be a me+Ashley thing, she was going to show me her favorite trails and favorite spots and she was going to show me where she used to live in Nelsonville and all that. She's history, so that idea is history as well.

Oh well. My opinion of Ohio continues to be one based on northern Ohio.

[Kitsa]

Nelsonville is a pit. Until recently you couldn't even get radio reception there. It was situated at just the wrong spot between some hills. Nelsonville is no basis for which to judge Ohio, Ohio in general sucks in altogether different ways.