Is it a full moon or something?

Weirdos.  Freaks.  Creeps.  Whatever.

In the past week, we’ve had the most unusual group of customers I’ve ever seen.  It must be in part because of the weather, bringing things out from under rocks nearby, or something.

Two girls are tops on this list of customers.  They were probably a couple.  One reminded me of a drug-addicted vegetable.  Really just arm candy for the other girl.  She never blinked in the nearly ten minutes she spent asking me questions about lemonade.  She asked her questions slurring syllables around at least two tongue piercings.  She didn’t touch anything she wanted to look at, or anything at all really.  She wanted to look at a CD… her friend had to hand it to her.  She needed money out of her pocket to pay for the frozen blended coffee she ordered; the friend had to reach into this girl’s pocket to get it for her.  Really spooky.  I can make eye contact with pretty much anyone for as long as I choose, but this girl creeped me out.  She wanted to know if our choco chip cookies were soft.  My response: “well, they aren’t crispy”.  Her response “wha’s cripsy?”  She then asked to touch the cookie, and determined it was too hard.  And, when it came time to exchange money for goods, the cash was held out in mid air, as if this girl was paying someone standing four feet in front, and slightly to the right, of me.  If I didn’t know better, I’d think this girl was a comic’s puppet, being controlled almost convincingly by someone else entirely.

Then there were the huffers.  Two kids, maybe 15 and 12, maybe brother and sister, came in for an iced chai.  They smelled like gasoline or turpentine or some other thing distilled from heavy crude, and they were covered in greasy grime.  I’ve seen the older one before.  Usually talking on a cell phone too loud to really interact with me.  He always gets a caramel frozen blender coffee, but not this time.  The two of them were trying to out-dumb each other I think.  The younger one had trouble counting to four (with her dollars).  The older one was having fun calling the younger one ‘dummy’, but also didn’t seem able to count effectively the change needed for the bevvy.   Neither of these two blinked, either, over the course of our discourse.

It’s always the young people that catch my attention most.  What precious few moments they have had being taught life skills by responsible people seem to have been focused on things other than how to properly interact with other humans.  And what will become of these kids in the years ahead?

The older folks that have come in… now they are a different story entirely.

Okay, Okay, so “Daily” might have been too optimistic

Loyal chewers of the Gristle,

So I’ve hit a dry spell. I can’t help it when it’s this hot outside. The AC struggles to keep the house under 80 around the time that I usually have a moment to write.

I was confronted by death in a surprising way the other day. In my commute to one of my jobs I came across a scene where a pedestrian had been hit by a car and killed. It must have happened recently. The EMTs were there just standing over the guy, and the police hadn’t yet arrived to secure the area and cover him up. The guy really looked like the dead people you see on TV dramas, lying in the street in some unnatural position.

I haven’t felt so fragile in a long time. Family, friends and responsibilities filled my head. Regrets, worries, love and laughter. I got lost in my thoughts immediately. The air horn of a huge Kenworth truck brought me back quickly, and I went about my day, changing little in the end.

Give your loved ones an extra hug or kiss or smile today. Life is all too quickly taken away.