High Necks and Bad Stores

I’m very concerned about High-Neck and Vanelli.  Well, concerned might not be the accurate word; nosy is more like it. 

They live in the neighborhood, and our kids briefly played with theirs.  The mother, High-Neck, is part-giraffe, I think,  and for one entire summer had complicated medical scaffolding surrounding her head.  She’s also known by the names Tower-Neck and Factory Chimney.

And the father looks something like this.

One of their kids (all of them?) has a severe allergy, and will supposedly blow up like Mrs. Puff if someone so much as drives past their house and yells, “Peanut brittle!”  High-Neck raises nine varieties of hell if the school serves snacks manufactured in the same town a peanut is rumored to reside, and always seems ready to throw herself on a sandwich while screaming “NOOOOOOO!”

Anyway, their yard used to be a thing of beauty.  In fact, it was featured in the newspaper a couple of years ago, after winning some sort of excellence-in-landscaping award.  But you should see it now…

I don’t know what’s going on down there, but the High-Neck/Vanelli home is in a disturbing state of disrepair.  The grass is uncut and unkempt, their screen door is hanging open and curved like a potato chip, one of their front windows is broken, and the wooden archway that used to cross their sidewalk is now lying on its side, in pieces.

The hell, man?  Toney says she hasn’t seen the kids or ol’ Periscope Throat all summer, and we’re wondering if there’s some kind of marital difficulty going on.

But we don’t know for sure… and it’s driving us (me) crazy.  Toney really needs to tap into her vast network of Aunt Bees and Clara Edwardses, to get the official gossip line on this deal.  I mean, seriously.

We need closure on the chip-door.

And speaking of things marital, Toney and I will be celebrating our fifteenth wedding anniversary tomorrow.  Fifteen years!  It’s hard to believe it’s been so long.

We were married in Atlanta by a judge who hosted (hosts?) a local radio show, had a party that night at Swissotel (a kick-ass party, I might add), then spent a week in San Francisco.

And now it’s fifteen years later and we have a couple of great kids, a neurotic border collie, and a home in the suburbs of, um, Scranton.  I have a feeling the Jeff & Toney of 1993 wouldn’t have too big of a problem with any of it…

I’m just glad the Jeff of 2008 remembered the date.  ‘Cause I don’t have a very good track record in that department; not very good, at all.

Over the weekend I added a few more complete catalogs to the Big iPod:  My Morning Jacket, Drive-By Truckers, You Am I, Kings of Leon, The Shins, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, Let’s Active, Luna, and Dramarama.

Yeah, I know a few of those bands only have two or three albums.  What of it?  I still added their entire catalogs.

I also bought the Fleet Foxes CD at Best Buy on Sunday.  It was on sale for $7.99, so I took ’em up on it.  And yeah… I’ve only listened to it a couple of times, but do you think I could get my money back?  Holy shitknuckles.  It sounds like Crosby, Stills, and Nash – if they’d been born during the Rennaissance period.

But maybe it’ll grow on me?  We’ll see.

Circuit Shitty advertised “All CDs $9.99!” on Sunday and Monday, and I told the Secrets we should go over there and buy a couple Beatles albums we don’t already have.  Since, you know, they’re getting all Beatles-fanatic on me.

So we went, and it was a complete mess.  The rock section of their CD department is one half-aisle, and everything was trashed.  Don’t they ever straighten that shit?  Well, I think I know the answer to that question, and the answer is NO.

The only Beatles albums we could find were novelty items like Love, and Let It Be…Naked.  No thanks.  Call me a radical, but I was thinking more along the lines of Abbey Road. 

Disgusted, I began the process of storming out in a huff, when the older Secret found a copy of Magical Mystery Tour, mixed into the Led Zeppelin section (why hadn’t I thought to look there?!), so we bought it.

But I still can’t stand that store.  On account of the suckin’.

And speaking of stores that suck so hard it hurts, why has Wal-Mart decided to make their new logo a cartoon rendering of a butthole?  I don’t understand the logic of such a move.

Sure, I’ve sometimes remarked, while navigating the aisles of a Wal-Mart, that we’d somehow wandered into America’s unwiped ass.  But to create an advertising campaign around it?  It seems bizarre.

Plus, where’s the hyphen?  That kind of thing bothers me, as well.

And just so we’re clear, I don’t have a problem with Wal-Mart on some high-horse anti-capitalistic basis; I have no issue with their success.  No, I just can’t handle the clientele. 

Big fat mamas walking around in stretched-out Flashdance shirts… Bobby Hill children with tails at the base of their buzzcuts… skeletal men in wife-beaters and filthy baseball caps…  It’s too much for me.

Where we live there’s a Target located next-door to the Wal-Mart, and I go to Target every time.  I don’t care if I have to pay an extra dollar per item, it’s worth it to me.  Toney shops at Wal-Mart, but not when I’m with her.  She knows I’ll only complain and bitch at length, and plans accordingly.

I used to work with a woman who bought everything from Wal-Mart: groceries, clothes, household items, oil changes, tires, eyeglasses, contact lenses, haircuts…  You name it, she purchased it from the Walton family.

She was telling me all this, seemingly proud of her accomplishment, and I half-heartedly told her I prefer Target.  And man, she acted like I’d just called one her kids ugly.  The woman flew off the handle, and started getting all passionate with it…  Fukkin crazy.

Another store I can’t stand, ironically enough, is Party City.  For some reason that place makes me sad, and I do whatever I can to avoid it.  The Secrets like going there around Halloween, because they have the insane decorations and whatnot, but it always leaves me feeling melancholy.

What chain stores do you hate, on a primal level like that?  Tell us about it, won’t you?

And I’m going to leave you now with a bunch of fresh Smoking Fish pics, here and here.  Thanks, as always!  And keep ’em coming.  Our logo, man, he gets around…

Plus, I have special treat for you folks today:  the return of lakrfool!  It’s been almost a year, but he’s back and funny as ever.  Check it out.  Great stuff.

And I’ll see ya tomorrow.