Pictures of rabbits humping.
This page just got hit off of Google for the phrase “pictures of rabbits humping”.
There are some wrong, wrong folks out there.
I apologize to any of you who might have a lepus fetish. I don’t want any angry People for Bunny Luvin’ members filling my in box with hate mail.
Actually, yes I do. Down with rabbits humping!!!
Anyway….
Atlanta.
Again.
We woke up Saturday morning and were starving. The wedding wasn’t until very late, so Esteban and I jumped into the Monte to score some vittles. We drove past many southern sights, including two men dressed as clowns, trying to attract people to visit model apartments. Now, I may be thinking from a Northern paradigm here, but if I’m in the market for a new apartment, would two men dressed as clowns be a selling point? I mean… what exactly is it saying? Look at how much fun we have in this apartment building full of clowns! And think of all the parking you’ll have, since all of their cars are very very small. Across the street, a man dressed as Elvis trying to entice people to come rent apartments there. If driven to make a decision, I’d probably go with the Kahng.
Esteban and I drove straight until we were faint with hunger and finally agreed upon what turned out to be a Southern Applebees-type place called Folks. I needed to be kitschy, so I ordered fried chicken, fried green tomatoes, mashed potatoes with white gravy and a biscuit. Esteban got chicken fried chicken (which is what he gets almost everywhere) and a boring baked potato.
I’ve decided that fried green tomatos are much better to read about in works of fiction. They don’t translate well to the actual dinner plate.
Then we hopped back into the Monte. Despite the fact that I had taken the Monte for a hand job (whoa…. get your mind out of the gutter there… I’m talking hand car washes, people… sheesh) before we left for Atlanta, it looked schmengy from the 1000 mile drive (mostly from the snow we hit north of Chicago). We traversed through what was possibly the oldest working automated car wash in the lower United States, which had the water pressure similiar to several midgets urinating on the car. Only up high and with water, not pee-pee.
Then we went back to the hotel. Esteban suddenly reveals that he had not tried on his shirt which we purchased last week. The one that he had picked out with the sales lady while I was shopping in the Cool Curvy Chick store. The one that I took one look at and said “Are you SURE that’s your size? I don’t think that’s your size.” to which he replied “I dunno… she measured me.”
That one.
Uhuh. You know what’s coming.
It didn’t fit. So I’m like, “No problem.” I knew that there was a Casual Male in town, which is where we had purchased the shirt. I hopped onto our $10 a day hotel cable modem access and found that there was not only a Casual Male in Atlanta… supposedly there was one up the very street our hotel was on! Holy crap! This would be no problem. I grabbed the shirt and my purse and headed out. It was 1:00. We were leaving for the church at 4:45. I had plenty of time. I only had to go a couple of blocks.
I trucked up to where I thought it was. It wasn’t. I called Esteban on his cell phone. He repeated the address to me. It wasn’t there. He gave me the phone number. I called it. It referred me to a different phone number. I got a bad feeling.
I called the second phone number. A very nice lady who sounded exactly like Miss Cleo explained that the Roswell Casual Male had closed five months ago but I should drive to the one she was at, which was the closest one. She told me to get back onto the beltway and go to exit 41. Ok. No problem. I hoped onto the beltway. It turned out that I was at exit 24 or something. Ok. Not a big. It’s a little far, but Atlanta is a big town and if that’s the closest one, so be it.
And then it started to rain.
Not any rain. Georgia rain. Sideways rain. I wasn’t driving anymore, I was hyrdroplaning, as were the rest of the cars on the road. My wipers weren’t keeping up to the rain. The road was flooding. Animals were starting to line up along the side, looking for a guy with an ark. It was not good.
After about 40 minutes, I finally got to exit 41. I’m starting to sweat now, because I still hadn’t gotten ready myself. But it would be cool. I got off and couldn’t find the store. I called the store again. I asked which way to turn on exit 41. He said “right” so I turned right. Still no store. I called back again and said “Look, I just passed a jail and a Waffle King… how much further are you past the Waffle King?” and he said “Exactly where are you ma’am?”
I wanted to scream “I’m where you people told me to fucking go, moron!!!” But I didn’t. I said “Exit 41. You told me to go to exit 41 on hwy 285!”
And then he made this sound. It made a large rock form in the pit of my stomach. I can’t really describe what it sounded like but it would be interpreted in any language as “Boy Lady you are completely fucked.”
Not Exit 41. I should have exited on Highway 41. They felt that they had given me proper instructions and I should have known this, because she had told me “look for Cobb Galleria” which is like telling me something in Latin or something. I didn’t even know that was what she had said. I thought she said Cotton Diahrrea. I just wanted to scream “I AM NOT FROM ATLANTA!!!!” The guy hands the phone back to Miss Cleo and she keeps repeating “Cotton Diarrhea” to me over and over. Finally, I say “Look… tell me which exit to get off!” After much conversation, it was determined that they were at exit 21.
Fine.
Back onto the highway. Back to the Amazonian rain. I called Esteban on my cell phone and explained that I had just driving like 50 miles out of my way because morons at his store couldn’t speak English. He soothed me and promised to iron my clothes for me. Then I got stuck in a traffic jam within site of exit 20 (note: Cotton Diarrhea is not at exit 21, as reported by Miss Cleo and her idiotic manservant. But by that time, I had ceased to believe a word that came from their mouths.) At one point, I was inching along a bridge and got to enjoy a rather scenic view of the Chattahootchie River. There were people fishing and two large whooping crane type birds. I even had time to snap a picture.
Finally, I found the store. I walked in and put his shirt up on the counter and said “I need to exchange this.”
Miss Cleo was this incredibly beautiful black woman with hair blown 8 inches around her face, like a halo. She was striking, but she was not happy with me, apparently because I do not automatically know that when she said “
Exit 41″ she meant “Exit on Highway 41 at the Cobb Galleria”. Despite the fact that I had said in the initial conversation “I am a complete retard and I need you to tell me in very simple language with few syllables how to get to your store.”
If only everyone gave directions like Badsnake, this entire thing could have been avoided.
“Do you have a receipt?”
“I don’t have a receipt, but I have tags.”
“We don’t have any grey shirts.”
“I’ll take a white shirt then.”
“Then it won’t be an even exchange. I do not even think we carry this shirt.”
“You do carry that shirt. Call the store in Appleton Wisconsin right now and give them the numbers… they’ll tell you. Or try scanning the tag in your register.”
“I’ve never seen a shirt like this before.”
“I’m not making this up. I mean, you just sent me 50 miles out of my way… do you really think I’d invent a phantom shirt to get a free shirt from you?”
“No, I’m just saying that I’ve never seen such a shirt before in all my time of working here at Gob Gal Luria”
“Fine. I’ll just buy a new shirt. I don’t care.”
Then there was a moment of silence. Now, I may have made some assumptions at this point, but I was, in fact, livid. I just waited for them to bring me the correct shirt. This was probably not correct. Her man servant, who looked like Scott Stapp, the lead singer from Creed, stood there counting the zits on his face. She sucked on her incredibly white teeth. And I flared my nostrils.
Finally, she nods to the back of the store and tells me to go look for a white shirt because they don’t have grey shirts like the one I wanted to exchange. I stormed back to the store and Creed Boy followed me because he was very smart. He found the correct shirt and arm length and then we walked back to the front of the store.
When I returned, she had tried the tag in the computer and found that they did, in fact, sell that shirt through their stores. The grey shirt, which we had purchased last week for $48 was now on sale for $36, she could only give me a store credit for $8. The difference could be received from any store in the chain, provided that I find the receipt.
Then she looks at me and says, “You know, I just have to tell you. The way you carry yourself, the way you hold your body when you walk… it’s just… when I saw you come in, I thought you’d be drudging around, slumping, but you carry yourself really well for a person of your size. I don’t see small people carry themselves with such fluid motion the way you do. You’re like a queen.”
Ok. It was kind of a backhanded compliment, and she was probably just sucking up to me because I was so pissed, but I’m taking it anyway.
I got back in the car and jumped onto the beltway again. It was 4:00. We were going to join the party bus to go to the wedding at 4:45. And I still looked like dog slobber, albeit queenly dog slobber.
I got back to the hotel and threw on my clothes, quickly did my hair (luckily, with the humidity and scary driving, my hair had a kind of Meg Ryan thing going on, which was dressed up with a few strategically placed rhinestone hairpins around my face). Esteban was already dressed, just waiting for his new shirt (grrrr). We managed to get on the party bus with only seconds to spare.
The party bus was an experience in and of itself. Ward and June were there, along with Esteban’s Aunt Neat and Uncle Stoic, as well as miscellaneous relatives from the other side of the groom’s family, whom we didn’t know.
The wedding was lovely. The only thing that was disturbing was the fact that there was a guy sitting behind me in the church who was heaving breathing, so the whole service sounded like a dirty phone call. “Marriage… huh huh huh…. is a sacred union between two… ahhhh huh ahhh huh…. friends, first and foremost… huh huh huh….joined…. heee hhheee hhuhh aahh… forever through eternity… huhh… ahhh.”
The reception was lovely. Aunt Neat was a little put out that this was a normal wedding and not like a Wisconsin Wedding with its broasted family style chicken, the drinking and open bar until midnight. But they adapted. Later, Ward got a bit loopy and kept pulling me out on the dance floor. I teased Uncle Stoic that he never danced with me at my wedding and then he made a point of asking me to dance during a slow one. At one point, the DJ sent the wedding party out to pull up guests from the crowd and Esteban’s cousin, the groom, pulled Esteban and myself up to dance to “Lady Marmalade”. Somehow Uncle Stoic ended up out there with us as well. I think it scared him, seeing me shake my groove thang with wild abandon, but he kept up to the rap-style music pretty well for a sixty-year-old man. Between him and Ward, I rarely had need for a dance partner, which was a good thing because the one time I sought out my husband to dance to “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” (one of my FAVORITE songs), he was getting seconds at the buffet and couldn’t be bothered. Thus, he didn’t get the pleasure of being on my dance card for the night, which was fine, since I had two silver foxes vying for my attention anyway.
See… he’s not always a perfect husband.
We stayed until the end and then huddled back onto the bus. I was calling everyone “Big’Un”, after my lessons on Southern culture at the Rancho the previous night. June confiscated Ward’s beer, stating that he had had enough to drink but I scored it back for him. Then she confiscated it again and gave me a withering glance. I told Ward that was the last time I’d do espionage for him if he wasn’t going to be discreet. And that I was like Olly North for him. That made more sense, though, when you’ve been drinking a lot of champagne.
I came back up to the hotel room to write my Rancho entry while Esteban partied with the revelers elsewhere in the complex. Then we went to bed.
And that was Saturday. And now I’m tired and going to bed. Hope your week is grand.
