Saturday....Saturday...Saturday night's alright...

Ahh...Sunday night. A purgatory of sorts. Caught in between the happy-go-lucky-full-of-possibility stance that is Saturday and the defeated posture that is the Monday morning realization that yes, I do have to work for a "living". Sighs and hail Mary's aside, this 11:28 finds me listening to a bootleg of Dexy's Midnight Runners' Come on Eileen (yes - on purpose) and eating curious ketchup flavored potato chips smuggled in from our Canadian neighbors to the North. To incorporate one of my favorite things (the condiment) with another of my favorite things ( food stuff deep fried in a vat of oil) is a beautiful, beautiful thing. We here in the little shotgun house rage on against tomorrow with salt and misunderstood but sung anyway vintage lyrics on our lips........

Once again, it was a good weekend. To those of you playing along at home, a "good weekend " to me means that more than once, I was able to cock my head to the side and say, "Well......will ya look at that...."

Head cock #1: I lost at miniature golf (something I never do) - thus killing my winning streak. But not before I over-exerted a swing thus hitting a woman two holes down with my golf ball and later watched a large woman trying to protect her shrieking child from a spider web by swinging a golf club into the air with absolute arachnid-induced malice and no regard to the safety of those around her. The scared child dropped and rolled like a log perhaps mistaking her elementary school fire safety training for something involving death by spiders instead. The spider climbed skyward as web unfurled. The crowd weaved and ducked under the shadows of a damaged fiberglass and wood lighthouse. A child no taller than a bird bath got a hole in one and didn't seem phased. As part of my losing bet, I am now supposed to sing "When you're a Jet.......you're a Jet..." complete with West Side Story finger snaps, footwork and jazz hands. I wish I had chosen something from Oklahoma instead. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers perhaps. Tommy?

Head cock #2: A friend and I walked into an ordinary looking basement bar while searching for food only to be assaulted with the musical stylings of a group of sixty something year old white men wearing Hawaiian shirts and moving in robotic motion while singing Brick House. In front of them throngs of women danced, being watched by men with slouchy backs and matching guts hanging over genuine leather, brass buckled belts with a khaki pant majority rule. They held their beers high in the air in a salute to Saturday nights and women who wear their Wonder bras to sports bars. Viva! ya'll.

We quickly retreated to the parking lot to the refrain of, "she's mighty...mighty...she's lettin' it all hang out..." after being told that we would have to pay a five dollar cover charge just to make fun of these people. Heck, we'd seen enough to make fun of them already. What did we look like? Suckers?

Head cock #2: Walking into a late-night Exxon station while still searching for food only to be dumbstruck by the sales clerk who seemed to have been waiting his entire life for just the right invitation to tell his marvelous story.

We walked in and picked out doughnuts from the Krispy Kreme display and a two liter coke and then approached the counter (Yes. My name is Kelly and I am held together with preservatives). While I tried to convince the sales clerk that I really did mean to buy a Coke when Pepsi is cheaper, my friend became awestruck with a display of giant lighters on the countertop. They measured in slightly smaller than a bread box at around 6" x 9 ". As my friend tried unsuccessfully to light one of the enormous lighters using both hands, he asked the sales clerk if it actually had lighter fluid in it.

Well, that did it. A light came on in the clerk's eyes and he said, "We ain't allowed to keep lighter fluid......flame-ables......in here." He then grinned under a strange top lip that I couldn't take my eyes off of ( more of a lumpy curled up bit of flesh than a lip - one tooth sticking out like a white flag in a dental defeat). Both myself and my friend were content with that answer and before I could ponder the way he pronounced "flammables", he raised his eyebrows and added, "We can't keep lighter fluid in here because.......I'm...a..... convicted arsonist."

I heard angels singing.

My friend nodded politely and shifted from one foot to the other. I realized that the weekend was winding down and I hadn't yet had my weekly odd weekend conversation with someone from an alternate lifestyle/ gene pool / frame of reference/ state of mind. I leaned in and said, "Oh? Really? A convicted arsonist? What'd you do??"

Hook, line and sinker....

He then wiggled his eyebrows as if to say, "You may worship me now."

My friend still man-handled the lighter and I stared with wide-eyed interest at the sales clerk while watching same friend trying to get a light in my peripheral vision, waiting to see a gigantic flame go up to the ceiling in a Hiroshima-style mushroom explosion, perhaps taking out the Funyons "back to school" display. He finally gave up and put down the lighter and stepped forward into the conversation, trying to get the hostage doughnuts out of the nether-world that I had jauntily fox-trotted us into.

The excited clerk rubbed his sweaty palms on the fronts of his pants, tucked his wrinkled shirt further down into his pants with jerking, spastic tucks and told us a winding story that seemed to be pieced together with things he had seen on Cops or perhaps even from flashbacks of memories in between injurious meltdowns at the meth lab.

He told us that when he was a teenager, a man paid him to burn down his barn. Fair enough. Well.....according to the clerk , he got all of the burning permits and came to burn down the barn. So, apparently the barn burning turned more into a barn explosion and the sheriff's deputies came and found out that they didn't have what the clerk called, "a TNT license". Boom! ya'll.

"A TNT license!", I yelled back at him to keep the momentum going.

He then started laughing like a little kid and told us how he had brought dynamite to take down the barn. Took it down good too. According to him, instead of going to jail, the judge made him enlist in the boy scouts and there he had to stay until he was 18. I then smiled and asked him if he successfully got his "campfire" badge. He giggled at me and leaned forward, hands on the counter. The lippish part of his mouth quivered and glistened with spittle. His eyes darted from me to the giant lighters and then to my friend standing beside me defeated and bored, having abandoned any idea of seeing flames of any kind, tortured with long stories about them.

My friend then broke the magical spell, picked up the doughnuts from the counter and bid the fellow farewell and started towards the door. I clutched my dusty two liter Coke and hesitantly followed as the clerk yelled puzzle pieces of information at us as we left, trying to draw us back into his labyrinth:

"We'd get up there in the woods!"

"We always made sure we had railroad ties!!"

"Railroad ties are covered in tar!"

"Tar burns like coal !! Like coal! "

When we got in the car, I stared back inside at the clerk and then grabbed my notebook and feverishly started looking for a pen. My friend looked at me and said, "What was with his lip?" I remarked that it would be mean for us to talk about his lip. He then asked me, "Didn't you notice his lip?" I said that I did but it would just be mean to talk about it. He asked, "Yeah....but that fleshy bit there on top...was that gum or was it lip?"

We went home and sat on my front porch in the quiet dark and ate doughnuts and sipped our drinks and talked about the lip/gum configuration a little more - never really coming to any conclusion. In the street in front of us, a police car drove in reverse down the road. Somewhere across town, a convenience store clerk surrounded by prepackaged triangle cut sandwiches and cigarette cartons felt like a pyromaniac god. Just blocks away people with no right to boogie down just kept on boogieing down. Perhaps a little tribute to Rick James was done and things got super freakyaaaw. Colored light bulbs continued to burn out turning miniature golf holes into guessing games. Somewhere a potato chip maker pondered the tartar sauce flavored chip. One never knows really. One never knows.