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Finding The Game before/after I went looking for the hockey game yesterday. Up at the lake. NOBODY around up at the lake, where the 'rents have a second sanctum in a WASP vacation nook. Seasonal area. Hundreds of cabins, cottages, homes, and all the owners are away. A frozen ghost town. And the hockey game was on television, but I wasn't getting it. So I went to the local bar to asses the hockey-viewing situation. Wearing my green parka, torn jeans, bed-head, grey fleece, silver mirrored 'matrix-esq' sunglasses, and brown leather doc-marten boots I opened the door to the dark bar. The door banged open and hit upon the building. I felt like a gunfighter. The bar itself was lined with locals. True locals, the people who live there year 'round, and there are not many of them. They turned their heads to look at me in unison. All at the same time. All in the same motion to the same degree. Freaked me right out. Me, being stoned, just stood for a second and looked back, unmoving. I entered the bar, and took my shades off. They turned away when they saw that I wasn't One Of Them. They were watching NASCAR, which was no real surprise, I guess. The barmaid got off the phone long enough to tell me that the game wasn't coming in on their equipment. Just long enough for the over-forty bar-fly girl, who may have had some looks when she was eighteen, but now she's forty, likely with children from a few different fathers, to burn holes in the side of my head with her eyes, and spook me with a winter cold cough that sounded downright tuberculear. Staying true to the angry rant I just had a few minutes ago out of the doorway to no one in particular about "...no one stopping me from getting the god-damned game.", I abruptly turned and walked out. A large, pale, toad-ish looking man with a thick dick-broom on his upper lip turned to look at me for no real reason as I left. Trying to get a good look at me, I guess. Found another bar, and they had the game on tv. No good, my team was down three goals in the first. I ordered a cheesburger and fries, and tried not to look too hard at the locals. It was a Sunday, on one of the slowest weeks of the year for the area. I was Not From Around Here. All the characters you will find in any small blue-collar dive bar were there for the loving. Funny how those things evolve, in respect also to geography and predominant culture. A lot of the characters and roles seem to stay the same, with a few variations, all over. I saw the flirty girl character. The 'I Am The Prettiest Girl In The Bar.' character. She's was the prettiest in the crowd, but that's not saying much. Her laughter was a nasal cackling, that both spooked and amused me. Her looks had started to go, but not gone. It was only a matter of time. She was doing well on the pool table, chatting non-chalantly with many in the bar, and just sank something like three balls in a row. Also, she was watching me with a certain intensity inbetween all of her social butterfly duties with the cashed posse in the bar. My gaze was on the pool table. My eyes drifted over to, and onto her. She felt it viscerally, and almost missed the cue ball entirely with her shot. Then they put it on NASCAR after the first period. So I left, and got the game on el radio. 'El radio' is Spanish for 'the radio'.
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