Scasm Flasm Slurpee Day

It's 7-11! That makes it Free Slurpee Day! Yippee. Getcher brain freeze now.

Is anything more agonizing than brain freeze? For about three seconds you just want to die.

And then you don't.

Cold-sensitive teeth don't help. Where the hell did that shit come from? Something about living long enough for something in my mouth to wear down and expose a nerve. Can't even drink ice water without being real careful, or brush my teeth on a cold morning.

Cold mornings are the least of our worries this time of year.

At the web site it says, "Want A Fun Job?" Yes, they mean at Seven-Eleven. I cannot fathom the state of mind that leads a person to consider working at 7-11 as a result of seeing an internet ad. "Ooh, mom, it'll get me out of the basement!" Nothing wrong with actually working there. It's the internet recruiting angle I don't get, not for that. We all pass one or several every single day.

I worked at 7-11 once. After my friend and I blew my student loan money in Mexico, I came back impressed with how hard the Mexican people worked for almost nothing and decided to quit lying around and got me a job. Yes, at the local Seven-Eleven, working eleven to seven. For awhile there were two of us, my partner being either a punkish Christian newlywed who worked on his car before sunrise to beat the heat, or his even more punkish little brother who regaled me with tales from the local gay spinning club and once pointed out a hairy tough-looking guy who'd come in to buy beer to say, "See him? He is hung like a donkey." I thanked him for that valuable info.

Once trained, I had the place to myself. It was mostly nuts when the bars closed around two and again at six when people were headed off to work. Otherwise I stared out the front windows, wiped counters, told kids the magazine rack wasn't a library, and stole quarters out of the till for use on the pinball machine. One time, about four a.m. two very hot chicks nearly begged me to let them buy beer for their "man" outside, but you cannot sell alcohol between two and six in the morning in this state, and I was upright and righteous and refused. I've often thought since that I should've have swung a deal. Another time, some local long-haired hophead got rude with the microwave: Didn't take the foil off his burrito, which is bad for the equipment, then stood there eating it with his mouth open staring at me. I told him to leave. Later when I walked home I found him lying unconscious on the sidewalk, which made me feel better about not kicking his ass earlier (but you know, those places have cameras).

Then I got an eight to five electronics job and should've just quit, but I was a responsible sod and gave two weeks' notice. For two weeks I worked two forty-hour jobs -- did my shopping in the wee hours Saturday at the all-night grocery and only slept between six and nine pm during the week. It never occurred to me to just walk away -- retail people do that all the time. But that's just the way I was.

This walk down memory lane (I'm not saying how long ago that was -- let's just say it was during the first term of a President who'd had a relationship with a monkey) was brought to you by random emails, oxygen deprivation, and an uncertainty as to whether I blog more when in a good mood or in blah. Maybe it's to do with the subject matter (so-called); which is quite random, really, much like life itself.