Perfume & Cardboard

Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008 - 12:00 a.m.

On the radio Monday morning, Ronn Owens was talking about how aggressive the kiosk terrorists are at the malls this time of year. They bark and yell and come up to you with samples and just sometimes are a royal pain in the ass.

I solved this problem several years ago by carrying a very old, very out of date, very stinky old bottle of cheap perfume with me whenever I'm going for Stonestown or Serramonte and if they touch me, or distub me after I tell them to leave me alone, I tell them to stick out their wrists.

So far, the people who have started their spiel have stopped immediately when I get ready to give them a squirt.

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Yesterday there was a nice thread in FARK about the list of most dangerous toys for the year, and one of the FARKers said his favorite toy has been an old car hood because he lived near a hill. That comment triggered a memory, so I'll repeat my FARK thread comment here.

When I was around nine, we had our annual mid-June family reunion picnic somewhere I had never been before, in a new park that abutted a levee that had been recently blackened with a controlled burn prior to Fourth Of July. When my grandfather saw that we had ourselves a levee to play on, he drove off somewhere and came back in about fifteen minutes, having scrounged a refrigerator box from somewhere. He flang it at us kids and told us to have fun.

As I recall, there is a picture of me with my little brother and four or five of our cousins, all lined up together, looking like a bunch of pathetic little imitation coal miners, wearing formerly clean kid duds, and holding our hands up so everybody could gauge how utterly imbedded we'd all become. The grups managed to wash our faces and hands before they let us near any food, and I *think* Mom took a picture of the bathwater later than night, too.

That cardboard box was the best toy on the best day in the best month ever in the whole kid history of ever.

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The weather says we're supposed to get rain today, so I'm looking forward to that nice, allergy-clearing stuff.

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That's it. Have a good Tuesday.

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