"This must be the week of the crazy people..." says Louise, grinning. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Went downtown to pick up some cigarettes and have some coffee. Decided that I didn't feel much like coffee and got back on the bus to campus.
An old man got on just after me, carrying four full grocery bags. An older woman (maybe fifty, but senile as all hell) got on just after him. The old man began staring at me. The older woman began cackling.
"I like yer hair!" she crowed with glee, then cackled. She didn't stop cackling the entire bus ride.
"Uh... thanks," I said, a little disconcerted. I never take compliments easily. "I just dyed it about a week ago."
"Why'd ya dye yer hair?" asked the old man with disdain. He was glaring. It was a "why WOULD you dye your hair," not a "why DID you dye your hair?" Glaring speaks louder than imprecise words.
"Uh..." I hesitated. Why'd I dye my hair, after all? Because I'm vain, that's why. Because I'm vain and it makes me grin to look in the mirror and see my hair all shimmery and reddish.
"You TELL 'IM!" said the older lady. She was cackling, tipping back in her seat as though she'd just heard the funniest joke of her life. "You TELL 'im why we dye our hair!"
"Because my room-mate and I were going to dye our hair on the same night," I said, sort of choking a little bit. In many ways, I fucking hate old people. I hate their lack of tact, I hate their stupid questions, and I have no idea how to relate to them.
The old man sort of grunted, then shifted as though he was trying to fart. "I had a son once dyed his hair," he told me; there was no punctuation in his speech, and he had a bit of an accent. A backwoods accent. A redneck accent. You know it when you hear it. "I had a son once dyed his hair. Six months later, he was DEAD."
And what the fuck do you say to THAT? I was wracking my brain's handy-dandy dialogue-maker, but all I could manage was, "Uh... WELL then..."
"He was a HIPPIE!" proclaimed the old man. The older lady cackled. "These goddamned hippies dyein' thur hair an' tryin' t'impress thur friends... And they all go up thur to that Evergreen..."
The woman chimed in, something about how HER son had OD'ed nine or ten times. Then she cackled. She said she liked Evergreen though. She'd worked there three times, she said. Somehow, I couldn't quite imagine her making up a syllabus. Somehow, I couldn't imagine she was literate enough to work in the bookstore. But one never knows, I guess. She told the old man she liked hippies. The old man scowled. He started going on about the "blasted hippies" again, while the older woman began picking on a kid toward the back of the bus with a skateboard.
"That's a real big board you got!"
"Yeah," said the skateboard kid. "It is."
"Looks like somethin' else!" cackled the lady. Then she flicked her tongue in and out a couple of times; it was supposed to be some sort of crude sexual innuendo about the skateboard, but for the life of me, I did not know what the hell she meant. The skateboard looked like a tongue? Like a dick? It didn't look like either of those things, but I smiled at her to let her believe I understood. The old man grunted. Two kids about my age, sitting across from me, began giving me this "whoa, dude, we sympathize" look. I grinned at them. They grinned back.
"Where'd ya get them shoes? You tie-dye them all by yerself?" That was the old man again.
"I uh... I bought them and I painted them," I said, still pretty unsure, but feeling a little more confident, now with the two kids near me. My shoes are plain old white Converse shoes that I painted purple. I painted them because I tend to get stains all over anything white.
"Must be NICE to be young. How old're you? 'Bout nineteen twenty?"
"A little older than that." I never tell people my age straight out. Makes my tongue feel kind of dirty.
"Twenty two?"
"Warmer."
"Twenty one!" The old man was triumphant. "Damn hippie kids."
What the fuck? I looked about as much like a toadstool as I looked like a hippie. But... was it Norman who had warned me that non-Greeners can smell a Greener forty miles away? It must have been. Must have been him who told me about the tensions and the little hatreds between the good ol' boys and the tree-huggers. It really was pretty obvious that this old dude hated my guts. Because of my ragged old purple shoes and my dyed hair? Because I'm young? Because I go to school with kids who hug trees? Because I have hugged trees? I just don't understand how people can just SPOT these things and twist them into something really despicable.
The kids near me had to get off the bus. One grinned at me. The other grinned and mouthed "good luck." I grinned back at them. Another ten minutes I was on the bus with these two old folks, the old man criticizing me and the older woman just cackling along about how purple was her favorite color, and how she liked "them shoes."
Gah-damned old people these days.
Louise and I went to Seattle yesterday morning. After wandering around for quite some time looking for breakfast, we ate in Pioneer Square. Then, we went to round up my friend Brian. All of this took about five hours, because I'm shitty at giving directions in a car, and Louise is shitty at knowing left from right (so am I; I can't really blame her), so we drove aimlessly for awhile.
Happily, we did find Brian's house. Brian brought Louise and I down to the shore to look at the giant rats; then we sneaked into the Seattle Aquarium to look at the jellyfish and the sea-dragons. Then up to Broadway for some freaky cuisine called piroschky, which was just a little too much for me to handle; I imagined jellyfish tucked inside those little pockets instead of ham or whatever, and just had orange juice instead.
We spent some time after lunch sitting in Volunteer Park looking at Seattle's water supply. We were all sleepy; Louise and I had gotten up at the ass-crack of dawn (well, eight), and Brian was just worn out from hanging out with us all day. So we watched the water for awhile (which wasn't doing anything, of course, but it was nice to watch it anyway), and then Louise and I drove Brian home and went down the the Showbox for the Cat Power show.
We'd been amply warned that Cat Power is kind of a lunatic.
I guess we really weren't paying that much attention at the times of those warnings, though.
She stopped, in the middle of songs, about fifty-seven times, to tune her guitar. She'd stop and say, "I never should have started playing THIS one." She mixed songs together. She told us she was going to play some quiet songs, and then she was going to play some songs with the band -- although there WAS no band. It was hard to know what to make of Cat Power. She's real, real weird.
Alas, the crowd was fairly disrespectful. Some kids in front of Louise and I were making out -- and keep in mind, the two of us were a mere ten feet from the stage -- and then another couple shoved me aside so violently that I lost my balance and smashed into Louise's arm; the couple then began slurping it up to the best of their abilities (which were minimal), until Louise said: "Look, it's Get A Room, Part Two." A HUGE crowd of people gathered by the bar area, drinking, laughing, and making merry through the entire show, so much that it was, at times, loud enough to obscure the music. People started shouting shit AT the stage; not just song titles or, "we love you, Cat Power!" but really obnoxious shit. Some guy yelled "Fifty-one fifty!" at the stage. Another guy yelled, "New York, eas'side, Cat Power fucks that shit!"
Dude. Weird.
Anyway, a decent night was had by all, except Rachel, who was pissed off about the whole guitar-tuning thing, and by the audience, which was just lousy. *sigh*
Anyway... I'm real hungry; it's dinnertime now. 'Night kids.
~Helena*