Ghost Hunters to Investigate my Brothers House!

Anybody who knows me is well aware that, since I was young, I have been interested in the paranormal. This interest was spawned by the certainty that the house I grew up in was haunted. This certainty was solidified once I moved into the basement of said house and experienced multiple episodes of unexplained phenomena. I won't go into the nut meat of that story here, but instead want to talk about the house that my brother moved into several years ago. The house is old. We don't know the year it was built, but it had to have been sometime during the close of the 19th century. The land it sits on was once a battleground between multiple native American tribes and General George Rogers Clark waaay back in...whenever the fuck that happened. Since he has moved in, friends and I have had personal experiences ranging from hearing footsteps up the stairs in the middle of the night to seeing lurking shadow people darting through the trees at the edge of his acre and a half yard. The experiences far outweigh the doubt in my mind as well as most of my friends who have stayed there with me. The only person not buying it is my brother, who I might add considers Men in Black to be the scariest movie ever made. Only once has he told me that I may be right, when he heard tapping on his window at three in the morning to find noone there. My brothers doubt is clearly caused by his unwillingness to accept the fact that ghosts might exist, and in his own house to boot. So, with his best interests in mind (hehehe) I contacted a prestigious group of paranormal researchers to investigate his house. They have set a date for late next month! My brother astonishingly agreed to let this happen so I will keep you all (ehm...I mean Rob) posted on what, if anything, they find! Watch this space!

Good luck? Proof of God? Or am I just due for a shitstorm?

Yesterday I was supposed to craft a blog about an incident which occurred at work. I found myself to be too lazy to do so. Something even more gnarly occurred last night, however, so I see it as appropriate to write about both events today. Lets start with Monday night. As a storm of epic proportions threatened to rage outside, a car with Michigan plates pulled up to one of the pumps. I cringed. I knew without asking that the folks were from Detroit and, if you read my previous blog on that city, you know I hate Detroit. Well, I was thrown for a surprise. The folks in the car (indeed from Detroit) kicked ass. Why did they kick ass? Because they happened to be traveling back home from Tennessee and they had Krystal Burgers. For the uninitiated, Krystal is basically White Castle in the south. The burgers appear identical in every way, yet they taste better and do not give you the shits. Two teenagers who got out of the car asked me if they could microwave the burgers in the store. I told them okay, and expressed my jealousy that they had one of my favorite fast food items. The girl laughed, microwaved her food, and went back to her car. She came back in soon after and told me that the burgers belonged to her mother and that I could have some if I wanted. I was elated! I know it sounds like a trivial and basically retarded thing to be excited about a re-heated fastfood item that had just traveled in a car for 12 hours, but I was. I haven't had a Krystal burger in 10 years! As my friend Rob looked on, I enjoyed the little fucker to the fullest extent. All it took was one burger given to me by a family from Detroit to make my whole night. Hell...it almost gave me a new outlook on the city. Well, lets move on to last night. A customer, I would say in his late 40's or early 50's and driving an enormous monster truck, came into the store to buy some small items. Soon after he made his purchase and left, I was hit hard by a wave of customers. I couldn't move for almost an hour as they stormed the register area. When it calmed down, a customer from a local buisness that stays open at night found a wad of cash on the floor. I quickly snatched it from him and thanked him for being honest and not taking it. I put it in an envelope and placed it into the safe, assuming the rightful owner of the money would be back very soon. Indeed he was, and it was the driver of the monster truck. He asked me if I found some money and I asked him how much he lost. He said the amount I found (roughly $200) and I presented him with the envelope. I told him he was very lucky, considering the staggering amount of customers who had just descended upon the store. He smiled, tossed me $40 and left. $40!! Considering that I was completely broke and trying to find a way to pay for my cigarettes and lunch, this was beyond a blessing! So all it takes to make me happy is an $.89 Krystal burger and a $40 tip. Actually, considering how bad my luck has been for the past decade, this seems like winning the lottery to me. Yet....I feel something horrible lurking on the horizon. Either that, or maybe all this being nice to people shit is finally paying off....

Strippers, Snakes, and Cops....

As many people know, I have been employed at a gas station for 3 and a half years. For the majority of those 3 and a half years I have been the third shift guy. During this time I have seen my fair share of weird shit, to say the least. Although this may not be the strangest thing I have witnessed while at work, it is hands down the most amusing.

For the past several weeks I have had a couple of regular customers who just so happen to be strippers at one of the areas least desirable clubs. I will not say the name of the place, but I will say that they offer insanely cheap steak dinners as a way to con people into going there. If your radio spot offers $2.00 steak instead of insanely hot nude girls, you know you are in for a treat. Anyway, I've grown quite fond of these two women since they never fail to inadvertently make me chuckle. At roughly 4:30 this morning the two came flying into the parking lot, and quickly abandoned their car in what can only be described as a Dukes of Hazzard fashion. As usual, neither of them were dressed appropriately for being in public, one of them in her usual manties and a t shirt emblazoned with the logo of her club, the other in a glorified bath towel with nothing underneath. This, however, is not what caught my attention. The two were obviously distressed and the larger of the two (in the manties) was going on about a "fucking SNAKE!" I had to investigate. Apparently a serpent of some kind had found its way into the unfortunate ladies car. While traveling the highway, the creature slithered across the passenger (we'll just call her manties) bare foot. My initial thought was that the two had gotten a batch of some bad acid and were having a freakout right there in the parking lot. Then I saw it. It was brief, but sure as shit, a snake had managed to crawl into the dashboard of their car. The more slender one in the towel (I shall deem her Skeletor since she resembles the Masters of the Universe villian in the face) informed me that she was at a nature preserve the day before and the snake must have found its way into her car then. So, I did what any respectful person would do and called the cops, knowing that my friend on duty would be more than willing to help out two distressed strippers. Instead, an attractive female officer was the first to show up. She had with her one of those long poles with a loop on the end often used to catch much larger animals than snakes. Then my buddy shows up and, as it turns out, is scared shitless of snakes. Between customers, I ended up being the one doing most of the work as the female officer was also not fond of the reptiles. With the aid of police flashlight, I searched under the dash trying my best to find the little fella. Somehow, the snake was evading us all. Manties told us that there was no way in HELL she was getting back in that car. Skeletor said that if the dashboard was taken apart, her husband would be very angry. The two cops were at a complete loss as of what to do, my buddy saying that if he saw the snake he was beating it to death. Hoping to save the critter, I did my very best (including blindly reaching into every crack and crevice of the dashboard) to lure the thing out. This snake wasn't moving. We decided that the heat of the engine was inviting to the snake, therefor it was not coming out. My buddy said he believed the snake was probably hiding in the airbag compartment, and couldn't be reached. I noted that, if the girls were to have an accident and the airbag was deployed, a snake flying at Skeletors face would probably not help the matter. My buddy then said he wasn't leaving until he got the snake out, and that he hadn't beaten on a snake in quite some time. I told him I doubted that to be true. For the next half hour we labored to get the creature free (me hoping to save it from a needless beating in the process) but to no avail. At the end of the ordeal, the girls drove off with a snake in there car, and the cops left the scene defeated. I have no doubts that Skeletor and Manties ride home was a fun one indeed...

The HORROR!

So last night was what is quickly becoming a normal night at work. Pure shit. What made this night special, however, was discovering one of our most important freezers had taken a crap and every item of food inside was ruined. This should not have been the case. One would assume that at some point in time someone from an earlier shift would have discovered it not working. All of the food inside could have been transferred to another freezer without having to be pitched. Instead, the other two shifts did not do jack shit for work, did not go into the back to get anything out of the freezer, and now we have a staggering $3000 in food, or roughly a month supply of hot dogs, burritos, cakes, tornados, and frozen snacks rotting in our dumpster. Considering that most of these items sell for three times what the store pays for them, that leaves $6000 worth of profit gone. But this is not what bothers me. No sir, I am not the owner of the store so the loss is the least of my concern. What bothered the hell out of me was throwing every bit of this food in the dumpster just before the end of my shift. I'm not complaining about being a poor bastard. It is something I've grown quite used to. But for a person who goes to bed hungry most days of the week, having to dispose of all this food was down right painful. $3000 worth of food could feed me for two years! It is times like this I miss working in a factory.

Why I hate Detroit

I won't pretend to understand certain things. Why does milk always expire EXACTLY when it says it is going to? Why must women completely litter a public restroom with toilet paper and not bother to clean it up? Why won't Jesus come down from Heaven and turn me into a ninja with flame throwers for testicles? And most of all...why in the hell do middle aged black women from Detroit love scratch off lottery tickets so fucking much?? Now, I don't typically take stereotypes as truth. Most of them appear to be age old racist remarks which are over exaggerated to the point of being incredibly offensive. However, working at a gas station for three years does enlighten a person after awhile. Every holiday, major or minor, I get heavy travel traffic from people either coming from or going to Detroit. 99.9% of these people are of African American heritage, and about 99.9% of those drive Cadillac Escalades. One would generally associate a brand new Cadillac with wealth, but this is not often the case. I give you an example from last night. This is something that REALLY pissed me off. At roughly 2:47 a.m. a black Escalade pulls up to the pumps and a family gets out to "stretch their legs". Just so you people know...rest stops are designated for this action, not fucking gas stations. Anywho, a woman somewhere between the age of 40 and 45 comes up to me and asks if I accept food stamp cards. Unfortunately, I tell her, we do not. So, she picks up a $.50 pack of crackers and pays me in dimes. No biggy. This woman had four children acosting her, all under the age of 10. The children ask her for a bag of chips, which would have put her back roughly $1.79. She VEHEMENTLY tells them "No, because this store doesn't accept poor folks food stamp cards!" I listen to this as I stare out at the 2006 (I asked) Escalade parked at the pump. A man is putting $80 in fuel into this behemoth. To my shock and horror, this women then proceeds to question me about which lottery tickets she should buy! She selects three $1 tickets. The kids watch her. She had $3 in her purse, and rather than spend it on a bag of chips for her children (who I might add looked famished and I fealt very sorry for them) she buys fucking lottery tickets! Now, this could easily be an isolated incident but it is not. Every holiday weekend I am presented with the same kind of scenario. It's ALWAYS middle aged black women who generally spend at least an hour in the store scratching off lottery tickets. I could count the number of times on one hand that I was not asked if we accept food stamps, and I could do the same with how many times these people were not driving a Cadillac Escalade. I'm trying my best not to sound like a Klan member here. It is not the color of these peoples skin that makes them behave in this manor. If that were the case, all 5 of the African Americans in this town would be rabid lottery addicts. No, I'm penning this one on the city of Detroit. Somewhere, way down the line, it was put into law that all middle aged black women in Detroit have to travel across country every major and minor holiday (generally to Alabama, Georgia, or New Orleans) and spend half of their travel funds on lottery tickets. Someone, ANYONE, please explain to me why this happens! And for that matter, tell me how the fuck these people are affording Escalades, because I want one to.