Frustrations of the 26th of June, 2025.

 Saint Vincent Depaul's Thrift Store and I are about to have some much needed time apart.  I really just couldn't.  First I drive in the parking lot once and it is completely full and like a random Walgreens anywhere at any time of day the number of people in the store does not jive with the number of vehicles in the lot, but I have other stuff to do.

Other stuff involves me driving past SVDTS again and this time there are two available spaces of the 20 and a corresponding six people in the store including employees.  I wander around noticing nothing much still not buying a nice copy of the book on Princess Margaret I already read, but still may buy one day if no one else does.  The vintage Pier 1 Imports Chinoiserie tea set is still there, but aren't they always.  A red Givenchy box caught my eye, probably someone's free gift with a purchase of Amarige back in 1997, but hey it was only $3.75.  A little cheeky for a thrift store, but OK.

How long must one wait for the person behind the counter understand the cash register.  I mean it is a shop and that is a cash register.  This should not be a bump in the road, but a bump in the road they made it, and of course I am the one being unreasonable expecting someone in a shop to know how to manage a cash register.  I mean I don't really expect fire stations without forepeople or firetrucks, but it is charity and I suppose I was a bit tart with the woman, but hey enough is quite enough.

The Christina Thrift store which blares annoying Christian rock is closing.  The clerk told me as I was checking out.  Everything is half off until everything is gone which is bollocks.  This town is already down to 6 thrift stores and I'm afraid Deseret Industries does not count.

Things Noticed On The 16th Of June, 2025.

Going to the Humane Society used to be one of my weekly treats.  A potter around other people discarded bibelots and mewing kittens in the background, occasionally the howling feral beast a little too close for comfort, but the times, such times I’ve had there, and finds!  Everything from an Hermes tie to slightly too large Turnbull and Asser shirt.  Books, bibelots, casual separates and strangers who, simply  put, have better breeding than that Goodwill lot.

Anyways, recently my weekly toodles through the jumble sales at the Humane Society have been a bit hard on the nerves.  The ladies who work there always seem to be at both ends of the candle, and you don’t have to look hard to see why.  Dizzy gen z volunteers who want to do good, but it is hard to separate the ones that really want to volunteer for the right reasons and the ones that just want to be around cats all day.  Neither sort can count and is completely lost if you pay with anything other than a card.

There are waves of indescribable guilt that wash over me if I ever leave the store without  buying something monumentally useless or breathtakingly tacky because it is for charity after all and the little furry charities and those are the only legitimate charities left, but lately it has been harder and harder to find something even ironically enchanting in the shop.

The poor overworked ladies who used to be so lighthearted and carefree now spend all their time  refereeing incompetent volunteers, dickering hillbillies, and AMSR tourists that it seemingly took them 2 months to move my Andrew and Fergie wedding memorabilia from the donation room to the floor and to say I saw stars wouldn’t really draw the scene, I was surrounded by Hobby Lobby bedazzle stars from the word go, but I gathered myself, forced myself not to repurchase my Andrew and Fergie pillbox, and found the most ridiculous glass encrusted bauble and walked to the register and purchased it just as soon as the lady finished showing a gentleman a broken figurine from the case behind the counter and quite nearly had waved goodbye to my afternoon’s long sobriety before I even got to my Subaru.

Reflections Of The 14th Of June, 2025

Not for the first or even second time I was perusing the depressing book section at the local Goodwill which used to be the local Hastings after Hastings moved from down the street when an older or shall we say more settled gentleman sought to inform me, entirely unsolicited, about some mysterious book bazaar in the local library with reportedly tens of thousands of books.

Tens of thousands of books?  That is rather a remarkable claim, and one I entirely discount, not because it is facially improbable, but rather because I have gone to investigate this reported Circus of Books twice before and both times it was the predictable ghost town of mental disorders and foot and mouth disease.  Always disappointing.

I couldn’t be having it, not an inch of it, and I can’t quite recall the withering reply I handed this impertinent oik, but I can only hope it stung enough to give the rascal pause before he tries to speak to someone without a proper introduction.  

It Isn’t that the natives can’t be civilized, I am not saying that, it is just they have never needed to be, having entirely ghettoized themselves in completely insular communities with exploding rates of juvenile diabetes, speech impediments and morbid obesity. I visited one of their camps called Deseret Industries and it was a moving experience.  One can learn a lot there.  Never forget.   

Occurrences Of The Fifth of June, 2025.

 I count myself as fortunate perhaps even blessed.  I caught the sting of the celebrity flashbulb at a very young age and from that moment I have devoted a good deal my efforts to avoiding the glare of publicity or worse notoriety.  As any well brought-up person is brought-up to believe, if one's works are not recognized posthumously then it really doesn't matter.  I mean people will obviously take the opportunity to criticize you after you've been safely cremated and can't argue back that is of course if you've given them anything to argue about.  Anything prior to that is simply publicity.  Any idea of merit needs time and perspective and maturation.    

Par example..... Radiohead was never a good band, perhaps never producing an album as good as Catherine Wheel's worst.  I have been saying this since OK Computer but no one would listen and it is only until someone hands Thom Yorke a smartphone and they are able to blast their unfiltered nonsense mania-speak into the population-void that suddenly people start to look at you like YOU'RE the fucking witch-doctor in the room.

I could go on, but sometimes it's best to punctuate your point with brevity.  

When I received that call when I was 8 years old and I heard the voice on the other end (representative of Pizza Hut) tell me that I had won the CareBears coloring contest including a free personal pan pizza something in me knew that nothing would ever be the same again, and not in the way one might expect.

I could anticipate the interview with the school newspaper and my coloring masterwork being displayed in the Pizza Hut foyer, yes, but what about after?  What comes after?  Like the young grad student that almost accidentally solved Fermat's Last Theorem as a grad student I had perhaps peaked to early.  What could come after this and could I handle the fame and celebrity when it came, no doubt, in waves.

No..... One can hardly open an app designed to admire cats without being bludgeoned with the image of someone with impossibly white teeth and limited vocabulary chasing the glare of celebrity in whatever embarrassing fashion seems most comfortable to them.  And even after what they did to Princess Diana and the Dixie Chicks it still takes my breath away people treat celebrity as anything other than something from which you hide in terror.