Adventures of Pee Wee Proportions

Today at Trader Joe's I bought some stuff and chortled to the woman in line with me when the woman in front of us said to the cashier, "Thanks Ryan, you did a really good job." The lesson there being never have a job where you have to wear a nametag because you might find your name included in a sentence like that. So I was talking about when I had a job on the tourist-riddled streets of Vancouver for which I had to wear a nametag and people would say weird things to me, Robyn, and it was silly and then I told the story about how being accosted by Tom Green while on the sidewalk with my nametag on. And then I had a moment where I see the other person's eyes watching me talk and I know they are thinking, "Wow, in Canada everyone knows each other and runs into each other on the street all the time. She probably chats to Celine Dion at the grocery store" Which isn't quite how it goes down. Canada has a small POPULATION but a large LAND MASS. Mostly we run into prairie dogs and bear scat on the street.

Then I went out and got in my car and when I tried to start it, it made sounds like it was going to explode. And it didn't want to move even though it was now blocking the throughway of the Trader Joe's parking lot--a parking lot already filled with a lot of frustration and rage without my station wagon sealing it off right in the middle. I managed to get it over to another spot and then my brother's brilliant Christmas gift of renewing my AAA membership really swung into action as I couldn't get it to start. It would ignite, but hitting the gas had no effect whatsoever.

So I called AAA and then took the perishable groceries back to the store. When returning them, I was helped by this hipster guy who has taken things to some extremes. Trader Joe's seems to kind of generally be staffed by cool people and the Silverlake Trader Joe's is kind of off the hook sometimes. This guy was very happy and friendly and had a mustache that was waxed into curled tips. He also had a tattoo of a Tim Burton drawing on the inside of his forearm. "Hey," I say, "is that 'Jimmy The Hideous Penguin Boy?'" "Yes, it is," says he. "I once wrote a paper on that poem," I say. A poem, it should be noted, that goes like this: "My name is Jimmy, but my friends call me Jimmy The Hideous Penguin Boy". And then the picture: horrible little lumpen creature with indentations for eyes slouched against a red-and-white striped background (circus tent? US flag?).

"How long was your paper?" he asks. "And what was it about?" And then I admitted that it was around four pages long and it was basically a paper that comes out of being in the third year of your English degree and knowing you could write a twenty page paper on one word, such is your ability to take a linguistic piece of work and pull it and stretch and roll around on the floor with it. Then he pointed to his tattoo and said something about George Bush. Then I went back to my car.

So I did block the parking lot after all with a giant flatbed tow truck. The tow guy was super nice as we tried to work out the various problems of how to get my car on the truck and then what to do with it once we got it there. In the cab of the truck on the way to Zen Volvo I started a conversation that I got lost in when I couldn't really understand what he was saying but I acted like I did when I didn't want to say, "What? What?" over and over again.

Luckily I had spent the afternoon helping Mo shoot in a backyard in the Valley that smelt overpoweringly of dog shit and featured a bone the size of a yule log and an antler lying around on the grass. In thirty-three/ninety-one degree heat. So I had an instant favour to call in and Mo came and picked me up and the sky was all softly purple and pink with silhouettes of palm trees like some kind of postcard with "L.A.!" scrawled in pink neon writing across it and we stopped at a 7-11 for juice.