come over here babe and talk into the mic

We just had a fire drill at work, at 7:15 am. The alarms are so ungodly loud I have that ringing in your ears you have after seeing a show. I thought it might be a real fire and not a drill since we just had another fire drill two days ago, or else I might have hid in my office but we all herded out like cattle and once we got outside we stood in the drizzle shoulder-to-shoulder with twitching mental patients. But I like a bit of the surreal thrown into the totally invariably routine day.

I was thinking today about Rhonda - she was my best friend growing up and she went to a Church of Christ that seemed really weird to me because they didn’t have any instruments and almost all the people who went there were very old. When I would spend the night at her house we’d go to her church the next morning and have Sunday school in the musty freaky basement with lots of flannel graphs and pictures from the ‘50s of white European Jesus. This bald old man taught Sunday school, his name was Blondie and he told outrageous stories. One thing he loved to say all the time was "There are thousands of people lying in bed right now regretting what they did last night." He also liked to say that Baskin-Robbins was a good place for us to hang out because it was bright and had lots of light, and the bowling alley was a bad place because it was all dark. My very favorite is when he told us "You boys and girls are really lucky to have the mommies and daddies that you have, because there are lots of boys and girls out there whose parents go out and drink alcoholic beverages, and they come home and get the little children out of bed and line them up against the wall and say…" - he held up an imaginary gun, his arms quivering - "...'I’M GONNA SHOOT Y’ALL!'"

I swear that I am not exaggerating or making any of this up one bit.

Hey...pants for dogs.