Waking down a fairytale...realizing it's a Target parking lot. #bitchwhat #imserious #targetparkinglot #nicerthanmyhouse #flowers #wheresbeyonce (at Target Store Westlake-Village)
so i think i just narrowly avoided getting kidnapped in mid afternoon in the parking lot of the Target in Eagle Rock.
JUST A TYPICAL SATURDAY DON'T WORRY ABOUT ME.
while i'm hurrying back to my car with new undies and ziplock bags and dry shampoo from Target, a dude a few yards away goes,
"hey honey, hey sweetie..."
honey / sweetie? what are you, my dad?? we couldn't be off to a more terrible start.
i turn my head but not completely, more involuntarily at the incoming sound than at the person delivering it. it's a tall young dude, smiling a HUGE wolfy, toothy grin at me, holding shopping bags, looking like he's trying to get into a white mazda. i'm not liking this.
he says,
"hey, hey honey, if i give you five dollars, would you come over here and do me and my wife a favor."
hey honey
if i give you five dollars
will you come over here
and do me and my wife
a favor
NO. no way in god's fuck.
what possible kind of favor could you and your wife need to pay five dollars to a strange woman for? also where's this illusionary "wife"? i don't see her. is your wife a roll of packing tape and a baseball bat in the back seat of your car? if that is even your real car. fuck IT'S BROAD DAYLIGHT OUT. regardless of age, gender, race, religion or creed i pretty much make it my policy not to go near any men who offer me five dollars for anything.
also what is this five dollars? this seems like an arbitrary amount. please don't feel i'm indicating that i'd do a parking lot stranger a strange favor if he had offered more money. it just seemed so fucking weird to offer five bucks to another adult for something totally mysterious. like, if i give you five dollars will you come over here and talk to me? why five? it doesn't make sense. also if you are an adult and you don't have a cell phone with which to solve or at least inquire into solving most matters that could occur in a Target parking lot, i don't want to know you. five dollars. what am i five years old? you might as well have offered me a packet of Skittles to get into your rape Mazda. fuck that shit. i'm leaving. i'm walking swiftly in the opposite direction. i wanna be like, HOW DARE YOU, but instead i just say i gotta go. i really do have to go.
in the words of Erin Hensley, I am concrete in my aversion to rape.
as with any apparently ridiculous technique for human coercion (see almost any pickup line), i find myself always speculating as to who this works on? perhaps my flawed assumption is that it must work on someone or the perpetrator of said coercion would never try it in the first place. like some randomly generated DudeBro pickup line in reality, no matter how terrible, must work on Drunk Backless Tank Top Girl. it has to. it's the law of attrition. so i'm left in potentially dead-end contemplation over who or what is the real-life Target parking lot cognate of Backless Tank Top Girl. is some poor fuck getting kidnapped by a 20something male right now in Eagle Rock because he / she is just really, really nice? i'm worried now.
or have i just watched too much SVU?
OH.
then i saw something that i can't unsee at the junction of Glendale and Alvarado. it was a hobo with a sign, but she was a youngish chick who appeared to have been ripped straight out of an American Apparel catalog. she had on distressed denim skinnies and bespoke suspenders. she was pretty. it was fucking weird. young hobos are not particularly weird but usually they are you know, crust punks. pit bulls and butt flaps are their accessories, not thick frame glasses and hats. she was the most straight-up fashionable derelict i've ever seen in my life. i drive up that masterpiece of LA city planning fuckery every day and i have never seen a more attractive hobo. i don't mean to make the point that poverty is more of a societal tragedy when the person afflicted with it is attractive and young. i guess it was just incredibly jarring. her thousand mile stare and zombie walk through the cars, i can't totally rid my mind of it. she wasn't looking at anything in particular. she lacked the insistence of the other people who typically haunt that intersection. she just kind of walked and stared.
that in addition to the prior incident definitely cemented my intention of remaining a complete shut-in until like, Tuesday.
