Have Nothing To Do With Such People
1 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.
2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,
3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good,
4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—
5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
Oh, that Timmy. He was such a Debbie Downer. To paraphrase the Dude, “He’s not wrong, he’s just a saint.” It’s in his job description to talk that way. Far be it from me to advise against having nothing to do with such people. I only want to point out that if you’re gonna try it, good luck. You’re going to need it out there in the wilderness.
We went out on an errand yesterday. We were driving on Western Ave. It’s Augusta’s Champs Elysees of gutbucket commerce, as they say. Tire shops and Wendy’s monkey-meat emporiums and sketchy Chinese places placed suspiciously adjacent to animal rescue processing centers. There’s an AHOP (the Augusta House of Pancakes), trying to avoid good cooking and a giant lawsuit simultaneously. There’s a Planet Fatness, pawn shops, Dollar Generals and Colonels and Buck Sargents, competing, both literally and figuratively, for your last dollar. There’s beaucoup Applebees and similar squat masonry laminated menu abattoirs competing for coveted Firestone stars, if there is such a thing, as the Michelin critic isn’t interested in dining out anymore and is having his bowel resected. He should have read more Timothy, the patron saint of stomach and intestinal disorders. There’s also a very large UHaul outpost patiently waiting for you to wise up and have nothing to do with such people, or at least the local versions.
So Western Ave. has a bit of everything the modern Huxley-bot craves. But above and beyond that, what it has in spades is dope stores. I think it’s the signal, solitary achievement of the soon to be ex-governor. Maine legalized doobies, and if the number and size of the spliff arcades is any indication, Maine is actively helping them build more around the clock. I’m not interested in marijuana, one way or the other, mostly because I’m an adult now and giggling is overrated, but as I’ll explain marijuana sure is interested in me. If I was a more conscientious writer, I’d find out some statistics to back up this observation. But I’m lazy, and stone cold sober most of the time, so monomanias like collecting statistics or eating the whole can of Pringles while hotboxing outside the dope store don’t appeal to me. I’ve got better things to do.
We only drove across town, and I noticed about at least a dozen or two of them. They’re across the street from each other. They’re next to each other in some cases. Some try the we’re medicine dodge, but that’s falling out of favor now that the stuff is legalized. They’ve taken to calling themselves The High Class Joint and Schwaggle Farms and other names suitable for sponsoring a Grateful Dead show. My wife complains about their lack of imagination, proven by the fact that they’ve overlooked the greatest moniker they could have taken, Fine Young Cannabis.
Our destination was the Verizon store. I needed a new phone. The clerk, who has been trying, unsuccessfully, to grow a beard since the nurse scraped the vernix off him, snickered at the phone I brought in to swap. It was a typical android slab, but to him, it was a cuneiform tablet. He’s never met a person that didn’t trade their phones in every time a new model comes out. He mentioned that I’d been on Verizon for two years, because his screen told him that. I mentioned that was just the last time I changed my billing address or something similar. I’d been on Verizon for longer than there was a Verizon. Hell, I’d been on what he called Verizon since Alexander Graham Bell’s name was still on the bills. But history only reaches back to the 1990s now, so there’s no point in mentioning anything that happened before that. I dropped the topic.
Our backs were towards the door. We felt a blast of air, signalling the arrival of another victim. My wife and I looked at each other and silently transmitted our thoughts to one another as married couples do. There’s a skunk in here!
Of course there wasn’t. Skunks usually got to TMobile, I think. But the bow wave of doobie stink on the fellow that entered made us pray for a skunk to come to trade in their phone and at least compete with the guy. When did dope smoke start smelling so bad? It used to just smell slightly better than cigarettes, and way better than cigars. Now it’s like Satan’s armpits.
The stoner just stood there, reeking, while examining the giant poster for ruggedized first responder phones that featured both kinds of firemen: a scrawny white female fireman, and a black female fireman, both lost inside the smallest fireman outfits they could find for the photo shoot. He found it endlessly interesting, perhaps wondering if either of these stalwart ladies would someday put him out when he dropped his joint in his lap, or maybe give him his Narcan refresher if things went really south.
We left, because the technicians in the store had no idea how to transfer my contact list from my old phone to the new one. They made an appointment for us to go back when someone would be in who was willing to at least take a stab at it. I made an appointment with myself to go home and accomplish it on my own, because they can snicker at me all they want, but I know how to do it. It’s that kind of world now.
We drove home, back the way we came, and encountered what I thought was an impossibility. As we neared the two dope superstores, literally right next to each other, my wife and I looked at each other and said the same line from The Big Lebowski we once reserved for driving past the reeking, belching paper mill in the town we used to live in.
Windows rolled up. The opposite side of a four lane boulevard. The smell lasted for a quarter of a mile. It’s not possible, but they’ve done it. The dope stores smell worse than a paper mill. If you’re interested in having nothing to do with such people, you’re going to have to move more than a quarter of a mile away, and they’re spaced every half mile anyway.
Good luck out there.
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