Unsavory mall characters and Gay Pride

Last night we did an inventory in the Buckingham Mall, but the inventory is not the subject of this post. The Buckingham Mall has seen better days, with now 70% of the spaces available for lease and the stores that are still open (for the time being) shining like hallucinatory beacons on the main street of a ghost town. But the Mall isn't the subject either.

We diligently worked behind Rave's closed security gate, thankful for the barrier not only because of the aforementioned ghost town ambience, but also because the store employees were talking about a shooting that had just occurred at the Aurora Mall, about 5 miles away. Already feeling a little on edge, it didn't help when a mall employee started walking back and forth in front of the store. I assume he was a janitor based on the garbage can he was pushing. He was older, with frizzy long gray hair under his grimy cap. He resembled a creepy elementary school bus driver, the kind of guy who is nervously tolerated until local children start disappearing. He was loudly chanting a line over and over and over, something like this: "...walkin' de dog....I'm walkin' de dogey....walkin' de dog....I'm walkin' de dogey..." When he noticed our lights on and activity in the store, he came right up to the gate and peered in, repeating his little mantra so we could all hear it. I was the closest to the front of the store but had my back to the door. I didn't even look up from my pile of shirts for fear of making eye contact.

Thankfully he realized we were all busy working and wandered off on his own, but his words echoed long after. You know how you sometimes get a snippet of a song stuck in your head and it just repeats for hours, until you start crying and begging it to stop? It is far worse to be trapped with the lunatic ramblings of a lonely janitor in there, believe me. About two hours later I had finally forgotten it when he came around again, STILL yelling it out ad nauseum. That coupled with a store temperature so hot it felt like my brain was boiling in my skull made me come dangerously close to just shouting, "Someone, kill me now, please!!!" It didn't help at all that some of the girls recounting us had already cooked off one brain cell too many and kept insisting we were wrong, making the supervisor waste endless minutes rechecking them and trying to explain that we were right while I tried to count practically the entire store alone. Unbearable.

In lighter news, Tabby invited me to the Gay Pride parade Sunday which I am looking forward to immensely, even with the full awareness that I might go home alone if she hooks up with someone (conversely, if she DOESN'T hook up, with every lesbian in the city in her vicinity, she might very well give up on finding anyone completely and resign herself to spinsterhood at the tender age of 22). Tery has never been to a parade (neither have I) and refuses to start now, with the excuse that she "doesn't want to draw attention to" herself. She doesn't see the patent ludicrousness of this statement, given that she's already out to everyone who knows her at work, at home, at social gatherings. I guess her Closet has varying degrees, rather than a definitive In and Out. That's fine, considering this morning she turned to me suddenly and asked why I don't look like Ellen DeGeneres, after I've spent weeks trying to assure her she's just as beautiful as the first day I met her (I fear the beginnings of a mid-life crisis might be upon her). Bitch. I'm still going (assuming I'm not working) and maybe will have some nice piccies to share from it. Hey, maybe there will be some religious protestors and I can get in a fight! Oh boy oh boy oh boy....