mallorys_camera | Superbowl Sunday

Singing, dancing Homer Simpsons have a short half-life. I've had to replace the one in front of my store four times in the past year. Some of this is due to wear and tear on plastic gears that were never designed to stand up to a hundred performances a day, but most of it is due to rude customers; either badly behaved children who beat on him while their gutless parents watch or equally badly behaved adults who drape themselves over him for photo opportunities in defiance of the big sign I put on his chest: "Sensitive male with boundary issues. PLEASE DON'T TOUCH THE HOMER."

Anyway, a particularly insufferable couple was molesting Homer yesterday afternoon. I let them go the first time when the girl sidled up to him, pushed hard on his shoulders and stuck her tongue in the space where his ear would be if singing, dancing plastic Homer Simpsons had ears but the second time when she started shaking her bootie at his crotch, nearly knocking him off his stand, I'd had enough and marched out of the store.

"What's the matter with you?" I snarled. "Can't you read? I'm curious. Are you an idiot or just an obnoxious jerk?"

The girl laughed uncomfortably, murmured apologies and backed off. She was a pretty thing, dark-haired, doe-eyed with a vague foreign accent. "Sorry, sorry."

But the boyfriend for whose camera she'd been posing was not about to give up so easily. "You don't have to insult her. Asking her if she can read! That's obnoxious. We're not doing anything."

"That's my property, see? It's got a big-ass old sign on it: don't touch."

"What kind of a question is that: 'Can you read?'"

He got in my face. We were gibbering at each other like monkeys.

"Oh, great," I said. "The big strong male protects his woman. Well. Let me tell you something, asshole. If you were a real man, you wouldn't be wandering around Cannery Row taking soft-porn shots with cartoon characters. You'd be home watching the Super Bowl like every other real man in America today. And maybe beating her up afterwards."

His mouth literally fell open. There was simply no comeback to this.

When I walked back into the store, my hands were shaking. The Retail Gods ain't gonna like that, I told myself but in fact the Retail Gods got the joke just and in the next fifteen minutes before I shut the store early to go watch the Super Bowl myself, rewarded me with about $100 in business.

In other news, while I was proofing one of Max's English papers I came across this quote:

The existentialist...thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be a priori of God, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is that we are on a plane where there are only men... That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. --Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism.

Neat summary of my current crisis point – like I say, I'm ripe for religious conversion, if only there was a televangelist au courant with The National Enquirer.