It's been a big weekend.
  Truth be told, I'm not even really up to giving you all the details right now, so I'll just break it down for you quick-like.
1) I have a new (to me) car. It's a Mercury Mystique, which is 11 years and 160,000 miles newer than my old car. I got it for the bargain price of $1.00, because
2) My sole remaining grandparent, my father's mother Isabel, has finally been moved out of her house into an assisted living facility. This has been a long time coming, but I still had a bad moment when I started thinking about how Grandma was sleeping in a strange bed while I was sleeping in a bed in the house she lived in for about 60 of her 89 years.
  I'll fill in all the details later. Remind me to show you the pictures of my fabulous new wheels, tell you all about Grandma's new digs, and especially about her wonderfully insane new roommate Flora.

I was at work when it happened.
  When I am old an gray and so riddled with Alzheimer's that I can't even recall which hand I use to adjust my glasses, I will still be able to remember turning on the radio and hearing them say that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
  I also remember riding in my mother's car and hearing the radio say that the Challenger had exploded. That was in 1986, and I can still remember the smell of the heater, the frost riming the rear windows, and the chill of the leather seats. The man on the radio was describing it as it happened. He sounded much like the poor soul whose voice we so often hear breaking down at the sight of the Hindenburg's immolation. I remember him babbling something about seeing an escape pod, which later turned out to just be more smoke and debris. I was actually kind of angry at that guy, for giving me that kind of false hope.
  Almost everyone has an indelible moment like this stamped on their psyche. Whether it's a shared experience, like the Kennedy assassination (part I or II), or more personal, like the morning Mom sat my sister and me down on the couch to tell us that her father had died, tragedy has a way of searing itself onto the brain, knotting itself into the neurons in such a powerful way that it becomes a vivid beacon in an otherwise grey, featureless fog of faded recollection.
  It may seem morbid or grotesque that these events stand out so markedly, and rehashing them may strike you as distasteful. On the contrary, I believe it is absolutely vital that we always remember the impact that events like this have on us. They are a powerful reminder that history isn't something that was used up by the things that happened before we were born, and it's not just black-and-white war film or Ken Burns documentaries. History happens every day, and it's our responsibility to make sure that the people who are going to inherit this country and this planet from us have more than just record debt and the possible insolvency of Social Security and Medicare to remember us by. They need to know that this country is not a monolith. It is vital and creative, capable of growth and change and vulnerable to injury. Most importantly, they need to know how these things affect ordinary people.
  The feeling of pride and unity that developed two years ago seems to have all but evaporated. If we share our stories and remind each other what we felt for the victims, for ourselves, and for our country, maybe we can recapture some of that sense of ourselves as a nation.
  Then again, there's an election season right around the corner...

  Attention, aspiring singers/songwriters/DJs/MCs. Heh heh. I bet you thought I was going to share something useful or productive with you. Alas, LBB doesn't care about your budding career. Retail jobs for everyone! (Damn, I am so bitter.)
  Anyway, here's something fun, at the very least. Songfight is a site that runs a weekly contest. They give you a subject, then you have a few days to write, record and post a song. Visitors to the site can then listen to and rank your song. Every week, a winner is declared. It's exposure, and a deadline to help you flex your chops. Check it out!
  If you're not trying to reinvent the modern musical landscape, you should check out Songfight, too. It's usually fun, always original, and often surprising for the depth of talent some of the posters display. Click now.

  Cowboy Mouth rocks my socks, and several other articles of clothing not normally affected by loud sounds. They're playing at the TLA on South Street in Philly on October 11th. You should go. It's a very fun, energetic, involved performance that engages and entertains. If you don't leave a Cowboy Mouth show feeling happily exhausted, you obviously hit the bar too many times. I'd be going, but I have a wedding that day, so I'm going to take Amy down to DC the following night and catch them at the 9:30 Club. Don't come unless you want to rawk! If you do want to rawk, tell your friends and neighbors, and share the rawk with them, too. They'll thank you for it, I promise.
  As a special bonus (Keren, I'm lookin' at you, here), Cracker is opening for both shows! It's a double dose of rawk. \m/_

  "Yer a bit of an idjit, ain't you?"
  "Well sir, I don't-"
  "Oh, I know. Yer momma probly calls ya 'challenged,' or 'special,' or some other fancy word. But the god's-honest truth is that ya ain't bright enough to light up a dark closet, are ya boy?"
  I'd never heard anyone speak about me so plainly, with so little pretense. He sat there on the porch, idly pulling at the peeling paint, flicking aside the drops of condensation that had pooled in in the cracks where he'd set his can of beer. His gray eyes stared levelly at me from under the brim of his sweat-stained cap.
  "Nossir, I suppose I ain't... I'm not terribl' smart. I try to learn things, but is seems like they just fall right outta m'head."
  His gaze flicked away, out into the dusty dirt yard. "There, now," he grunted. "It's out'n the open and we kin deal with it. Ain't no shame in being stupid, boy. Worst possible thing you c'do is go 'round foolin' yerself about it. Nothin' worse than a damn fool tryin' to convince hisself he's got more brains'n he was blessed with."
  His eyes twitched back and took me in completely. And not just the me in front of him, but all of me, my life stretching all the way back to the womb. I sometimes believe that, if he'd stared at me long enough, my uncle could have looked right back into the past and seen the faces of all the ancestors whose blood ran in my veins. Instead, he looked out past the yard at the cloud of dust just topping the hill that separated our land from the county's.
  "Just you remember, boy. There ain't many places in this life that intelligence kin take you, where hard work'n persistence can't git you just as well."

 So there I am,
puttering around my surrogate bookstore, when the store's security guard comes over. She's not charging, exactly, but she's moving with more urgency than I've ever seen her exhibit. She motors over, looks up and me and says, "I have to talk to you in the back."
 We'd been listening to a jangling alarm from the second floor, and watching mall security block off the escalators, with a sort of amused, speculative, no-ever-tells-us-anything curiosity. I assumed that she'd finally gotten someone to give her a straight answer about what was actually going on. I somehow managed to miss the depth of anxiety apparent in her wide eyes and clenched teeth.
  Once she'd dragged me to the back room, she blurted it out. Someone had found a suspicious package, and the mall was being evacuated. She hadn't been able to get much more information, but the stores were closing, and we had to get all of our customers out.
  We proceeded to inform all of our customers that we'd been told to close. We were hot, man. A calm exit, no panic; we handled it like we'd been facing the possibility of being blown up daily for years. As we were getting our evacuation on, a mall guard on her way past the store shouted at us that we could stay in our closed store, once we'd gotten all of our customers to safety. I called my District Manager to tell her what was happening, and she and I agreed that we could close everything up, put all the money in the safe, and go home, foregoing the last hour of business in favor of not being trapped under three collapsed stories of retail rubble.
  To make a long story slightly less long, it turned out that it wasn't going to be that simple. As we were preparing to beat it, we were informed that the mall was planning to reopen in 20 minutes. I was relieved, since 20 minutes seemed like an awfully short evacuation if anyone was really concerned about the package in question. However, my relief was somewhat tempered by the fact that I was facing having to go through the trouble of getting my store running again to do business for another half an hour.
  So, I didn't die. Yay, and such. However, I was treated to an incompetent, lopsided response to a potentially serious problem,a disturbing lack of concern for the safety of myself and my co-workers and further proof that people are just not as highly regarded as the chance to make a few bucks. Sometimes, knowing what's going on is really depressing.

I don't really have that much to say.
  But, I'm trying to make a commitment to writing more often, so I'm going to share something with you. Here goes.

  As I'm sure you're tired of reading by now, I support my bastardly habits (and pay my half of the rent so Amy won't beat me) by working in a bookstore. We're a chain store, and when managers from other stores take vacations, we sometimes get to go fill in at their stores. Last week, I got to cross the beautiful, cinder-block-clear Delaware River, and fill in at a store in Philth-adelphia.
  I don't get into Philthy as often as I probably should. I'm never cool enough to know what bands are playing, and I do a radio show on Friday nights, so I never get to the First Friday events, where all the art galleries are free and such. So any chance to go to the city and get paid for it is always welcome. I drove my LB butt up to the Patco station and rode the train in, what amounts to triple the commute for basically the same job.
  The first night went pretty well. Counterintuitively, the customers that I interact with in the city tend to be more pleasant than my regular suburban Jerseyites. They're more thankful when you can help them, more gracious when you can't, and they're just tend to be nicer in general. I came to appreciate this all the more on my second night, when I had to ask them all to leave an hour before closing.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Slack Ass Mo-Fos.

  I am of the opinion that the Summer Reading List is a fabulous idea. I'm sure that, when I was a student, I would have balked at the idea of squandering my three cherished months of freedom to read anything I wanted choking down some ancient tome. With a few years of perspective, I see the wisdom of trying to keep at least the vestige of critical thinking percolating in the minds of teenagers being bombarded by a summer's worth of MTV and Jerry Bruckheimer movies. When I was in high school back in the Cretaceous, we didn't have a Summer Reading List. I was lucky enough that my parents instilled an interest in reading in me from an early age, so my I.Q. only descended into the realm of advanced apes, rather than to the depths of gelatin. For those students who don't read for pleasure, however, it certainly can't hurt to have something that will coerce them into at least minimal cogitation.
  I maintain my endorsement of The List despite the fact that it provides an annual source of aggravation at my day job. As a bookseller, it's my job to provide the books that the schools assign to their students. Some of the schools will occassionally assign an obscure or out of print title, which is annoying, but not ultimately too traumatic. No, the real rabid badger in my oatmeal are the parents who come in to buy their kids' summer reading books the day before school starts.
  I encountered a lighthouse-glaring example of this problem today. (It will help to keep in mind that today is September 1st. The child in question has known about this assignment for almost three months.) A woman (who I will heretofor refer to as Mrs. "Your-Kid-Should-Fucking-Fail," or Mrs. YKSFF) came in with a crude, handwritten list of nine books which were her son's options for his summer reading. He was required to read two of the selected books, and write a report on each for the first day of school. Mrs. YKSFF wanted three (3) questions answered about each book. 1) Was it shorter than the other books on the list? 2) Was there a junior adaptation available, which would preserve the plot and characters, but would probably be easier to read and (in a sneaky reference to item one) be shorter? 3) Was there a movie based on the book that he could watch?
  By now, you're probably wondering why, if he didn't have his books at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on the day before school started, why he didn't come to the mall himself to get them. That's what you would have done, right? You might have started reading them in the car on the way home, in order to avoid wasting any more time. I was wondering the very same thing. In fact, I was close to leaping onto her back and whacking her on the head with the Junior Classics version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, while screaming "Why are you helping your lazy slacker spawn?" over and over. Luckily for me, she provided an explanation. Apparently, Junior YKSFF was still "at the shore."
  There are times when it takes a physical effort to squelch the bitter retort forming on my lips. When I have to clench my jaw and not tell Mrs. YKSFF to her face that she's a craven, callow cow (alliteration always awesome) who is too stupid to understand that her indulgence is just reinforcing her son's irresponsible behavior. It was a struggle, which I finally won by pointing out to myself that the odds were Mrs. YKSFF wouldn't even know what callow meant, and that if she did, I was just about guaranteed to lose my job. So I swallowed my caustic comment, and instead hooked her up with both the regular and apdapted 20,000 Leagues, and the novelization of the screenplay for West Side Story. I felt vaguely dirty helping Mrs. YKSFF, knowing that I was an accomplice in her son's slacktitude, but I was able to comfort myself with the knowledge that his report was destined to be a pile of rancid goat cheese, and he was likely about to pull an all-nighter, only to write two papers barely worth using to wipe the ass of his school's mascot. Of course, he'll probably go to college on an athletic scholarship...

Today was dancing kids day...
  I know, I missed the memo too. But it was happening too damn frequently to be a coincidence, so I can only assume that the Deptford Mall was holding some sort of event for dancing, 6-and-under epileptics. The only other explanation is that someone has invented a dog whistle which only young children can hear, that makes them shimmy rather than sit or heel.
  They were everywhere. This one's groovin' in the aisle, these two are shakin' it in the archway, this one is doing what can only be described as a sideways moonwalk. On my way to the Food Court for lunch, I saw a child who was attempting to swim the 100 meter freestyle standing up. He was bent at the waist, kicking his legs behind him and waving his arm (the one that his mother wasn't using to drag junior Mark Spitz down the hall) with a determined scooping motion. I was sort of hoping the kid would wriggle out of his mother's grip, just so I could find out whether he would actually lie down on the floor or just lean forward far enough that he'd fall and bust his nose wide open on the shiny white linoleum. Alas, his mother held fast, so I only got to see him kick hard enought to lose a shoe. And it didn't even hit anyone. *sigh*

If you're young enough that you have to sneak online to
view pornography while Mom and Dad are at work, shove off.
There aren't any naked people here, but there are some naughty words.
If you're old enough that you shouldn't feel guilty for doing so, keep reading.

I hear you have a beautiful girlfriend,
  who isn't:
A) little
B) bald
C) or a bastard
...how'd you get her?
-in love with your girlfriend
Dear In Love,
  What can I say? There's something very attractive about college graduates who work in retail. Women are overwhelmed. All you have to do is labor way below your potential, and you'll have chicks up to your eyebrows. But don't fool yourself. There isn't a single one of those bottom feeders who's half as smart or attractive as my girlfriend. She was obviously a gift from the patron saint of sarcastic advice columnists, and as such is way out of your league. And mine, now that I think about it.

Dear LBB,
  In a past life did you work at hell pit called Regal? I also heard that you are in a comic book. In it they say you have a spider scribbled on your shiney Dome. Are either of these true?
-Kevin Oscar Myers

P.S. I have a bunch of divits in my head, one is from getting hit by a ski lift. Will lard help them?

Dear Kevin,
  It is true what they tell you. I did, for five months in mid-2001, support my bastardly existence by working as a projectionist for the Regal Cinema in Turnersville, NJ. Although I don't remember a pit of any sort, the smell of the xenon projector bulbs was suspiciously reminiscent of brimstone.
  Sadly, I was never actually in a comic book. However, I did rip off my look (and, now that I think about it, the bulk of my personality) from a fabulous nugget of graphic storytelling called Transmetropolitan, written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Darick Robertson. The main character, Spider Jerusalem, is a journalist in a far future America. He's sort of a cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Attila the Hun. He's also bald and sarcastic, so do the math.
  Incidentally, lard, taken internally, will fill your arteries with delicious plaque, but will do very little for your deformed scalp. But if you smear it into the grooves, smooth it over with a putty knife, and cover it with an appropriate shade of concealer, it should go a long way toward making your gouged cranium appear intact.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Who do you feel is the most attractive Disney character?
- F'ing Goofy
Dear F'ing,
  It's a little difficult to fathom being terribly attracted to characters from what are, generally, movies made for seven-year-olds. However, when put on the spot, I'd have to say Bruce Willis in The Kid. There's just something intriguing about an actor who can make every line of a light comedy sound like "I'm going to break my fucking agent's neck."

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  What one thing did you do in college that you'd be most horrified to tell your parents about?
- Moving Off Campus
Dear Moving,
  With any luck, Mom and Dad Bastard will never know that I'm bald because of a bizzare incident involving a bottle of Elmer's glue, a bottle of tequila, and a triple-dog dare.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  If you had to ask me a question, what would it be?
- Wanna BB
Dear Wanna,
  What do you do when your own personality is so weak and depressing that you start wishing you were someone else, just so you could have some semblance of a life?
  For pity's sake, at least fixate on someone who likes to look at him or herself in the mirror. (But not all the time. That's just creepy.)