wrong about costco

Over the weekend, between rock shows, reunions, and booze, I had some great conversations about lots and lots of retarded shit! Some of them were with my friend Stacia and at her behest I am going to write a post involving one of those convos. But why stop there? I've decided to make this week here at BAABP "Dork Week". Not only will you be treated to 5 (count'em!) posts this week and all of them will be so filled with dorkery that by the end you might find yourself saying things like "Spiderman didn't have organic web-shooters!" or "Band of Horses are just a rip-off of My Morning Jacket." So I am starting this glorious week off with something that happened to me all the way back in the fall of 2006. It's a story about where being an oblivious dork really can be pretty funny, and it's not about me.

I was sent to Costco this day due to the fact that a tire had asploded on the company truck while I was driving it to Spokanistan. It was just before Christmas so of course there was going to be a long wait, as there would be other people preparing to take the pass over the holidays. In other words; I was in it for the long haul. So, after dropping off the keys at the tire center I decided on a little jaunt around the massive warehouse. I always head straight to the "tech" section, where today I spent most of my time trying to crash the cheap ass computers and changing the desktop backgrounds to the Walmart logo. After about an hour of that (literally) I went back to the food hutch area, not because I was hungry, I had actually filled up on microwaved crab-cakes and triscuits with jalepeno artichoke cheese spread at some of the sample tables in between my computer hacking.

The weirdest thing for me about Costco is the aforementioned food hutch area. It's located at the end of your shopping journey and basically the only way you can get to it is after you've already paid for your 10 gallon jar of mayonnaise. When you go to Costco you don't just go there to spend fifty bucks, you go there to spend more like 200. My question is; why after spending a couple hundred dollars or more on various goods and sundry would you want to spend another 5 dollars on some crappy pizza or for that matter anymore time there? But the single weirdest thing for me is the seating. You are basically made to perch on what can only be described as poorly constructed indoor picnic tables, which for some reason have umbrellas over them. I don't claim to be any expert on indoor seating but I am pretty sure that you are well protected from the elements when you are inside. Digression.

I find a seat at one of the empty tables, whip out my cell phone and settle in for a good round of Uno. It doesn't take long for my table to become unempty as 4 of the remaining 6 seats are filled by a very young very Japanese family. I really didn't give them much thought other than to remark to myself at how cute their two kids were and that the father was writing a letter or something in Japanese. We sat quietly respecting each others space, until some dude in his early twenties came and sat across from me next to the Japanese wife, who was across from her Japanese husband. A minute or two passed as our new young guest noshed on a giant hot-dog. I could see him stealing quick glances at the Japanese husbands writings, until the dood said something I couldn't decipher, but could only guess was Japanese. The husband looked up smiled, and said something back to the dood, who also smiled and said "Sorry, I only know a little Japanese, I just recognized that Kanji character." To my utter horror and embarrassment the dood went on to start spitting extremely bad and simple Japanese to not only the husband but the wife, and children as well. These people new less English than that dood knew Japanese yet he kept trying to communicate with them, by acting like a big dumb American and pointing at various objects and saying their Japanese equivalent. This shit went on for 5 more unbearable minutes until the Japanese family spared the doods life by getting up and leaving but not before exchanging many bows and other pleasantries. I say "they" spared his life because I believe they could sense how humiliated I felt for him and the rest of American society, so much so that I was willing to take this man's life right in front of them just to preserve my honor.

I guess the worst part of this was how oblivious this dork was. I know a little, French, Spanish, and Chinese, but that doesn't mean I will walk up to anyone hailing from a nation that speaks one of those languages and just start spouting out phrasal verbs like some kind of retarded parrot. This guy couldn't have picked a better target though, for as we all know, the Japanese as a whole are eternally polite, so really he was just taking advantage of this fact, though again he was probably not aware of it.

So how does this all tie in to dork week? You mean aside from this doods obvious social faux-pas and why he is what gives nerds, geeks, and dorks a bad name everywhere? Here it is: It's every dorks dream to go and live in Japan, and I am not excluded. It's just that some of us know that Japan isn't only about anime, video games and ninjas.

It's also about Hentai. (Can you believe some nerd spent this much time writing that shit out?!)

P.S. My good friend Cal pointed me to an excellent site that he has been writing for, and I must say that his album review of Malajube's latest is not only one of the best reviews I've read in a long time, but also one of the most well written. Record reviews are not easy to write people, and Cal seems to have a knack for it.