Sunday morning, Dean and Jim came home from their nightshifts to get some sleep.
I went out to the local coffee diner to get some breakfast. I picked up a copy of the San Rubio Times newspaper. It was just 16 pages. It was the Sunday edition. It cost $2.00. It's no wonder that the newspapers are a shadow of their former selves if all they can do is charge a high price for so few pages. This is ridiculous!
The Sunday edition had just two comic strips. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (yup, Disney characters) were the only strips allowed in the newspapers. Worse yet, there was no sports section, no classifieds (thanks to Greg's List), no weekly TV listings books, no features.
I scanned the whole paper in a mere 10 seconds looking for whatever headlines interested me. I did notice something odd. Reports of space ships from another time or dimension were materializing and vanishing at a wormhole along the stretch of highway 125, especially near the Wal Fart location near Mount Scooby and Drew Carey's Ford and Hyundai. Dean works overnights at Wal Fart stocking toys in the graveyard shift. What were the space aliens here for in the wee hours of the morning? Why did they come and go so fast?
I scanned the newspaper and saw a couple of familiar names. Chachi, our old friend, is the coach of the San Rubio Carp baseball team in Shocker, Arid Zone. At least I found out where one of my main men were at. I looked at the roster of player hopefuls and I noticed another familiar name trying out to make the baseball team. Mindy the hermaphrodite vampire slayer. I hope she's not taking steroids to make the team. Don't want to spoil her Buffy at 18 look.
Well, as soon as I, Dean, and Jim save up enough money, we'll drive on over to the Carp spring training camp to meet up with Chachi and ask him about the whereabouts of Scotty, Hoss, our female friends, and other folks.
Later in the day, Dean woke up and he told me that around 2am, a spaceship descended upon the Will Call department of Wal Fart. Some guy with a Scottish accent and a former NFL quarterback build with greyish hair was looking for his folks. I asked Dean who they were that he was asking for. He said "Chachi." Dean asked him way. The man said that it was top secret. Then he and the spaceship left, went southeasternwards toward Mount Scoob, and disappeared through a wormhole.
I wonder if that's Scotty. Looked and sounded familiar. Dean doesn't know him too well yet. I asked Dean if I could apply for the toy stocker night shift job at Wal Fart so I could possibly meet up with the man if he comes around again in the spaceship. Dean told me that I was hired on the spot. Great. I got two jobs running from mid afternoon through the next morning like I had in 1986 when I worked some pizza place in Lakeside in the afternoon, then worked overnight at some red store Target stocking mostly toys tied in with TV cartoon shows of the era. What happened to Jem? Strangely enough in the fall of 1986, I noticed some weird sounds coming from outside like the sound of a Tardis or Enterprise whizzing by. Wonder if the space aliens were hitting La Mesa in 1986 then.
Dean also told me tha the was appointed the foreman of the night shift since the guy who was the boss was abducted by one of the space aliens the night before Dean was hired.
Jim woke up and said that he was fired from the gay adult toy store after four hours because he was personally testing some of them on himself. No need to get detailed about it here.
Around 1pm, we went out about the town to get into some kind of Vernamlas Holiday spirit by getting a taste of the culture. It was the last weekend of Equimas shopping and the stores were jam packed with shoppers.
There were no Equimas carols playing in the street's speakers becayse there was no such thing. There were just Christmas carols with the word Equimas substituting for the word Christmas in the lyrics.
We saw Equimas on the Prado complete with holiday symbols. There was a giant Equimas tree. There was a fake display of Santo Pedro and eight beefy flying buffalo. There was an actor playing Santo Pedro inside one of the stores, along with a long line of children asking Santo for a toy that wasn't tied in with Disney. Lotsa luck, kids!
Later on, Dean and Jim dropped me off at Papa's Hut for my evening delivery shift. I was just outside on the right hand side of the door, remaining unseen by anybody inside the store, when all of a sudden, I heard someone inside the store that was just too familiar.
It was Valerie Bertinelli inside the store. How did she get into El Zona? Does she read my diaries? Crap! Maybe I should have posted them after I got home. Anyway, she demanded that the manager get me so that she could draft me to lose weight at her Jenny Greg weight loss center that she was the spokeswoman for. Oh s--t! The folks I delivered pizzas to last night lied to me! Jenny Greg sicked Valerie on me!
I slowly backed away and hid behind a bush until Valerie left the store. Five minutes later, I entered the store for my shift. The manager told me that I just missed seeing Valerie. I told him that was good because I didn't want her to draft me as I can't afford any of their diet plans. The manager said that she was buying her son Wolfie a $100 Papa's Hut gift card for his 18th birthday, which was the next day, March 16. I said wow, that was cool.
Anyway, after my delivery shift in the 1970 remodeled Torino, and again, with nothing but Radio Disney artists on the radio stations, Dean and Jim picked me up from the place and drove me along the boulevard. We decided to stop in a Circus City electronics store since the parking lot was full and we figured that the store was busy with shoppers. When we got inside, there was nothing but cots and hundreds of homeless people. I asked the proprietor, a pastor, what happened to the store. He said that Circus City went out of business the month before and the Emo Church bought out the building. They converted it into a homeless shelter. All of the cars that are parked outside belong to the people sleeping inside. It's the same thing with the building formerly occupied by Thinens and Lings who went out of business the month before.
The funny thing about it was back in the 80s, the lot that's occupied by these two stores used to be the lot that was occupied by the old Black Front store, then it was bought out by Med Fart, then went out of business and became Bullseye where it sold Atari Pele Soccer cartridges for 50 cents apiece in 1983.
The economy in El Zona is really bad with people homeless and filling up the former stores turned into homeless shelters. Stores are going out of business. Banks are overstocked with homes that continue to lose value, heck, why can't they just lease them out for cheap and recover some of the money and let the homeless pay whatever they can afford to live inside them for a few years. It's better than asking the government for a federal bailout.
El Zona is depressing, yet there's a lot of holiday spirit going around. The region was still booming just three months ago when I visited during its nonholiday December 25th Gregorian Date equivilant. What happened to get the economy down so fast?
Anyway, it's midnight (Pacific Standard Time) where I'm at. I'm using Dean's portable computer to type this diary entry at Wal Fart. I'm still waiting for a possible return of the spaceship that might have Scotty inside the ship, and if I meet him again, I got a lot of questions that need answering.
I gotta get to work now, stocking Disney toys for the shoppers. Got a stack of High School Musical The Kindergarten Years to put on the shelves. Sheesh. Isn't Disney milking this enough? Not even gay Jim likes this stuff.
Cya tomorrow.
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