Wow, I almost forgot to tell you about my Bad Times at a CVS! It was in the parking lot at the Western and Elston location one night a few weeks ago. Chris and I were stopping there on our way home. I’d started to pull into a parking space when I saw an even closer spot along the side of the building, and directly across the aisle from me. For some reason I decided I HAD to park in that spot—that I would be a total chump to not park there, considering that all I had to do was coast straight ahead five yards or so. There were no cars in between, only open space and a single pigeon puttering around. I pulled ahead a few feet and stopped.
“I’m waiting for the pigeon,” I told Chris. Somehow it hadn’t flown away yet. There were parked cars on either side, so I couldn’t just drive around the pigeon. I rolled forward—slowly—and stopped again. Now I couldn’t see the pigeon.
“It flew away, right?” I asked Chris. “It had to have flown away,” he said. I pulled ahead into the parking spot and turned off the car. I had a funny feeling, though, and sure enough, when I looked back there was a crumpled ball of grey feathers right where I’d driven.
We got out and just stood by the car and stared for a minute. “How did I manage to kill it?” I said out loud. I was a little stunned. I wanted to blame my car. Maybe my Subaru Forester was a big clumsy killer, I thought, just like the halfwit in Of Mice and Men.
“Don’t worry about it,” Chris said. “It’s the city. It’s a dead pigeon.”
Another couple had come out of CVS and were walking to their car, which, as it turned out, was pretty much right next to the dead pigeon. The man had just walked over to the driver’s side when he spotted it a few feet away. He stopped, rather dramatically. “I think you just took out a bird,” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Weird, huh?”
But the guy just stood there, frozen with either horror or disgust. He opened his car door as if to get in, but then froze again. Definitely with digust. “God,” he said. He shook his head. “God,” he said again. The woman who was with him waited on the passenger side of the car. “Honey?” she said. “Let’s go.” The man looked at us one last time. He actually sighed. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
We could feel him glaring at us through the windshield as he started his car. “Does he think I ran over that bird just to ruin his day?” I asked Chris. “He thinks that, doesn’t he?”
“Good for you,” Chris said, and then we went in to shop at CVS. Though we have yet to determine whether this incident makes this CVS a Bad Times CVS.
In other news, USA Today liked my book just fine last year and thought us bloggers with book deals were just peachy, but apparently Stephanie Klein’s book sucks so bad that the rest of us now suck in retrospect. Awesome! Thanks, Stephanie Klein!
(Also, I hope Carol Memmott writes more publishing trend sidebar pieces about books written by people who got their start writing things that totally weren’t even books. Like maybe she can write about all those journalists who only got their book deals because they’re journalists, and who don’t make the USA Today Best-Selling Books List because, in the end, they’re nothing but journalists who can’t write anything as good as The Kite Runner or The Clique #6: Dial L for Loser (A Clique Novel) and therefore ought to go back to journalism, where they were “bigger” anyway, according to the latest hypothetical un-statstical non-data she’ll totally forget to cite.)
Side note 1: I’m going camping in Michigan this weekend, so any comments left after tonight may not appear on the site until Sunday night or Monday. Though, hey, if you’re a disgrunted Stephanie Klein fan, maybe you’ll just leave a multiple one-star reviews on my Amazon page just like you did with my friend Jen Lancaster’s book.
Side note 2: You know, I haven’t even READ Stephanie Klein’s book yet and I don’t know if I will, though if USA Today reporters are going to equate blog books with self-indulgent suckage, I’d sort of like to know what I’m being blamed-by-association for, so maybe I will read it, though when I do, maybe I’ll keep my mouth shut and stay out of all this.
Side note 3: Wow, I think I need to calm down. Let’s all watch this highly amusing video ad for John Hodgman’s book, shall we?
