I Have A Love-Hate Relationship With The Bay Fair Target

Today, I went to the Target in Bay Fair for the first time. Much like the Target off the Stadium Spur in Milwaukee (for those of you who are familiar with my homeland), this Target is bi-lingual due to the high percentage of the population demographic that is Hispanic. I had a blast laughing to myself at the sub-par English-Spanish translations. There’s something about seeing a vernacular phrase you see every day in another language that makes it seem utterly ridiculous. However, this fact also means that many of the employees are not familiar with my mother tongue. Which also happens to be the official language of this country.

In any event, I decided to start an herb garden on my fire escape (oregano and basil, not the California herb), so seeing as how this Target had a garden center, I was firmly in business. I first picked up some groceries, and a few things for my apartment (did you know ice cube trays are considered home storage? I didn’t.) and then headed to the garden center. Here’s the funny thing about me: while I’m shopping, I have a tendency to forget that I don’t have a car, a fact that is only remembered once I have passed the checkout. This means that I either have to get home on my bike, or on the train, both of which are almost equally daunting propositions when you are carrying enough groceries and/or housewares to outfit a small Mexican village. This lapse in memory and judgment has lead me to ride my bike home to South Berkeley from the Safeway in Oakland with six full bags of groceries on the handlebars. But I digress.

I walked around the store, picked up my plants, then realized that I needed pots for all of them. Then I realized that I needed dirt to fill the pots. Then I realized that I needed a cart because all this stuff sure as shit wasn’t going to fit in the tiny basket I was carrying. But at no point during all of these realizations did I think about having to carry several hundred pounds of garden supplies to the Bay Fair train station, then onto the train, then home from the Ashby station. I did realize this after I left the Target Store and saw the yawning expanse of parking lot that separated me from my train. So, being the resourceful person I am, I figured I could carry all my stuff across the parking lot in my cart, and then ditch the cart once I got to the edge of the lot. What I did not take into account was that the sneaky target bastards had a trap set for people like me. Turns out at this Target, if you take your cart beyond a certain point, the wheels lock up. Irreversibly. And that point happens to be the middle of the main road connecting all the stores in the shopping center. Which is where my cart still is. I figure if they want to put the electric fence there, they can fetch my cart back from the middle of the intersection with no working wheels. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to do them the courtesy. So I loaded all my bags into my arms, hiked to the Bart station, and waited for my train.

***

My central concern about this whole endeavor is the seemingly frivolous use of technology. Doesn’t it seem as though all the research that went into developing shopping carts whose wheels lock up could have been used for a better purpose? Like seriously is there a huge black market for stolen shopping carts? Because the last I checked, most people want shopping carts in the store, not outside of it. I would be really fucking pissed off about all this, except for the fact that my grand total for like eight bags worth of stuff was $44. Damn you, Target, and your incredibly inexpensive merchandise, making me forget that I was mad at you in the first place…

I Saw It On The Bart

So the other day when I was waiting (a fucking eternity) at the Ashby bart (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station for the Richmond train, I had an awesome idea. I said to myself, “self, you should make a segment on your blog dedicated to stupid shit that people do on the bart. You could call it ‘I saw it on the bart’ and it would be really funny and people would like you because of it. You could even have other people submit stories and then you could write a book based on stories other people have submitted to your blog just like ‘texts from last night’ and ‘fuck my life.’ Then you could get illegitimately wealthy by taking the work of others and claiming it as your own.” And then I looked at the scrolling marquee, which besides telling me that I still had 13 minutes until my train arrived said “Seen and heard on bart! www.bart.gov.” (People in the bay area have a really annoying habit to which I refuse to succumb, which is dropping the article in front of bart. So instead of saying, “I took the bart,” they just say, “I took bart.” Which, because bart sounds like a proper name, makes it seem like they are discussing an actual person in train form. Which is weird. But I digress.) So anyway, I got really fucking pissed that the bart website had taken my idea and I resolved to put plan “I saw it on the bart” into action anyway. So without further ado, here is the first installment.

I saw it on the bart Vol. 1 Ed. 1

Guy at the Ashby station full on sprinting down the up escalator with his bike to make the Freemont train. And then getting yelled at by the train driver for trying to take his bike in the front car. Saw that shit on the bart.

Guy getting real confused by the fact that you have to scan your ticket on the way out of the station as well as on the way in. OK, that was me. That’s not how trains work on the east coast…

Ok, I didn’t really see this on the bart, but outside the downtown Berkeley station some dude was smoking a joint. At 8:30 on a Sunday morning. In public. What was even funnier was the black woman who walked by and said, aloud: “damn somebody be smokin’ them grapes.” Awesome.

Two homeless dudes fighting over a boom box at the top of the escalator of the 16th Street Mission station. This was at once hilarious, and terribly sad.

Two teenage girls getting stuck between two train cars of a moving train because they let the door close behind them before they opened the one in front of them. It made me chuckle.

Hippie man who clearly got dressed in 1969 (sporting flowered shirt, headband, full beard, etc) sitting on a woven blanket playing a sitar. Dude. It’s the year of our lord jesus christ two thousand and nine. This means three things: 1) Playing a sitar hasn’t been cool in approx. 30 years. 2) Lighting a candle and sitting on a blanket outside the Powell bart station has never been cool. 3) You should go to the barber and tell him you’re sick of looking like an asshole. I wanted to hit him upside the head with a fashion magazine. Although it was a pretty interesting dichotomy: him sitting there sporting his 1960s gear with Barney's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Louis Vuitton not half a block away. Funny.

***

So here’s the funny thing about “I saw it on the bart”: it looks as though it’s going to end even before it really gets on it’s feet, due to the bart worker’s strike that will be going into effect on Monday. I was mad enough about this strike when it just prevented me from getting to San Francisco in under five hours, now I can also be mad about the fact that it is ruining my ability to find wonderful unintended humor at the expense of others. Hell.

Observations

Since I’ve now spent a almost five hours in Berkeley, CA, and since that pretty much makes me an expert, I’d like to share some observations that I’ve made during that time.

1. Almost everyone in Berkeley is a hippie, with two exceptions: surfers and the homeless. Not that any of these are mutually exclusive, however.
2. Shit is fucking expensive here. My six-pack of Newcastle was $8.65, and that was before bottle deposit and the staggering 8.75% sales tax. I’m pretty sure I paid like $4 for a fucking box of mac and cheese.
3. People carry marijuana in the open.
4. The trains run more frequently, and smell less like pee than those on the east coast.
5. The weather is nigh on perfect all the time.
6. Cars actually yield right of way to pedestrians.
7. People smoke marijuana in the open.
8. Fucking everyone rides a bike.

Addendum

ok i thought i was done making fun of people in the airport, but clearly not. a whole fucking squadron from the army just got off a plane, all wearing fatigues, and one of them actually had a camo-print travel pillow? why the fuck do you need that? so you can fucking hide out while you catch some z's on the plane? i think not...

Fuck Twitter

Ok, since Twitter's being a douche, here are some points of note from the Salt Lake City Airport. This is what I would have Twittered if that stupid ass website would let me post shit.

1. SLC smells strongly of fart.
2. holy shit just saw a kid get landed on his ass because he tried to outrun his kiddie leash on the moving walkway. fucking priceless.
3. the guy sitting next to me just rolled up with a full ass bag of groceries. where the fuck did he get that? did he bring it with him? is there a grocery store in the airport?
4. shout out to the guy who just walked past sporting a x-large Hawaiian shirt, blue scrubs, and a straw hat with buttons on it.
5. old people shouldn't be allowed in airports or on planes.

at least my flights are on time so far.

Travel Update

Just a quick update: I fly to California tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed that this isn’t like any of my recent trips (if you are confused, please scroll down) and I can go back to normal, uneventful travel that happens in only one day. If Twitter starts working again, I will post updates throughout the day, most likely starting at 4am sharp when I wake up for my 6am flight. Yeah. It’s gonna be crappy. But crappy for me generally means funny for you. Remember the formula: tragedy+time=comedy. Especially if the tragedy didn’t happen to you.