on wednesday

I think it was Wednesday – I wasn’t sleepy, and had a bit of Bourbon, and Amanda had already konked out for the evening, so I decided to go wander around downtown. This was back in the joyous days when I had an operating camera and I could spend the beautifully blustery evenings taking pictures all over the city. [insert mournful sobbing here] [insert opportunity for mysterious, anonymous donors that seem to visit all blogs other than mine to donate money for a shiny new digital SLR here]

Anyways, I was on Commerce, taking pictures of a crane (none of them really turned out), and here’s what happened:

I was accosted by three or four women that had obviously had too many beers (that is, one, maybe two) at the Predators game. “What are you doin?!”, they asked, clearly skilled in the arts of wooing potential mates like myself. “Takin pictures?”, they continued, despite my best efforts at pretending I was deaf:

“Yes.”
“Of what?”
“The crane”
“Why?”

I resisted, here, countering with the only gambit I knew for repelling drunk hockey-goers: lying:

“I work for the crane company, and they want some pictures.”

This was off the top of my head and was not as banal as I had hoped, but honestly, even if you do want to talk to some guy taking pictures of a crane for a crane company, wouldn’t you at least feel bad about bothering him while he’s doing it?

Well, not these girls. They were persistent. So I played the nice guy, and humored them. They were from Columbia, they all work at the same McDonald’s, blah de blah. “Are you union?”, I asked, and got vacant stares like I had just flung poop at them. Eventually they wandered off.

Then, when I got at home, exhausted, I drank my own weight in water (highly recommended), only to hear the phone ring. My home phone – the useless, atrophied appendage of my internet connection. It never rings, because no one calls me on it unless they’re interested in money, but never at 12AM on a Thursday. So I answered it, because I am the adventurous type. It was those girls. They had looked me up in the phone book. This is where I had one of those “wtf?” moments. No, not “wtf? these girls looked me up in the phone book? that’s psycho” (that came later), but rather, “wtf? I’m in the phone book?”, followed by “wtf? they still make phone books?”

It was then, in the 1/15th of a second between when I answered and when I responded that I thought: there’s an interesting sociology paper to be written in the class distinctions between someone that would stalk someone by first looking them up in the phone book versus those that would first look them up on Google.

Anyways, I answered as best I could muster “uh, hi, yeah I’m the camera guy, uh huh, yeah, right, gotcha, uh huh, okay, gotta go, going to bed *click*”. I handled it pretty well, I thought, except for the part where I let her slip in a “so I’ll call you tomorrow” before I hung up. Rookie mistake.

So like clockwork on Friday, they (she? maybe, but I assume they called again in a group like last time, for moral support) called, and Amanda answered instead, and they hung up (pussies), so I assume that’s that. No, I never told them I had a girlfriend, but hey, they never asked. I didn’t realize we were in some sort of fucked up mating ritual. I was just trying to take some damn pictures.