The single bell on a string bangs harshly against the glass to signal my entrance into the local liquor shop.   Hey, it’s the weekend; I’m entitled.  The click my heels make seems magnified in this store.  I wasn’t even home for an hour and didn’t even change, from my business-casual work clothes, before I decided to make a liquor run.  I pick up my favorite flavored drink: Smirnoff Ice.   A 12-pack is necessary for this weekend, I decide.

I go to the front of the store and watch as a man stumbles into my peripheral.

“I here first,”  He slurs, cutting in front of me.  I step back suddenly, the mans’ breath reeking of rum.  He slams a 30-pack of Budweiser beer cans onto the greasy counter.  “Ring it up!”

The guy behind the counter is young and built.  He grunts in reply.

“Come onnnnnn,”  The drunk guys says, swaying.  He’s wearing a suit, well, partially.  His necktie is dangling off, threatening to sink to the floor, his shirt if halfway undone in the back; his leather belt, looping gracefully around his waste, is the only clean thing about him, remnants of this morning, I guess, so very long ago.

“How are you doing there Ed?  23.80″, The cashier says.

“Fine,”  The drunk guy says shortly, handing him the bills he had out.

“1.20 is your change”, The cashier says, “Don’t go drinking that all at once, alright?”

Ed laughs weakly and picks up his box of beer, stumbling towards the door.  He’s on the wrong side of the door, so it doesn’t open right away.

“Dammit,”  Ed shouts, trying to pull the door in.  The sign right where he is pulling glows in the setting sun, ‘PUSH’.  “Dammit Josh you gotta’ fix this damn door sometime!”

“Mhm,”  The cashier, Josh, says, motioning me forward.

“Isn’t that illegal?”  I blurt out after Ed makes it successfully out the door, his fourth try.  I place my own box of beer on the counter.

“What is?”

“Giving alcohol to a clearly intoxicated person,”  I deadpan.

“Oh, him?”  Josh says, laughing, “That’s just Eddie-boy, he comes in here all the time.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to sell him alcohol when he’s like that…”  I say, pulling out my debit card.  I tap it on the counter, thinking.

“He’ll be fine,”  Josh says, looking for a minute like he is worried about dear old Ed.  In the next moment (maybe it was a trick of the light), a shadow passes his face, the feeling is gone.  “Besides, he’s good for business.”

I frown, looking out the window.  I watch as Ed has trouble opening up his trunk to put his beer box inside.  If anyone should not be allowed to drink, it’s this guy.  The license plate on his silver Lexus gleams brightly as the drunk guy backs out and heads north on the main road; I notice the numbers and try to remember them.

“Hey,”  The cashier, Josh, says, bringing me back into the store.

“What’s the total?”  I say, whipping out my cellphone.

“I already told you,”  Josh says, sighing.  He tells me again.  I hand him my credit card and dial 9-1-1.

“What’re you doing?!”  Josh glares at me, watching as I dial the numbers.  He looks at me, panicked, “You aren’t reporting me are you?”

“No,”  I say immediately.  Honesty is the best policy when the guy you are talking to looks like he wants to crush your cellphone into a million tiny pieces.

“Oh,” Josh says, looking more relaxed.

“Nine-one-one what is your emergency?”  A womans voice says smoothly.

“It’s not really an emergency, sorry,”  I say, inventing wildly, “I would like to report a drunk driver.  He is swerving in and out of lanes, I’m about to turn off the road to get to my house, but he is heading north.”

The operator asks what street, and I tell her.   I give her his license plate number as well, along with an intersection a few blocks north of here.

“Thank you for this information, we’ll take care of it from here,”  She says, and I had a strong urge not to say, “No, really?  Are you sure you don’t want me to tail him and try to pull him over?”

“Great, now Ed won’t be back for weeks!”  Josh says immediately after I hang up,  he looks genuinely upset.

“At least he’ll get to sleep it off,”  I say sarcastically.  Josh breaks into a grin as he swipes my card through the terminal.

“What?”  I say, putting my cellphone into my purse.

“It’s ironic, really,”  Josh says, looking at me as if seeing me plainly for the first time, “It’s ironic, that you would call the police on him, I mean, most of the customers who come in here look like, well…like you. And all of them are drunks, too.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,”   I say, shrugging as I adjust the sleeves of my business casual shirt.  Josh hands me my card - the transaction is over.  I pick up my flavored beer and walk towards the door, my shoes clicking with every step as I walk over the threshold, and into the night.

Who knows, maybe Ed was thinking of getting drunk and beating his wife, maybe he is just a lonely alcoholic looking to relive his party years.  Maybe he has kids who don’t talk to him.  Sure, it may have been inappropriate of me to call the cops on him, but I like to look at it as helping a potential victim of his if he were to run a red light or forget to stop at a stop sign.  Who knows.

So, a few weeks ago I realized that my cable is not working properly.  On my TV, sometimes I’m missing channels 36-40, other days, it’s 35-43, and most days it is channels 39-45.  This is America, dammit, and I shouldn’t be missing any channels, right??  Right!  Excuse me while I go spit tobacco out my window and pick my teeth with a fork.

I ended up calling the cable-guy to come check out why I was missing so many channels.  Discovery Channel among the ones that is frequently missing, I feel like I’m missing out a crucial part of my life, I mean, so much education, packed into one channel.  Where else can you see a breakdown of second-by-second of the Youtube video Battle at Kruger?

It seems that we assign personalities to each TV channel these days.  Discovery Channel are for those who want to feel like they are learning, but really the guy with the smooth voice is saying “monkey penis” and “watch as the elephant rolls in his own feces”.  Clever.  I know if I want to see gerbils who pick their nose and crack jokes, I’ll turn on Nickelodeon, alright?

The cable person arrives a week later; I guess the company had a hard time finding the right packaging material because he had Air Mail stickers all over him.  Whatever, I just want my cable fixed.  After looking at the snow channel on 40 for about 10 minutes and trying all the stuff that I already tried, I feel like he’s just waiting for me to yell out something like “Oh my god, I didn’t realize my TV had to be ON to get those channels!”.

Yeah, I already tried all the normal dumb-girl stuff; work with me here cable dude.

He leaves a few minutes later, proclaiming obviously that the channels aren’t working.  He comes back a few moments later with his own, small, TV.  He hooks up the cable to his TV and flips through all the channels.

And, all the channels work.

“I’m afraid that the tuner in your TV is going out,”  He says.

“Well, can I just buy a new one?”  I say, thinking about computer TV tuners; whenever those blow out you just buy another one, toss the old one and away you go.

“I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than that when it comes to TV’s,” He says, knowing that I was talking about computers.

Damn.  Well, it’s not surprising since my parents had this gigantic 32″ TV for the past several years in their front living room.  They bought a new TV, and this one resumed it’s life in storage until I got out of college.  Now, I have it.  I’m sure somewhere between the move, the storage, and my accusing stares, it broke.  So, now it’s either 1.  Get a VCR, or 2.  Buy a new TV.  Since VCR’s are approximately 1/8th the price of TV’s, I’ll go with the VCR, for now.

The last time my parents were here, they brought up a VCR for my enjoyment.  At first I was skeptical: “VCRs?  Aren’t those things all in a museum somewhere?”.  But when I hooked up the VCR and received all of the channels I was missing, including Discovery Channel and, GASP, Animal Planet!  I was more than ready to accept yet another remote into my expanding collection (this was before I got The Universal Remote).

Of course, the VCR worked like a perfect angel when my parents were around, but, like the bastard child that I know that it is, it started acting funny as soon as my parents left.  It was like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, honestly.

In case you are at work or whatnot and don’t want to see the video: As I was trying to figure out why my VCR was having so many problems, I just left it on channel “3″, which is TBS, naturally. The movie above basically highlights the problem I was having: When I flip the channel on the VCR,

Each.

And.

Every.

Channel.

Is the SAME channel. Which is, whatever channel you started on. In this case, it’s TBS. What you see is about a full minute of me flipping channels like mad, but each channel is TBS, no matter what I do.

What happened to the VCR, why was it acting like that? And, will Chandler finally solve his problems? Tune in next time to find out!

So, in a fit of rage I pulled the plug on the VCR, and, now it sits inside of my cabinet, dormant. I know it’s plotting it’s revenge on my DVD player and PS2, don’t think I’m oblivious to that fact. And, now I’m back to not having Discovery Channel and Animal Planet.

I guess I’ll have to get by on not being able to watch the Groundhog Story on Animal Planet, or extreme fishing on Discovery Channel.

I wonder if I get National Geographic Channel; I haven’t seen Caesar calm a 300-pound rottweiler using just his voice and the “CHHH” sound he makes, in quite some time.