The present, 12/22/2017 in Normal entries

I went out to pick up stuff for Christmas dinner. I didn’t like the looks of the parking lot at my favorite grocery store and the next closest is my least favorite grocery in North America (including the weird ass one I was stranded in once in Saskatchewan). I did me some quick calculating and pointed the nose of my rig towards this quaint little bakery I go to sometimes when it’s easy to get to.

For that bakery it was crowded, like almost six customers. I had to wait almost a full minute. Oh, yeah, the bakery is quaint as a basket full of kittens in Victorian hoop skirts, but the shitty little strip mall, maybe five stores long, is the opposite of quaint and the reason for the earlier caveat ‘when it’s easy to get to.’

This young woman who looks like she’d be at home riding her buggy to market to sell her Amish wares asks me what she can me with. I came for a loaf of sourdough, a commodity not so common around here but always well stocked at that bakery. But, I was going to get a pie at the grocery store so I got the sourdough and just started asking for pie substitutes, cornbread with cranberries and pecans (I know, right? They do make good corn bread, push comes to shove or pomp to pith, I can pick the cranberries out) A beautiful coffee cake and, just because they had it, a loaf of Challah. The young Amish woman didn’t blink, the other customers glared at me, not in an anti-Semitic way, but like I didn’t know how to make a hard Ch sound.

So, as she’s asking if I’d like my challah sliced (da fawk?) my phone rings. I’ve never been embarrassed by my ring tones, most of them set up to be embarrassing and/or funny. The current one is not, well, not broadly, it has its own personal irony for me. I had to clip the song to fit. In the library quiet of the reverent bakery my pocket starts snarling in Dylan’s best whore-mongering whiskey voice “… I got a new pony, her name is lucifer …” hiccups and goes to “… come over here pony, I wanna climb on top of you.” The hard Ch glarers glared harder, Miss Amish (hmmm, Miss Mennonite sounds better) demurely looks at her shoes. I fumble with my phone, see the caller ID, and mumble something about no good ever coming from a North Carolina phone call, and shove the phone into a pants pocket to, hopefully muffle it. The effect, instead, was that my pants were growling “Come over here pony, I wanna climb on top of you”.

The employees of that bakery are all very sweet and demur. The customers glared me into the parking lot, one even followed my crooked path back for a half a mile or so. Perhaps Bob Dylan would happy to still cause unrest in the world, though, I’m not sure anyone would expect that song to do it, I’m guessing there are some fair-weather fans who’ve never heard of it. It’s not my ringtone because I’m a Dylan fan. Personal Irony. Hmmm let me see if I remember how to embed a song.

Ok, that’s weird, but of all the versions y’alltube had this one is closest to the album version on my phone, even though it’s a cover by someone trying a little too hard.