October 27, 2004

• Y'know what I want for my birthday? I want TV-B-Gone. Never again stuck in an airport waiting area, forced to listen to CNN tell me that the world is about to end!

  That reminds me of the time I went to the Mexican corner of the food court at a local mall. It was 2pm, the mall was empty, there was no one around. I was the only customer. I had ordered a beer, so I had to sit in the special yes-I'm-an-adult area, but it turns out that the adult area has a big screen TV blasting ESPN. Had I realized this beforehand, I wouldn't have ordered the beer. Its relaxative qualities were more than offset by the TV shouting at me. I would have post-traumatic stress disorder on the way home.

  So I got up, walked over to the TV, and turned it down. It wasn't playing a game or anything, just mindless chatter, some scores, and lots of ads. I sat back down at my table and breathed a sigh of relief. All would be fine now. That's when the Mexi-corner manager came out and turned it back up, to be just as loud as before. He just walked out the little door and turned the corner, giving no indication that he even knew I was there, and turned the thing back up. A Budweiser commercial echoed through the empty food court. He quickly went back in, again having not seen me.

  I could have said, "Hey, uh... I'm trying to eat over here..." but it's in my nature to, as my newagey friends say, embody the coyote archetype. So I turned the TV completely off and waited.

  Dude came back out again, looked around, didn't see me again, and turned it back on. I did this four or five times. It was much more entertaining than simply sitting there and eating my burrito, TV sound or no. He never let on that he saw me, and he never wavered in his slavish devotion, not only to the big screen TV, but to the big ugly sound that came out of it.

  I invented this little story where his location of this chain restaurant had sold the most burritos and so won a prize: A big screen TV with which to attract beer-swilling ESPN-watchers (at 2pm on a weekday). Or another one where there were a bunch of Mexicans in their restaurant uniforms on the other side of that wall, smoking grass and listening for scores from the TV, each of them holding a glass to their side of the wall, a half-dozen of them with their ears to a glass in a smoke-filled room, trying to contain their giggles.

  Whatever was really going on, I eventually finished my beer and moved to another table across the mall.

  • 10:36 am
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