True Tales From the Shallow South

I recently went to my city's lavish civic center (and by lavish I mean largely barren, and by civic I mean "next to an empty lot underneath an overpass that would make a great lair for a hobo serial killer").

The local classic rock station had assured me--between Nickelback and Charlie Daniels Band--that an "Electronics Expo" was to be held there, and that phenomenal deals were to be found on

CAR STEREOS DVD PLAYERS BLU-RAY PLAYERS HOME SECURITY SYSTEMS RADAR DETECTORS B61 NUCLEAR BOMB FUSES and FUTURISTIC SEX DOLLS!

I was skeptical.

My father was not.

We arrived at the site in the late afternoon, just as the sun was beginning to melt into the dingy urban haze. A familiar, greasy smell filled the air that I forever associate with elephant ears and cheap, rural carnivals. Around us milled a throng of teen and preteen girls.

"Must be here for the futuristic sex dolls," I said. My father frowned.

This was troubling, being a party consisting solely of two adult ogres, adrift amid a sea of flowers in various stages of bloom. My father, being older and wiser, was more sensitive to the awkwardness of the situation than I, and he suggested that we quickly find out "where the fuck we are going before security asks us to empty our pockets."

We hacked bravely through the pre-oestral thicket, and while we incurred a few nonplussed looks from nigh-obese guardians with drooping fanny packs, we finally made our way to a clearing. There, upon either side of us, were two signs consisting of 8.5x11 sheets of printer paper fixed to a sign holder. The text was, predictably, some member of the twisted Arial font family.

This was one of those cruel reminders of time and place: my current co-ordinates in cultural and social space-time. I was--quite literally--between the Cheetah Girls and a Gun Show.

That revelation was my second reaction. My first reaction was "What the fuck are Cheetah Girls?"

The throng of women-children veered to the left in a great arc, as if pulled by a source of tremendous gravity (or perhaps repelled by the opposite). My father and I remained before the dreadful sigils, straddling the barrier between two strange and terrifying worlds.

Without a word my father turned and began to head right, following the instructions of the second sign. In those moments where I drifted, contemplating my place and purpose in the universe, confronting the terror that I was finally and irrevocably out of fucking touch, my father was reading the cultural geography.

An electronics expo, he reasoned, would naturally occur closer to a gun show, just as a stream's source must fall near a mountain, and a swamp must lie near the sea.

Would a truck pull be far behind?

I'll tease the reader no longer: we never made it to the electronics expo. After navigating a chubby wilderness of orange vests and woodland-print coveralls we found that the touted expo was charging eight dollars for admission. Savings indeed! Dreams of home security blu-ray sexbots dissolved in my head into a murky solution, which then boiled down to a brownish powder, eventually burning away and leaving only acrid smoke.

We left in near total defeat, my only consolation being the knowledge I had gained--bitter though it was.

My father was considerably more Zen about it.

"At least they validated my parking."