Cart, Depart.

On friday, around noon, I was working in my studio and heard a very shopping-cart-esque commotion going on outside my window. This peaked my interest because, as loyal blog-readers will know, for a few days now, I have been playing host to an unwanted shopping cart. I craned my neck to catch a view out my side window just in time to spy a young white man making away with a load of metal tubing and bits of fence in my cart.

See? I said my cart. This damn thing had really weaseled its way into my brain. All I wanted was to be rid of it, and the minute it actually leaves, I think "Hey! That guy's got my cart!!!"

So there he went with his pile of stuff in the cart formerly known as mine. I don't know who he was, and I don't know how he came upon my cart or how he got all his metal pipes and fence to my cart without the aid of... you know... another cart. All I know is that life (and the strange rythyms of the city) had washed a shopping cart up on my shore, and then a few days later, the tides came and washed it right back out again. I suppose I could wax even more metaphorical-like about the deep meaning of all this... About how my garage door was just a rest-stop in the greater journey of an inanimate object, but the simple fact of the matter is that I'm glad it's gone.

Yes, I identified it as mine, but ownership doesn't neccisarily mean affection. (see also: "my hip pain," "my brain tumor" and "my aunt Gladys.") It was unwanted, and now I don't have to worry about it anymore. I know that I've devoted more time to thinking about the cart than any normal person should have, and that I've made a much bigger deal about this tiny encounter than it merits. I should have known at the onset that the cart would only be a temporary guest. If I had only paid closer attention I would have realized carts are not barnacles that attatch themselves to you for life. The city drops these things off like kids spending a weekend with dad, and after a brief stay, the city picks them right back up again.

Tired of all this drivel? Want to get back to fart jokes? Stay tuned.

Shopping Cart Wars II: The Cart Strikes Back

Early today I noticed that the Dreaded Shopping Cart (see previous post) had managed to move itself all the way into the alley behind our house. Before you go thinking that this represents some sort of major progress, I'll point out that the alley in question is 3 feet from Ground Zero. (Ground Zero being our garage door, where the Cart has a tendency to loiter)

Still... It may not have been much, but it was a move away from our door, which was something. I didn't allow myself to hope, though, that the cart would remain where it was. I knew that fate, or perhaps God (in his infinite wisdom) would soon return the cart to its rightful place in the universe, alongside our house. The question was, how long could it resist the pull of the garage door?

About 6 hours, as it turns out.

I returned from a meeting around 2pm and the cart was back in position, against my garage. In fact, this time it was actually facing the fouse, touching the house, as if someone had driven it straight at the door in an attempt to ram it straight through and into the garage itself. Or maybe as if the cart was actually trying to push itself under the door... It was, if I may be perfectly honest, a little bit eerie. Re-read Stehpen King's Christine, and any time he mentions the titular vintage automobile, cross it out and write "Creepy old shopping cart." You'll start to get the picture.

Anyway, I decided to try a little experiment and see what happens whan we stretch the umbilical cord just that much further. Tonight when I took out the garbage, I picked up the cart and moved it across the alley, placing it against my rearward neighbor's house. Will it find its way back? And if so, when? Adding even more intrigue to my (by now painfully obviously) dull life: What will the trash guys do tomorrow when they come and see the cart sitting right where my neighbors and I put out the trash?

Are you holding your breath? I know I am.

Here's a new and unexpected problematic aspect of home-ownership...

What do you do when your house (without consulting you) takes on a shopping cart?

Ours arrived in the middle of the night. A nice blue number from Wal-Mart. It is clean and un-damaged and parked right outside our garage door. Sal and I discovered it this morning, and were at a loss as to what to do. I can tell you, now that I've had all day to think about it, that there is nothing in the home-owner's handbook that covers how to handle the sudden onset of a shopping cart.

We have no idea how it found our house. The nearest Wal-Mart is a good 7 miles from here at least. I'm not so naive that I don't understand that the cart was probably liberated by a homeless or unfortunate person who used it to ferry around their posessions. I get that. What I'm trying to understand is how that person pushed the aforementioned cart all the way up to our garage door and then said, "That's far enough. This will do nicely." And then what? Unloaded all their stuff, shouldered it and walked away? A cart liberated from a market parking lot is not outside my realm of understanding. It's a perfectly good cart abandoned in an urban, but fairly nice, neighborhood that I have yet to really grasp.

Anyway...

Sal and I were agreed that we wanted to avoid touching it. Or even really looking at it too long. Anything that might imply ownership of said cart to any watching neighbors. If it seems heartless to leave a poor shopping cart out in the cold like that, I should point out that a shopping cart is an unwieldy thing to take on. It's not the sort of thing that you can stick in a closet, and it's not the sort of thing you can drop in a waste basket. The trash guys do not, as a rule, collect shopping carts with the rest of the garbage. I'm fairly sure that the bulk pick-up guys (who come get beds and couches and old water coolers and stuff like that) don't deal in shopping carts either.

Did you ever unwrap something that was sealed in thin cellophane, and had a piece of the cellophane static itself to one of your fingers? You shake your fingers, but it just sticks. You grab it with your other had, but it statics on to that one. You stand there over the trash bin, shaking both your hands like a madman, but that damn piece of cellophane just clings. It's yours now, and there's no getting rid of it.

A shopping cart is exactly like that. Only bigger. And metal. With wheels.

So we don't want to touch it, or acknowledge it, or god forbid, take it into our home. We decided to leave it out there for a day and see if it decided to cling to any passers by.

The cart went untouched for most of the day, until 3 o'clock, when the area schools let out. Then it saw all kinds of action. Kids, for the most part, can't resist something like a shopping cart. It calls to them: "Hey kid, I have wheels. You really should give me a push. Maybe give your buddies a ride..." And push they did, the little bastards. from one end of my house to the other, but never once did the cart leave the perimeter of my house. The kids may have succumbed to the allure of the cart, but their parents were well-versed in the shopping cart's insideous clinging nature. "Put that back, jimmy... Leave that there..."

Damnit.

At some point tonight somebody went to the trouble to knock the cart over. Knocked it right on its side, but did not in any way drag it further from the house. Just up-ended it. See, the neighbors, they know. They look out their windows and see the cart, and they feel sorry for us, the way you would if you saw a man in the store with a tumor growing out of his head. "Look. Those poor people. They have a cart. and they seem so young too... Such a shame. Kids, when you go outside, do not touch that cart. In fact, cross to the other side of the street."

So we've left it out there, like a shiny metal spider web, hoping that a passing fly may inadvertently pull it from our house, But Sal and I, in our hearts, know the truth:

The shopping cart is now grafted to us. Like it or not, this thing sits out there even as I type... Built for movement, but not going anywhere. It is as surely a part of my house as the front door, or the roof. It is only a matter of time before the garage door slides upwards, and I take this new thing into my home. It's either that or let it stay out there, the bulging tumor on my house's head, rusting in the fall, catching rain in the winter, season in, season out, until one day we put an ad in the paper. "Lovely Canton townhome, 3 BR, 1 1/2 Bath, Claw-foot tub, deck, shopping cart. Please call."

Okay, I'm officially a slacker.

Nearly a month between posts? I know that by now my 3 devoted readers have probably given up on Fanfare From The Common Wombat and moved on to greener blog pastures. But, if I still have your attention, allow me to apologize from the heart of my bottom, as they say.

Now, on to some serious bloggage. Stuff that you need to know about.

1) I had been shaving my oversized noggin, but lately I've taken to just trimming it, so that I constantly have maybe a quarter to a half inch of fuzz up there. It looks better, I think, than the completely bald head, and I just like the way it feels when I rub it. However, I have discovered that I am somewhat deficient at the manly art of trimming your own fuzz. Every time I do it, I miss some conspicuous spot, and Sal always has to alert me (hours later) that I've been walking around looking like a dork with a hunk of longer hair sticking out the side of my head.

Why am I sharing this info? Just in the spirit of brotherhood, my friend. There's no moral to this story, except maybe that if you have someone who can trim your head for you, you'd be well-advised to have them do so. Because no matter how many mirrors you have configured about your bathroom, the back of your head is one big blind spot.

2) One of the reasons for my prolonged absence from the blog is that I suffered a huge computer meltdown a few weeks ago that resulted in me losing all the info on 2 of my 3 hard drives (Lost: all my artwork. Saved: my porn. Go figure.) and my being completely out of commission for about 2 weeks. It sucked.

I will say this about the whole ordeal. I should be fed up and cursing my computer and its faulty hard drives, but after all the mess, I have but one thing on my lips: God bless Dell customer support. I mean it. I've dealt with a lot of crappy tech support, incompetent help, and outsourced indian folk reading off a screen, and I have to tell you that the people at Dell were awesome. I spoke to 3 different tech people over the course of my ordeal, and all 3 of them were intelligent, helpful people who took the time and effort to walk me through all the diagnosis and repair I had to do. Consider this my ringing endorsement: Dude, you're getting a dell.

3) Sally keeps making me look at her poops. Especially when they are impressively long. This disturbs me, but not as much as you might think it would. We're just strange people.

Okay, I'll leave you with that image to keep you up at night. I swear I'll try to write again before another month goes by.