Friday, May 16th 2008

The sun was out in force which caused me to break out into a sweat by the time I woke up at 12:30 p.m. I rolled out of bed, checked the email, let Belle out of the bathroom, and searched the house for any more dead birds. Koal watched me as I slowly stalked from room to room looking for any dead animals, and I’m pretty sure to him, I must have looked like a fucking idiot.

With the house secured from flying things, I returned to my room for some GTA 4 while waiting till 2:30 to pick up Samantha from school. I plowed through some more missions and realized that found that I was actually 63% done with that game, and that I had only logged in 42 hours thus far. I sat there in amazement when I looked at that number, how the fuck did I log in 42 hours into a game that’s only been out for a couple weeks? I quickly check the only blog entries and saw that I played a lot of that game. In fact, I’ve put a great deal of hours into the game since April 28^th when I bought it. I rationalize this to mean that I’m home a lot during the day, and since I became the chauffeur for my brother and sister, it kind of kills my going out during the day for longer than an hour.

As I’m neck deep in killing Russian thugs in the game my phone rings and the caller ID says “Withheld”. This usually means one person…my boss. I was right. He was calling to tell me that he has just left the theater and we had changed the prices today instead of next week like I had been told by the owner. I roll my eyes at this piece of news, but since there is nothing I can do about it, I chat about the expected totals for the evening, and hang up the phone a couple minutes later.

I rush out and pick up Sammy, come home and play some more GTA. I shoot Marcus a call and see if he wants to get dinner when he gets off of work, he agrees and says that he’ll be over by 4:30 to pick me up. I continued blazing through GTA and end up putting another 3% dent in the overall experience. I turned the system off, and threw my clothes on as Marcus was pulling into the driveway.

We head down to Submarina, and pick up some very good, yet extremely overpriced, subs and sit down to eat. Marcus fills me on some of the happenings at work, and I update him as to the financial state of the drive-in. I barrel through my foot-long sub, only to realize that I ate too much and became completely overstuffed. We packed up it, and I waddled to the car hoping that the feeling of being filled to the brim with turkey would go away soon.

Marcus drops me off at home, where I quickly conquer it and take a shower. I tried to trim my beard, but my electric razor ran out of juice and doesn’t work while it’s recharging. By this time its almost 6:30 p.m., so I throw some clothes on, talk to Mom for a few minutes and head off to face the crowds at the theater.

The crowd wasn’t as big as I thought, and ultimately wasn’t as big as we all thought. The lack of a co-feature with PRINCE CASPIAN brought a huge drought to that screen. People are used to the idea that we are a double-feature establishment, and when we have a single feature playing twice, we pay the consequences of that choice.

From when we opened the box office, to when the movies started, nothing really major happened. We moved some cars, some customers bitched about the price increase, but generally people were compliant. When we tallied the number of cars on each side at the beginning of the movie, PRINCE CASPIAN only had 192/600 and IRON MAN/SPEED RACER had 197/310. The owner had shown up and talked with Brian, Bob and I about the possibility of switching the movies around so that IRON MAN and SPEED RACER had a better shot of packing them in. We decided against it because of how close the car amounts were to each other. These numbers meant jack shit when the intermission came for CASPIAN and 80% of the cars left.

I worked the box office for the remainder of the evening. I didn’t bring my laptop or Nintendo DS, so I just thumbed through my new issue of Game Informer, and chatted with Geoff about the upcoming Fallout 3. When SPEED RACER came on the screen, I got some popcorn and sat in the little booth next to the box office and watched it again. Even on my second viewing, the movie is still the shit.

Around 1:20 a.m., I closed the box office up, handed the money to Brian, and chatted with Bob and Annette for a while. I had been putting off emptying the trash cans around the building because of how much trash was in them, but I had to do it sometime, so I finally did. I was fortunate to have Eddie help me out with them, and it turned a 45 minute job into a 20 minute job. With the place cleaned up, and the movies turned off, I left right before 4 a.m.

I desperately needed gas, so I went down the street to the gas station I usually go to on the drive home from work. The attendant was doing inventory, so all of the pumps were shut off. I remembered that there was another Arco up the road that had the comparable prices to this gas station, so I went there instead.

I usually put in about $40 bucks a week in gas, and this week was no different. Although $40 bucks only bought me a half tank, when back in the day it got me a full tank….how I miss the good old days.

With my tank half full, I drove home at very fast speeds with the windows down to keep me awake. When I got home, I left a note for Sam and Mom about checking out an early showing of CASPIAN. I went back to my room and saw that Bree was online, so I shot her a call and chatted with her drunk ass for a little bit. After our conversation, I conquered it again, set my alarm for 9:45 (so I could get up in time to catch an early showing of CASPIAN), and blacked out.