Thursday, May 26, 2011

The Jacksonville Summit Part 1: Da Funk Bus

Anticipation was high as I casually strode through the early morning streets of Downtown St. Petersburg, pre-dawn before the hordes of rotting vagrant flesh could awaken from their inebriated slumbers to grub some pocket change out of me.

The streets at this time of morning are so robust with the odor of the damned that city workers are assigned to come downtown and spray City Hall with a deoderizing foam to mask the stench.

A stench I bullied my way through to arrive an hour early for a 7:20 am meeting with the Greyhound Bus that was scheduled to pick me up and haul all 180lbs of magnificence known as John Miller up to the city of Jacksonville in north Florida where I would converge with other die-hard fans of cult / horror / grindhouse / drive-in / exploitation cinema for the first (and maybe last?)end all, be all of conventions for weirdos such as myself known as Cult-Fiction.

Arriving before the doors opened allowed me time to be talked at by a brother / sister combo that wreaked of unwashed clothing and beer cans after they have been mildewing in the summer heat for a few days. Apparently the pair were catching the bus for a trip up north to Daytona where they would give a final good bye to an old friend on her death bed due to cancer. Not that I particularly cared for their stories, a part of me was selfishly thinking to myself that if I sat next to this haggard old bag of wrinkly dried out skin that I may be able to negotiate a hand job or something out of her on the bus.

Unfortunately no such luck, before I knew it the doors had opened and the brother was requesting to the lady at the counter that he be seated next to his dear ol sister. He would be my first of several encounters with a cock blocker this trip.

Carrying a Tampa Bay Rays duffle bag around my neck, resting it along my chest and a black Jordan backpack on my back, while still carrying around two cardboard poster containers I made my way up to the front counter beaming with excitement over the possibilities that were to come over the next several days. "Here to pick up my ticket", I said with a rare smile.

As I leaned forward resting my elbows on the counter anxiously awaiting my tickets to print I noticed the biggest, ugliest, blackest son of a bitch I have ever laid eyes upon. The best description I can give is that he looked like the lost siamese twin of Charles S. Dutton, the guy who played Roc and the annoying preacher in Alien 3.

The woman working the counter that morning looked up at me with a straight face and said, "your ticket has already been printed". Taking this as some sort of correctable mistake I calmly asked this diarrhea faced whore for a quick resolution to arguably the stupidest fucking crisis I have ever been mixed up in. Especially after I flashed her my million dollar smile and said, "well, you see that is impossible, I don't even have a printer at home". Her response, "doesn't matter, your ticket has already been printed and I cannot give you another one".

After several exchanges of trying to understand the situation I realized that talking to this braindead twit was an excercise in futility of biblical proportions. I could barely barely get a blink out of this comatosed bitch let alone a straight answer. With the bus's departure minutes away I somehow managed to argue a 1-800 number out of the Terry Schiavo of customer service reps, which ofcourse only worked on CENTRAL TIME!.

When I heatedly asked the woman to speak to her superior she blinked at me one last time before I nervously shouted, "miss, what the fuck is it that you do around here? You have absolutely no answers to any of my questions, you refuse to be helpful in any way besides occassionally blinking to show me that you are atleast a notch above comatosed, I need to get on this damned bus, can you please print me another ticket or something! Anything?!?!"

She blinked at me again and before I knew it Charles S. Duttons ugly siamese twin decided to chime in with his two cents by telling me very boldly, "man, you need to chill the fuck out!".

I'm sorry, but the last thing I am wanting to hear minutes before a $80 round trip bus ticket slips through my fingers and causes me to miss out on the hotel I spent roughly $250 for the weekend to stay in, is the guy from Alien 3's brother boldly telling me I need to, "chill the fuck out".

That's right about the time I completely flipped a gasket to the point that I was ready to just say fuck it and spend my weekend in the 49th Street County Jail.

Without thinking I turned to Charles S. Duttons siamese twin and said, "excuse me motherfucker? How much did you spend this weekend on a hotel room in Jacksonville and a bus ticket to get there?" He calmly continued eating his scrambler bowl (a combination of grits and other assorted breakfast foods)as I ended with, "exactly, now shut the fuck up please unless you have a solution to offer".

Finally, from out of nowhere at the very last possible second the incredible blinking woman opened her mouth and recommended that I just get on the bus outside and go to the corporate office over in Tampa where they would find a way to resolve my issue. Which, logically, a somewhat coherent person would have offered that suggestion from the start instead of walking around for twenty minutes blinking and occassionally muttering on about how she could not give me any assistance. Dumb ass heffer.

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