Sinister: quick and dirty proof of inductive fun

[Kevin Hyde]

Hello everyone, 


There exists a small but elite group of Australian businessmen in my
hometown. They all work in one store, a pawnshop, called Cash
Converters. I find this odd simply by merit of the fact that my hometown
is in Pennsylvania, in America- and is a very small town, a former steel
industry center, now sort of brownly decrepit and sprawling. And I
wonder why it is that these people (all unrelated, I might add) would
come all the way from Australia to (presumably) live and work in a small
suburb of Philadelphia, in an unglamorous (albeit very successful) store
which, besides having a name that to my mind suggests money laundering,
is located in perhaps one of the worst parts of the entire county. The
only hypothesis that springs to mind is that, somehow, through complex
and arcane networks, the mayor of my town has forged a kind of draconian
marketing contract with various travel agents and career counselors in
the metropoli of Australia, where enthusiastic and (again, this is me
speculating) towheaded antipodean youngsters are suckered into selling
all their fantastic Dirty Three albums and bootlegs in order to buy a
plane ticket to the exciting and impossibly-bustling-and-cultured
Pottstown, PA. My God, this confused me. I'm not exaggerating when I say
I thought about this deeply for the five or so hours it took me to drive
home to Virginia on I-95. Could it be that my confusion was just
sublimated anger at having one of the sales clerks ask me, upon the
purchase of a cheap electric guitar and practice amp at said store,
whether this [the guitar] was for me "as a rock and roll star, or is it
a gift, mate?", (and I promise, he actually did say 'mate' I'm not
making that up) to which I responded by nodding my head and saying, in a
sort of shy and lamentful way, "uh, rock and roll style?", having heard
the 'star' as 'style' and now consequently feeling slightly embarrassed
in front of the witchily pretty female sales clerk. 

I know there are some Australian sinisterines + -ettes on the list, and
I was wondering if, hey, are there any large and unwieldy roadside
billboards over there with pictures of Pennsylvanian landscapes, mottled
with fall colors, and featuring some sort of sentimental and catchy
slogan in a sensible font? Maybe even vaguely authoritarian in tone?

Ok. So there is (at least) another Kevin on this list (hello other
Kevin!), and I think I need to confront this fact head-on. In my
opinion, it's really a good thing, you know, because, heck, our name
means 'gentle and lovable' (uh, in Gaelic, if I remember my
grandmother's tiny namecards correctly), and with all the sort of
rippling hostility and thinly veiled sexual threats that are always
flying about on this list, people of a kevin-nature are here to serve as
a buffer (feel free to hurl invective at either of us, and like
egg-carton insulation foam, we will absorb and dampen). Plus probably
all the Rachels too, 'we can never have enough Rachels' = story of my
life. 

So, that's enough meta-list talk I suppose. I really wish I could write
long and consistently-themed missives (a la Kieran and the PF), but
really, my attention span is far too short for that. And plus I'm at
work. Which place is populated mostly by diminutive secretaries whose
faces look as if they would explode into thousands of tiny green
mosquitoes if given the proper stimulus. 

I'm looking forward to: the fourth of July, which for me is one of the
saddest holidays; going to see the Giddy Motors next month; applying to
grad school, and getting engaged so that I can have a fiancee to give me
the OED as a present like the inestimably lucky Michael Vance. Oh, and
any sort of post from Laura Llew would be great, as they (the posts)
always rock my socks off. Seriously. Hosiery --> obliterated.


off to lunch, 

xo, 

Kevin

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