The Annoying Part's Done, Right?

So, Donna drags me out to help her pick fabric. Exactly what I want to do on a Sunday: drive out to Seven Corners and help pick out fabric. Joy.

The whole corridor from Bailey's Crossroads to Seven Corners is always a driving adventure. It's too much traffic for roads and intersections that were never really designed for the volume. In addition, probably 80% of the people driving it, if they drove at all before coming to the US drove in countries that had very different rules of the road. It's a stretch of road that manages to make most of the other DC-area driving seem safe and sane by comparison. But, you have to drive through it to get to the strip mall that houses Joann and G Street fabric stores. Between that stretch of road and what awaits the end of the trip, it's enough to really set the mood for the day.

In fairness, though, the mood was pretty much already set before heading out. I mean, StumbleUpon decided to grace me with a YouTube video of Blackeyed Peas' Let's Get Retarded. And, yes, that pretty much describes the whole debacle of the drive out...

The driving comedy started near the intersection where King Street meets the Semenary Rd entrance to I395. The intersection just before the interchange is right at a medical arts building and a low-rent apartment complex. As I'm getting to the intersection, the light turns red. There's a car in the middle lane, stopped for the light. There's a car in the lane to the right of mine that's slowing down for the intersection. At the intersection ahead of me, the lane is empty. This would be the far left lane. The car that was slowing down decides, "Oh! Empty lane at the red, think I'll duck in and take that slot".

Now, getting cut off like this - and having to radically increase the braking to make up for the now suddenly-reduced stopping distance - is maddening enough by itself. However, after the light turned green, it turns out that the dipshit that cut me off actually needed to be in the far right lane so that he could get onto I395. After letting the cars to his immediate right go (and holding me up in the process) he careened across two lanes of traffic, cutting several people off in the process, to make his exit. Douche.

The rest of the trip to the store was fairly uneventful - particularly given that yardstick. We get to the strip mall and I find a parking spot. I shut down the car, thinking, "just wait here for Donna to complete her errand," only to be reminded, "I need your help to pick the fabric." Things like this make me wish I was colorblind. So, I stalked into the store behind Donna.

While standing around, waiting for her to identify candidates, this "blonde" woman comes into the store and nudges by me. Now, by "blonde" I only mean in the most obvious of "fresh from the bottle" blonde. Even better is the hairstyle: she looked like a Jersey Shore reject - but was sporting the female version of the spikey-do. Lovely. Even better were the stylin' white tanktop and too-small sweatpants she'd crammed her fat ass into. Classy.

Eventually, Donna finds some fabrics she wants my opinion on. I give it. She seems satisfied, so, I beg my leave to return to the car. Even in DC heat/humidity, I'd rather sit in the car than wait the slow death that is time spent in a fabric and crafts store.

I turn to leave and start walking towards the front door. As I'm walking towards the front door, this nightmare in "I can't see colors so well, so I need to dress extra bright to match my colors" polyester waddles in front of me, drifting left and right as she talks with her friend. Who's her friend? None other but the Jersey Shore "blonde". When the aisle widens near the checkout counter, she starts slowly drifting her way towards it and out of my way. I stalk by and head out to my car.

I get to my car, get in and turn on the radio. It's the usual crap that DC 101 plays. But, still, better listening to that, in the hot and humid, than inside at the freakshow. As I'm sitting in my car, I notice a black Mercedes parked in the aisle ahead of my car. It's parked across four parking spots. Pimp-tastic. The back seat is full of crap and it's sporting a blinged-out license plate frame around a personalized Maryland license plate with the word "GUIDOS" emblazoned on it.

I shake my head at this and then drift back to thinking about nothing. Out of the store comes the waddling polyester monstrosity and her blonde friend. It hadn't quite registered in the store, but the polyester monstrosity's hair managed to be even worse than her "blonde" friends. It was one of those Brady-esque, "who electrocuted the poodle", over-done perms sprayed to the sky with, no doubt, Aquanet Ultra Hold. And, if you haven't guessed it by now, their destination was the "GUIDOS" Mercedes.

You can't make shit like this up. I wish I'd remembered to bring my camera with me so that I could have had photographic evidence of this natural comedy gold.