This wasn't a comical attempt at astonishment. Todd was truly, utterly astounded. After I'd told him about Sheryl's salary hike, he stared at me in speechless, breathless disbelief: mouth open, eyes blasted, beard electric.
"What in Christ's fuck."
Just then Amelia Lapland came over to my desk. An elderly toadish Russian lady, with gaping fleshy mouth and Stalinist chin, she wanted to know why she wasn't getting notifications for her holds. This led her into an extended gulag of complaint about Google--that her email account had been hacked three times and she had lost all her information and she only had a flip phone so she couldn't receive text messages from Google about getting a new password and her brother wanted to give her a smart phone but she didn't want it and finally she had gone to "the Google" in Boulder but they wouldn't let her into the building, even after demanding to speak to Mr Google himself. I nodded and smiled and chuffed my lips to express sympathy. Then she went away.
Todd gaped. "Was that woman talking about seeing Mr Google? Is she insane?"
"Indeed!"
I then decided to test Todd's limits for astonishment. I had seen an old friend a few days before, someone I hadn't heard from in years. This friend--we'll call him, uh, Gary--had and has a number of vague Mayo-Clinic-ish ailments that prevent him from leaving his house. His wife works in the legal field and makes all the money while he sees doctors and tries new treatments in ever-diminishing cycles of effectiveness.
In his text Gary had warned me that his house was a "shitshow," but being a connoisseur of shows and shit, I drove right over. He answered the door with his graying hair in a topknot and a vermicular braid in his beard. He wore a soiled white t-shirt, sweat pants and crocs. Then he explained that before we got caught up he needed to go to the local dispensary. On the walls of the kitchen, amid the darkness and disarray, were several post-it notes that spelled out one word: SPRINKLER! His wife was gone at a wedding, and he needed help. Firstly, he needed to scare up some cash, as he didn't like the idea of using a card to buy weed. We went into the bedroom where the bed was buried under a Matterhorn of clothing and shoes. Gary muttered, going through envelope after envelope, extracting bills from birthday and Christmas cards.
"Okay, fifty, fifty, fifty, and four twenties. And a ten. That's... 240?"
"Yes."
He stopped, counting and recounting, laying out the bills on the clothing peak. "Wait, what did I say?"
"240."
"Wait, no. It's three fifties. And four... twenties." He counted them out. "What is that? Is it 240?"
Gary gave me such an anxious, befuddled look that it made me question my own math. I went over it again in my head.
"Yes, it's 240."
"Okay. Okay. Okay. Wait, what's this ten? Is that another twenty? Wait, what did I say?"
"420. No, I mean, 240."
"240?"
"Yes!"
Having finished our labored and overlong Cheech n Chong routine, we hied to the local pot emporium whence Gary decided to involve himself in cannabis. He haggled with the utterly high person behind the counter, arguing for discounts and asking about growers in the area and why don't they carry this blend anymore and Dave's not here, man.
Once we rode a unicorn's rainbow back to his house, we tackled the ubiquitously posted SPRINKLER! subject. Ripping down a post-it, Gary stared for a long moment, then turned to me. He asked if I could help him with his sprinkler. Hence: SPRINKLER! Would I be able to? I said sure, man. This entailed going out the front door again, and as we did so I loudly cracked wise about reefer.
"Shh! Shh!" Gary said. "It's against the law, federally. Okay? Come on. Seriously, be quiet about that."
"Do you have enemies who... live across the street?"
"Just, shh. Okay? Just. Come on. Shhh."
Before traveling to the back yard, Gary had to lock the front door. He patted at his jacket. One pocket. Another. And then another. Fuck, he whispered. Then he found the key and proceeded to lock all the locks, one by one. Which was a good thing since we were taking a perilous three-minute trip to the back of the house--we didn't want narcs bogarting his stash or-- SHH. SHH. Right, right. Sorry.
He led me with a flashlight to the spigot. It was turned tight. Gary was baffled.
"Who turned it off? I just talked to [my wife] this morning, and she says we needed to turn it off."
"Did you do it?"
"No."
"Are you sure? Possibly while high?"
"SHH! SHH!!"
"Right, right."
Chores finished, we now entered into the fun portion of our hang-out sesh. Gary warned me that the basement was not... tidy. While the house was packed with tottering piles of books, large mysterious boxes, drifts of mail, little cat turds, hundreds of pill bottles, and decomposing bodies, the basement was somehow even worse. As we descended the stairs, the vibe changed from Cheechy Chongy to Scooby Doo-ey. The floor, the walls, the ceiling were covered in... DVDs.
"Wow," I said banally. "That's a lot of DVDs."
"Yeah," Gary said, kicking at a turd.
I stood over a raft of DVDs that came to my knees. The titles ranged from Dr Who to Anchorman 2 to Jeepers Creepers 7.
"So how many DVDs do you have?"
With a grimace, Gary stretched, turning and twisting his back. He was still recovering from our adventure. He held his stomach.
"Just a sec."
He took out a little bottle from a slag heap and loudly drank something called Aromatic Bitters. He threw back his head and gargled.
"Ahhhhhh," he said. "Helps to settle my stomach."
"Hm. Anyway, how many DVDs would you say...?"
"Yeah, I heard your question. It's probably around, I don't know, five to six thousand."
"Wait, wait," Todd said, interrupting my story. "How many...?"
"Five to six thousand."
His eyes rolled up in his head, and down he went. Justron rushed over and waved pages from my dad's economic thriller, trying to to prod the boning experience, but to no avail. Todd was out cold. We stepped over him the rest of the day.
Sometimes, my friends, life is just too damn much.
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