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cold day in the asteroid belt
Wednesday, February 9 2011
This afternoon I went to Mavis Tire out on the Kingston "asteroid belt" (as James Howard Kunstler would put it) to get a new tire and a wheel alignment for the Honda Civic. Its tires had been wearing unevenly, and Mavis is good at fixing such things, though there's a danger with that place of upselling. I hate places that come back to you and offer additional services, particularly in a case where they have your car on a jack and only they know what they're looking at and you're somewhere far away, reached via your wife's cellphone.
I dropped the car off and walked through the bitter cold into the nearby Los-Angeles-style upscale strip-mall (a fairly recent newcomer to the Kingston asteroid belt, where upscale is an uncommon thing). My destination was the Starbucks of a Barnes and Noble. Usually when I imagine a Barnes and Noble, I'm picturing the stores I knew in places like Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Charlottesville. In those places, the customers tended to be photogenic and you could, for example, hang out in a comfy chair hoping to casually make eyes with a reliable stream of fashionable cuties. But the Kingston Barnes and Noble has no such stream. It's not quite the freakshow of the ghetto Hannaford in Uptown, but then again, I've never seen a larger booger on a bathroom wall than the one I saw today about the urinal in the Kingston Barnes and Noble. It was the size of a blueberry, and that was fully dehydrated.
After a reasonable (though not excellent) soy capuccino and an hour of pointless web surfing on my netbook, I walked all the way down to the Office Depot (in a different strip mall). Being a pedestrian after so many winter storms reminds you of civilization's priorities when it comes to snow removal; to get to the Office Depot I had to walk a half block out of my way to get around a mountain of snow that blocked a path I would have taken had it been July. Normally I don't notice how dreary and depressing Office Depot is (far more than Staples), but today I did. There's something about the emptiness of the white-painted metal trusses high overhead that makes Office Depot feel like a sweatshop. At Home Depot, by contrast, they use this space for overstock and the occasional advertising poster. The dreariness is such that I'll bet Office Depot employees commit suicide at an unusally brisk rate.
Back at Mavis, I saw my Civic was still up on jacks, so I returned to the Barnes and Noble and considered getting some food there. But their vegan options were nonexistent, so I continued up the strip mall to the Panera at its other end. The vegan options there weren't much better, but at least there were more savory options. I ended up ordering a pesto vegetable soup with a side of overpriced baguette. The pesto probably contained cheese, but when I'm hungry such things don't bother me. Though the soup was claimed to be "low fat," it had droplets of oil floating on its surface. I never see that on any of the soups I eat at home, all of which are both more delicious and more vegan.
At some point the guys at Mavis called to upsell me an additional tire and some surprisingly-inexpensive brake work (anything less than a thousand dollars is cheap when it comes to brakes, though, for some reason, if one does it one's self, it only costs tens of dollars). So I said yes.
Mavis never called to tell me the work was done; I had to trudge over there and see for myself.
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