Carwash heathens.

Sunday mornings. I wake up and try to piece together the vague recollections of the night before. This time it was something about bellydancers. And fire, I remember lots of fire. Every Sunday I do this while attempting to mold myself back into something remotely human. Recognizable at least. Then I trudge to work. Along the way I always stop to get breakfast at one of the millions of generic fast-food restaraunts along the way that each peddle their own abominations of the same concepts. The people lodged in the tiny windows of these places conjure up a mild discomfort inside of me. They are always far too chipper to be working a minimum wage job in the food service industry at 7:30 on a Sunday morning. Its as if they have been supressed to the point at which they finally snapped and have formulated some ill-concieved plan for vengeance. On several occassions I whole heartedly expected to hear the catterwalling of firetrucks once I had put some distance between me and the soon-to-be pile of rubble. I will never be that upbeat at work before 10:00 AM mostly because I have no ill-will directed at my management. So instead I sit behind the register of the car wash with a bitter blend of fatigue, apathy, and the longing to be elsewhere smeared across my face as I await the inevitable parental shit-storm that always accompanies occassions in which children are allowed to read our greeting cards. As a car wash, I dont know why we have greeting cards, let alone the kind that we have. The kind that are perverse simply for perversions sake. These cards do, however, provide me with endless hours of entertainment. I sit back and watch as helpless souls wander precariously close to the vertical, rotating column of seemingly harmless cards and then are sucked in like moths to an incandescent street light.
It always happens the same way and yet somehow, the whole ordeal never loses its comedic potency to me. They wander over, immediately drawn to the shiniest and most colorful thing in their field of vision which is usually a birthday card which paints an all too graphic picture of the effect that seven decades of gravity has on a pair of breasts. They pick up the card and study the front with an expression of blissfully ignorant optomism. The card is then openned. The face drops. And a pessimist is born. I am not sure who creates and distributes these cards. I am certain somewhere in Arizona a very imaginative and industrious sadist is rocking back and forth on the hind legs of his chair cackling and giggling with the utmost glee.
Sunday brings an interesting pattern of customers. A steady stream of sinners but with the occassional onslaught of saints who just left some church where they payed God not to punish them for their sins. Of course, the logical thing to do after some holy lip service that was intended to make up for the fact that you are a shallow, materialistic bastard is to go to the car wash and get your Escalade polished. I am convinced that not only love, but religion and hipocrisy are blind as well, and that the latter two are born of the same unholy womb.
I like this job because of the variety of people I encounter. They all drift in, pay, then sit around for about twenty minutes which gives me time to observe them. Some simply sit outside and smoke like a California brush fire. Others sit quietly inside and nervously fidget the entirity of their stay and I wonder if they are like that constantly. Surely not because most of them are at least fourty years of age and if they had lived their entire lives in such a high state of tension then I am certain that some important artery would have burst like a sewer-main by now resulting in an impressive aneurysm that possibly would have even injured some bystanders. Some customers come in and are obviously products of dogged battles against the psychiatric world. Visibly fatigued from years of fighting the stigma of insanity, these customers pay, then grab a newspaper, calmly walk to an empty seat, and begin to tenderly ask their six-year-old children if they would like to hear the obituaries.