Some rooms just have a bad vibe in them, and it’s just a fact.
You need to accept there’s nothing we can do about it, and that’s that…
“Mr. Eiland! Do we have to keep practicing?” my fellow percussionist, Carrie, stuck her head out the door and desperately hollered at our band teacher.
Mr. E. had been contentedly working with the rest of the student-musicians in the main part of the Rolla High School band room, while those of us in the drum section had been sequestered in his office to work out our sh*t on our own.
“No, you can’t come out and join the rest of us just yet,” he hollered back. “Something is, uh, how do I put this? Something is ‘off’ in the rhythm department, and I can’t have it throwing the rest of the band off.”
“Okay, fine, but do we have to do it in your office? Whatever is off is even worse in that confined space,” Carrie protested.
“Yeah!” I said, popping my head out the office door behind Carrie. “The acoustics are terrible in here!”
Carrie looked back at me with one of those looks that say, “What in the ----- are you talking about?”
“What?” I shot back at her. “You accidentally hit an extra beat and it seems to bounce around forever in there.”
“Things do tend to linger uncomfortably long in there…” she said as she shook her dang head.
“What are you two jabbering on about?” Mr. E. chided us, still from across the other side of the band room. “Get back in there and get back to work–and don’t forget to shut the door behind you!”
Carrie and I groaned in unison, knowing that we had failed our other drummers in our quest to get our practice session relocated to a different, preferably more spacious, locale.
“I was really hoping he was going to let us jam out outside,” Carrie sighed nasally as we both trotted back into Mr. E’s office.
“I take it were still stuck in here?” asked Iris–percussionist 3 of 4–as she waltzed1Damn straight was time-signature based pun…ya konw, 3/4…waltz…you get it right? back in after a suspiciously long trip to the water fountain just outside in the hall.
“Dammit, one of us is —-ed up, and it’s not me!” said beater #4, good ol’ Double-B of 21-Trap infamy. He could be a prick sometimes, so his feisty attitude didn’t particular surprise me.
“Don’t you mean ‘is —-ing up’, Double-B?” I interjected.
“I know what I said.” Double-B glared at me.
“Yeah,” I said, wiping some sweat from my brow. “Ah, ’tis a real mystery. It could be any one of us,” my eyes darted around the room furtively. “But we may never know who…”
“Thwack! Thump…thump…thump.” The familiar crack of a pool stick hitting a cue ball was followed by the sound of billiard balls bouncing off the felt sides of the pool table…but conspicuously absent was the satisfying sound of any of them balls actually dropping into the table’s pockets.
My cousin, Rene,2I’m actually fuzzy as to which female cousin this was…it might have been Lisa, or perhaps Jennifer–either way I almost never hung out with them otherwise. sighed in mild exasperation after yet another fruitless turn on my part.
“This game is taking forever,” she muttered.
But it wasn’t like it was all my fault that it was dragging on endlessly; she wasn’t exactly droppin’ balls in pockets either.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I can’t put my finger on it, but for some reason I’m just not on my game today,” I noted.
“Me, too,” Rene agreed. “I’m usually a regular pool shark, but something is amiss around here, and it’s really messing with me.”
“It must be this musty old school building,” I said gesturing around to the repurposed Richfield Grade School classroom which, up until the building had recently been turned into a modest community center, hadn’t been regular used since our mothers were 8th grade students there in the 60’s.
She looked around the otherwise empty room. On this particularly lazy Sunday, we appeared to be the only ones not just in the billiards room, but in the entire building.
“Yeah, something sure is off in here,” she concurred. “What say we just call this game a draw and jam outta here?”
“It is indeed a beautiful spring day outside, and the casual stroll back to Grandma’s house does sound rather pleasant,” I responded.
As we (rather loudly) racked the balls and put away the pool sticks, Rene all of a sudden paused and made a scrunched up face.
“There’s that smell again…” she noted.
“Yeah, let’s go on and get outta this confined space,” I said reinforcing our newly-laid plan.
“I need fresh air–NOW!” she said as she suddenly made a break for the exit.
Once outside, we both drew in two huge lungfuls of the crisp Kansas spring breeze.
With our heads cleared, I couldn’t help but muse aloud.
“That was really odd. I wonder if they have a mold problem that needs remediation…”
Rene just gave me a sideway glance.
“Mold? Here in Southwest Kansas? You know that we are technically in a desert climate, right?”
“Ah, ’tis a real mystery. It could be any one of many endless possibilities, then,” my eyes darted furtively back to the building we had just escaped. “But we may never know what…”
“Hold my beer…” is most definitely what Frito-Lay told Nabisco back in the mid-90’s when they saw the massively successful nonsense the latter had found in their well-intentioned-but-tragically-misguided non-fat Snackwell’s cookies.
With Proctor & Gamble’s recent food-science breakthrough, Olestra, in hand, those wily bastards took nutritionally dubious “healthy” snacking to a whole ‘nother level with the release of their Olean sub-brand of completely fat-free chips. I mean, this was revolutionary. Fat-free, yet they did not compromise the taste or texture of all of Frito-Lay’s greatest hits in the least–they were virtually indistinguishable for all intents and purposes. You see, the miracle lied within the fact that these Olestra oil-substitute would pass completely through one’s GI system without ever being absorbed…
Would this result in explosive diarrhea and unbearably horrific farts in large quantities that were nearly impossible to control?
Would anybody you know be so intent on living an extreme ‘healthy’ low-fat lifestyle that they would continue to regularly consume such a product having experienced such dire consequences after the first go-round?
Is it possible that any human could be so inconsiderate of their fellow man and woman that they would knowingly subject them to such inhumanities, just for their own personal benefit?
Can you conceive of such a self-focused psychopath that would inflict such suffering on others, then proceed to give a whole new meaning to the term ‘gaslighting’ by pretending that if anything was ‘off’ about the experience, that it must be the environment and surely not their own stank ass?
Ah, ’tis a real mystery.
*eyes dart furtively around the room*
But we may never know the answers to such questions…
Content created on: 22/23 June 2024 (Sat/Sun)
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