2004-07-11 @ 10:45 p.m.
and BINGO was her name-O

Yay, me. You da wittykitty! ....fuck.

So I was sitting there trying to decide which bill needed to be paid the MOST. Probably the insurance and electric bill, since they were both double bills. They add up to about $130, so that�ll leave me $37 for 3 weeks. Yippie skippie. Ummmm...fuck.

Man, this poverty thing really cuts into your leisure activities, like eating and feeding the cat. So I decided to go to some garage sales. Maybe I could find some good stuff to sell for a large profit. Like that Frank Sinatra record I bought for 25 cents and sold for nearly $30 a few weeks ago. Yeah, that�s the ticket. Unfortunately, you have to drive 30 miles and go to 43 garage sales before you might discover a rare cache of Star War figurines or a vial with Abraham Lincoln�s nose hairs in it.

The first sale I went to was an estate sale. Those can be absolute treasure troves if the former owner was smart enough to collect something valuable. One sale I went to two summers ago had this suit case up in one of the bedrooms. The suitcase itself wasn�t worth much, but it was jammed with hundreds of postcards and souvenir books from amusement parks in the 1960�s. I don�t know that the person running the sale knew it was packed full of goodies, and I wasn�t telling, since that�s their job to know, so she gave me the whole thing for $3.00. I ended up making almost $80 from all the various kitschy doo-dads within.

So I was walking through this house, eyes cast downwards looking for something good, rare and exceedingly cheap, since I�m so broke and shouldn�t be doing this, but this may be the only way I�ll make any money this month, so little voice in my head, just shut the fuck up....

And I hear, HELLO WITTY!

I look up and there was Jim, my first Art Class Potential Husband Person, who I had later determined was gay. He dressed like someone in an L.L. Beane catalog. He seemed to take particular interest in the male models. He was soft spoken. He had good taste...all landmarks for gayness, right? Just two weeks ago I had bumped into him out in front of a local library. He was smartly dressed in bike riding apparel. He had said he was waiting for his �female partner�. And I was thinking, you mean like Grace Adler? That wasn�t meant to be catty. My best friend is gay. But then I never saw her, and I figured he was covering for someone else, like Bruce the cake decorator.

So he was looking at this blonde 1950�s dining room table (oh, yes, he is definitely gay), and was negotiating with this bombastic auction-type guy who was trying to convince him that a table like this would probably sell for $1200 at the local furniture store, so it was definitely worth the $500 they were asking, so I just gave Jim a little wave and headed for the basement. Basements in estate sales are always the best place to find things cheap. I did find an old book for a famous movie in the 1950�s which I will put on E-Bay tonight. But when I came upstairs from the basement there was Jim and this blonde woman, right at the top. It was then and there I learned the truth. Jim is married. His female partner is his wife. Ya could have knocked me over with a feather. She was nice though. Together they reminded me of a couple in a Woody Allen movie. Later when I told my mom about it, she thought maybe the wife was a cover for his �gayship�.

Gayship? Ya mean, like the Queen Merry.

I hit quite a few garage sales, but it was a very uneventful day, except for one sale where they gave me a cute little Boyd Bear for free. I love bears and this one had a little brown velvet tam with a rose on it was really cute. And it was a Boyd�s! And free!

I was also noticing as I was driving around, that I was really starting to feel very depressed. It was a combination of not having any money, thinking about the boys up at the nanny job, feeling like a failure at not following through on that, not having heard from Married Guy in over a week and thinking he was angry at me for not telling him about the nanny job when I saw him, but in an e-mail. I also have some anxiety about seeing �A� after all this. I feel like I have failed him too somehow. He tried to get me a job to make my life better and I failed. Plus I was eating like a maniac all afternoon. Mostly caffeinated sodas and sugar shit and chocolate. I was really wired and anxious.

Mid-afternoon, I stopped at the grocery store and picked up some fresh food. After a week of eating grizzly, fatty frozen hamburger patties everynight (and I�m not particularly fond of hamburger anyways), and grilled cheeses, I really felt like I needed to clean out my system. Bought some fruit and vegetables and yogurt and some oat grain bread and milk (Sir G only had milk on Tuesday and never again). It felt good to have control over what I was eating instead of depending on someone who only buys bulk canned foods at Costco. I even popped open the skin milk on the way home. I think I must have consumed about 30,000 grams of fat in the last week, because that was all they had cheese, salami and fatty hamburgers products.

I called my mom when I got home, because I knew I was heading for some kind of emotional meltdown if I didn�t. We talked for quite a long time. I got out some more of my angst and anger about the last week and my anxiety about the money situation, and I didn�t know what I was going to do about it..blah, blah, blah. And then she suggested that we go to BINGO.

Now I haven�t been to BINGO since probably the late 1970�s. I don�t particularly like gambling. I have the most incredibly bad luck of anyone you�d ever want to know. I just cannot win anything. And yet I am perpetually buying lottery tickets, in hopes of hitting some kind of jackpot....ANYTHING!!! I berate myself for doing so, since I really can�t even afford $1-3/week for stupid lottery tickets. I can�t even win the $1.00 ones for God sakes. I might as well just stand on a highway overpass and dump one dollar bills out of my purse out. My biggest win to date? $4. Whee! And that�s in 20 years of playing.

So, since I am totally desperate for money and this church pays out $3500 a week, and my mom offered to pay for my night of BINGO playing, I decided to go with her. And happily, in our state, us non-smokers no longer have to huff in the poisonous gasses of you smokers, so it was certainly doable.

We got there an hour and 15 minutes early. My mom was all excited because she used to be addicted to BINGO. As a child, I spent many a night, in the local BINGO children�s nursery...AND I HATED IT. She was having fun, and I was stuck in a classroom with a bunch of weirdo kids with very little to do. Sometimes they�d let us play a junior version of BINGO with the prize being a candy bar or something, but unfortunately my bad luck involving anything gambling extended back even to 1966.

As we walked in I was like, hmmm...is this a Weight Watchers meeting? Or maybe a casting call for The Jerry Springer Show? Oh...its a Bingo Hall. It�s pretty bad when Wittykitty is the coolest person in the entire building and I�m only wearing shorts and a Jersey Shore t-shirt.

And what is it about old ladies? Why do they all wear flower print shirts and pastel color pants? Is that like the official uniform of old ladydom? And those flower print shirts must really have some good stretchy material, because these old broads have the most bodaciously upright boobs. Is that a steel plated bra under there, Bertha? How do you get your boobs to aim towards the ceiling like that? Is there a switch under there like at the planetarium when they�re adjusting the telescope? All I have to say is if I ever attempt to wear a flower print shirt and stretchy pink pants anytime before the year 2029 or even after, can you just please whack me in the back of the head?

There weren�t many men there, but the ones who were there, were probably just there because there was no NASCAR races on. Saw one dude with this ridiculously huge red-white-and-blue cowboy hat on. He had hundreds of metallic pins all over it. I figure his wife probably has him stand near the TV with the cable in his hand, in order to improve the television reception. I figure with all those pins, they can probably gets Al Jahaira Television from Iraq.

We sat behind this table where all the women looked like they went to the same hairdressers. Mullets-R-Us. It�s weird enough when you see a guy with a mullet, but to see a herd of Mullet-Women, none of which weighed less than about 350 pounds, sitting so closely, I couldn�t help but stare. Why? You already weigh 350. Why are you aggravating the condition by having the world�s ugliest hair cut? They did have a little girl with them, about 12. She didn�t weigh 350, but she had the biggest ass I had ever see on a child. You could have rested a 10 pound sack of potatoes on her ass and still had room to cut fries.

And speaking of fries. If you�re on a diet when you go to BINGO, don�t expect to find any healthy snacks to munch on. It went pretty much like this: Greasy hotdogs. Greasy hamburgers. Greasy french fries. Greasy potato chips. Nachos with greasy cheesy stuff. Greasy donuts dipped in solidified cholesteral. About the only thing without fat was the Sierra Mist soda. I tried to order that... but they were out. Or maybe the spigot was blocked with a lump of grease.

I was also worried about my mom eating this shit. She is a heart patient with bad cholesterol. So she arrived back at the table with a hotdog and a headlight donut. The donut had this hard crunchy yellow shit on top of it. She offered me a bite. Normally I�d jump at a bite of something with sugar, but the yellow crunchy shit looked so incredibly unappetizing, that I passed on it.

The games finally started at 7:30. My mom had marked up all my cards with all the weird games they play...the Little Joes, the B and N Railroad, Crazy T�s. The more she tried to explain it verbally, the more my brain reacted in confusion. Like huh-what? So she took a highlighter pen and drew it out. See, that I understand...visual examples. She then gave me this really pretty purple dauber. Gee...what a pretty color. I wanna draw some pretty pictures....

YIKES...I think I just missed 2 letters. Oh no, they just said two more and there�s another one up on the screen. Now what did my mom say? I can�t mark the one on the screen until they say it? Oy, I�m so confused. I looked over a few rows and there were three Filipino women with about 47 cards each. They are marking them so fast, that sparks are flying out of their daubers. Shit, I don�t want to be beat out by a stupid Filipino...AGAIN.

I finally got a rhythm going. Daub...daub...daub. Fuck...who am I fooling, I never....HEY I�M SET TO WIN, I�M SET TO WIN....

I�M SET TO WIN

�B-12�

BINGO!!!!

What....did you really think I was going to win? Some old lady with a steel-belted bra and pink stretchy pants won up near the front. My mom got set once near the end, but neither of us won. Afterwards the place emptied out in like 5 minutes (maybe there was a NASCAR race being replayed at 10 and everyone was rushing home to catch that). Some massive woman in a wheel chair with an oxygen tank in her lap was at the edge of the parking lot.

�Ya win, hon?�

My mom, of course, had to recount in great detail on how she was set, and how her number was next up on the screen and she hadn�t heard another person call BINGO and how she had thought she had won $350 and how excited she had been, blah, blah, blah....

And the woman in the wheelchair, looked up at us and said rather plaintively, �Isn�t that always the way, hon? Isn�t that always the way?�

Lyrics by Lennon/McCartney. All angst copyright by awittykitty