I went to the shopping center on my lunch break the other day. I am not talking about a big mall filled with useless novelty stores, nor am I talking about a strip mall whose anchor business is a family-oriented buffet restaurant. (I bet no one speaks nostalgically about that old country.) I am talking about a proper shopping center. One level, all right angles, built somewhere between 1940 and 1970, you know, a shopping center.
The nice thing about this particular shopping center is the fact that every parking space is convenient to a door, and there is a sidewalk that goes around the entire building. And there is a movie theater! In fact, I think the movie theater is the only thing that kept the place open for the first twenty years of my life. But then a big bookstore that contains a coffee shop came to town, and the shopping center has been swinging ever since.
Anyway, I went to the shopping center because I needed to go to the bank. I don't like going to the bank. Never have. But I needed to fill my lunch break somehow, and I had this paycheck to deposit, so off I went. Then I realized that I also needed to go to a certain horrible store to buy an AC adapter. Lucky (I guess) for me, there is one of those shacks that sells radios (and AC adapters) at the shopping center as well. Not the greatest lunch plans in the world, but at least I was being efficient and tackling all of my yucky errands at once.
I managed to make my ATM deposit without incident, and then I stepped back out onto the sidewalk. I still had to go buy my adapter, but I don't actually know if I can get into the shopping center from the bank. I didn't want to cut through the bank. If I wanted to be inside the bank, I wouldn't have used the ATM in the foyer! So I went out onto the sidewalk and walked past all of the unpleasant smelling eateries to get to the nearest entrance.
As I strolled up the sidewalk, shopping center traffic was passing me on my left, at the shopping center speed limit of five miles per hour. And then I heard it. Music coming from a car. But not just any music. I heard the never-ending, piano-heavy, extremely painful outro of Layla, and I was blinded with a flash of very hot, very intense rage. I decided that the right thing to do would be jump on the hood of the car and pound on the windshield, all the while hollering, "If you are old enough to drive you are old enough to have heard Layla one billion times! Change the station! Change the station now!"
Would it be worth risking injury to make my point? Let me remind you, the car was going no more than five miles per hour. Simple physics and a childhood spent watching The A-Team and The Fall Guy (and the fact that I used to hang out with car guys where this sort of thing would have been considered normal) told me that the hard part would be hopping onto the hood with just enough force to land without gaining enough momentum to make me go rolling off the other side.
Ideally, I would have been sprawled out parallel with the windshield, so I could bang on the glass directly over the driver's face. He needs to learn that blaring Layla is not a smart practice, and I think that I could illustrate that fact in one simple lesson. But by the time I was done planning, the car had already passed me by. I couldn't hear the music anymore, but that didn't make my blood pressure any lower. I scowled, continued walking, and passed the stop sign where the offending driver was waiting to make a left. I braced myself for his crap taste, only to be confronted with silence.
I knew that any minute, either a commercial or a classic rock deejay would come blasting out of his speakers. Oh, how I wish I had been right. Instead, what started up but the useless syrupy claptrap that people mistake for a soulful riff that begins the most horrible of all songs, Wonderful Tonight.
Problem 1: Wonderful Tonight? Wonderful Tonight? Why anyone would listen to that song on purpose is beyond me. He spends the entire song bragging about how good she looks, how well she treats him, and then how she hauls his drunk ass home and tucks him in. That is all well and good for him, but I can't help but take note of the fact that it would suck to be her.
Problem 2: This driver, this person who is licensed to operate a motor vehicle but obviously needs supervision when selecting music, was not listening to the classic rock station. He wasn't even listening to a Derek and the Dominos album. He was listening to some sort of awful career-spanning Eric Clapton compilation. There is no excuse for that.
Not a minute too soon, the crapmobile made its left turn and I gazed after it, wondering if I had anything in my pockets that I could throw. I didn't, so I went into the shopping center to buy my adapter instead. Of course they didn't have what I needed, making my (already ruined) trip to the shopping center complete.