$27.50

Fact that even Wikipedia is leery of: My hometown of Langley is the horse capital of British Columbia. As far as I can tell there’s no reason for this other than that the town wanted to increase its tourism but didn’t want to fork out the dough to build the World’s Largest Envelope off of Highway 1 or something.

You could live in Langley forever and not realize you were apparently a citizen of Horsetown, BC. Sometimes things that you should probably know just never settle into your psyche. My mother, for instance, just realized not long ago that if you crank the toaster setting all the way up to 6 it doesn’t increase the speed at which your bread toasts, it just increases the amount of time it spends in there, burning away.

When I use the toaster I like to settle in at about a 3.5, myself. Sure, when you get to margarining the bread it might not melt in so well, but I’d rather back out of something early than ruin it by going too long. This is a philosophy I discovered during the only instance in my teenage years in which I successfully flirted with a cashier.

No offence to the bearded dude at the record shop who has a story about a drug trip that relates to every album I’ve ever bought there or the flamboyant gentleman at the stationary store who “didn’t take [me] as a scrapbooker” (which I took as a compliment), but as cashiers you both pale in comparison to the chick who used to work at the HMV when I was 16. Admittedly, this ranking is entirely biased towards a time in which all it took to evoke within me such a fervent vehemence (or whatever the version of love is that 16-year-olds have) was her doing the following things:

a) Displaying arcane cultural trivia relating to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD I was purchasing, namely her informing me that in its initial pressings Rhino Home Video had somehow removed 45 seconds of footage which I totally knew babes, but thanks for watching out for me.

b) What, you want something else? That isn’t enough for you?

If there was ever a time in which my worthless accumulation of pop-culture knowledge I had kept backlogged over the years paid off, this was it. In the two and a half minutes it took me to make my purchase and undo the Velcro on my wallet we bantered about every conversation point I thought only ever came up on internet message boards. We were like the children of the ’90s versions of Tracy and Hepburn which okay I’m not really sure what I’m referencing there but that’s just the sort of carefree attitude and rogue nature that had her swooning I tell ya.

Our conversational intercourse came to an end before I could risk grabbing whatever album was displayed next to the register which probably would’ve stretched the limits of my off-the-cuff bantering and brought the total cost of love up to $27.50 — more than I was prepared to pay for it at the time. Also, there was a dude behind me who seemed to really want to buy the second season of The O.C. in a hurry. (Ugh dude as if there’s an interesting anecdote about a production error with that DVD box set.) The cashier told me what a shame it was that our conversation had to “die like a Twilight Zone Movie child actor,” which in retrospect makes me think I probably should have proposed to her right then and there.

I never saw her after that in or out of the store. She had a calling in life higher than HMV, higher than me. About a month later I wrote a poem about her for my creative writing class born out of absolute desperation to come up with a topic. The result, “HMV Girl,” netted me an A as well as the saddest look I have ever received from a teacher upon handing in an assignment. It went like this (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SKIP PAST THIS POEM):

Now and then I indulge myself
And enter the store that’s intentionally dim
Acronym: HMV
His Master’s Voice

Inside is a cashier
Working just a smidge over minimum wage
Always cheerful during store hours
Happily maintaining virtue

Her knowledge where each product lies
A second nature, one might say
Keeps me focused on my goal
Honing my vision

And how is that you know
Every bizarre television series I buy?
And how is your hair so perfectly kept?
Heavenly, masterful, voluptuous

With such a vast knowledge of cult media
Then truly to me you are
The Queen of Nerdvana
Hypothetically my Valentine

Based off of this interaction and fed up with the implications of Langley as the province’s horse capital, I started a campaign to rebrand Langley as the vixen capital of BC. It didn’t get anywhere not least because that is a terrible idea. Five years later I microblogged about the whole thing when I couldn’t come up with an entry. It’s all a cycle here.