Trailer Trash Diaries   Yes, I live in a trailer.   While I am embarrassed to admit that I live such a life, I do have to say that it does provide me with copious amounts of material to write about. Thanks to my life in the trailer park, I can write about fools, idiots, retards, dumb-asses, pro-abortion-poster-children, dorks, shitheads, and stupid fucks until the end of time.   While many might think that this is a somewhat limited topic of conversation, I find that the inexhaustible supply of retardation as amazing as space exploration. I believe that I may live in something like an intellectual black hole, a place where the intelligence quotient is so low that it actually sucks in IQ points from neighboring communities.   The trailer-owners association around here is quite the find. Thanks to them I have had to make a number of modifications to my abode and the yard surrounding it in order to avoid litigation. There was quite a struggle for a number of months as I sought to keep them from installing the mandatory concrete lawn gnomes and the spare tires on top of the trailer.   After the melee, I succeeded in talking the trailer-owners association into just letting me keep a few old bicycles leaning against the trailer and purchased a pickup truck to maintain credibility as a mobile home owner.   Here are a couple of chapters from my trailer trash life...   1. A Day at the Roller Rink.   As you may have learned in my last installment, I take my kids to the roller rink on weekends and have a real good time laughing at the low-rent-types that engage in this great white-trash "sport." As with all white-trash-day-care-centers (such as malls, video arcades, and Nike shoe factories) the roller rink has its share of losers and meatheads.   Let's first talk about the rink...   This is the roller rink. It looks like a warehouse and was apparently built in 1960. The parking lot is in such incredible disrepair that I have to steer carefully around the potholes to avoid sinking into the abyss.   It is rumored that there was a movement in the early 90s to turn some of the potholes into national parks. At one point during the Parks Services negotiations, someone said, "Hey, I think they already did that somewhere west o' here... Arizona, Montana, or some damned place like that." It was only then that the Parks Services people realized that they had almost created a second Grand Canyon National Park and halted all discussion on the topic.   The rink looks like a bomb depository that has seen a few too many accidents from poor ordinance handling. Across from the rink is a farm looking thing that has a horse and a few really weird looking cows. On a good day, the smell of the animal droppings wafts through the rink and mixes with the nacho cheese odor to create a unique experience that can only be described as "scrumptiously nauseating."   Once inside the rink, one is taken by the lumpy floor covered with a gray, ratty, stained "carpet." Off to the right are the snack bar and the incredibly unmaintained bathrooms. On the left hand side are some extremely old video games and the skate rental counter.   Once the skates are donned, participants can engage in a number of great roller skating pastimes.   On the left, you see the traditional opening "High IQ Skaters Only" segment of the session. The announcer doesn't know that IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient and proceeds to pronounce IQ as a word. This is why the event is known as the "High Ick Skaters Only" skate.   To participate in this event, the skaters need to have an "Ick" above 100. Since none of the skaters knows what an "Ick" is, they opt out to avoid embarrassment should someone accuse them of lying about having a high "Ick."   Those that do skate during this part of the session are usually too stupid to know that there is an event going on to begin with thus creating the ultimate irony with the High IQ skate. The only participants in this skate are the stupidest people in the facility.   After the great time that all of the "High Ickers" have, it's time for an "All Skate" AKA "Adolescent Rollerball." The All Skate portions of the session are where all the little kids get on the floor and proceed to annoy, trip, and eventually kill anyone that is even remotely skilled as a roller skater. I suspect that there is a place in Vegas that makes odds on how many people that the ankle-biting set can injure and then proceed to watch the video feed direct from the rink to see who has won the bets.   After surviving the first All Skate, the announcer reads the general rules and then gets the skaters to participate in a game called "Beers For Everyone."   Beers For Everyone is a spinoff of the old roller skating game known as "Let's Get Drunk as Fuck and Break a Couple of Our Own Bones and Maybe Even Get a Concussion" (acronym: LGDAFABACOOOBAMEGAC).   The participants line up in the middle of the floor and then one-by-one skate up to the bar to choose between a broccoli milkshake and a Buckhorn beer. Those who choose the beer get to drink the beer and those who choose the broccoli milkshake are thrown off of the floor. The beer drinkers go to the back of the line and get to make another pass at the bar.   This continues until all participants are thrown off or pass out and piss themselves.   After the LGDAFABACOOOBAMEGAC spinoff, there a few more all skates, a couple of drunken brawls, and some crappy music. A guy named Ferd usually shows up somewhere in the middle of the session and displays either a macaroni casserole or his personal parts to the skaters on the floor. After Ferd does his thing, alcoholic beverages are served to the juveniles and the session winds down to a close.   Just before the final minutes of the session, there is the Harassment skate. The Harassment skate is also known as the "I haven't slept with my sister" skate.   As you see in the picture, there are few participants in this event as the people that choose to skate during this time are heckled and booed for being too unmanly to have had intimate relations with their closest of relatives.   Skaters are harassed with phrases like, "Hey, izz yoo too stoopid to..." (harasser falls down and has seizures related to inbred disease processes).   If no-one chooses to participate in this skate, the harassers spend their time yelling at the wooden floors until the skate is over.   The session is "capped" with the final event, "Avoid The Bullets."   At the end of each session, a drunken skater is chosen to wield the Uzi and then shoots up those that haven't already left the rink. While this may sound dangerous, it is usually pretty harmless as the person doing the shooting is also the winner of the Beers For Everyone competition.   In the event that the shooter is sober enough to do damage, the bullet recipients are rewarded with free passes to the next open session and then dragged out to the parking lot. After Avoid The Bullets, the skaters take off their skates and head on back to their trailers to sober up enough to attend the next week's session.   After all is said and done, a good workout has been had by all and the skaters can then go outside to see Evel Knievel jump one of the potholes in his jet-powered Yugo.   2. The Trailer Trash Vacation   Kathy (my wife) and I (me) have been married for 17 years.   We (us) have pretty much been around our kids since they were born. Clint (Barney Molester) and Jessica (Angsty Girl) have never been in a day care center and have only been away from us when at school. Since they have been home-schooled (OK, trailer-schooled) for the last five years, Kathy and I have had little or no time away from the kids, so we decided to take a "vacation" for a couple of days.   Clint is 15 and Jessica is 13 and we figured that they were old enough to stay home alone for a couple of days while Kathy and I went out for a while. Being that we are paranoid parents, we felt that we could only go so far for our vacation and feel that the kids were safe. So we made reservations at a local Double Tree hotel and stayed there for two nights.   To make it feel more like a real vacation, we took pictures of the sights and brought them home for the kids to see.   The Hotel...   We paid $76.00 a night for our room. We figured that this would be quite the snazzy setup for the price we paid.   While the lobby of the hotel was pretty and shiny, the rest of the the hotel was frighteningly old and pretty run down. The ceilings on the floor that we stayed on appeared to be only seven feet tall and the ceiling tiles were old and cruddy looking.   The room was clean but shoddy. The carpet was crappy looking and the floor had a huge crack in it that showed through the carpet. In order to avoid being swallowed up by the gap in the floor, Kathy and I pole vaulted over the floor-valley since bridge-building materials were not readily available.   The room was smaller than the rooms that I used to sell at my $39.00 per night hotel and was in much worse condition.   The curtain over the sliding glass window was also in cruddy condition and the overall feel of the place made us think that there might be a meth lab in the vicinity waiting to explode. Other than all of this, I considered this to be a pretty junky joint to stay at.   The First Activity...   The key to any successful vacation is to tackle your deepest fears and try to conquer them before you go home. For instance, if you fear large poisonous snakes, then you should check into your hotel, fill it with radioactive, anthrax filled pythons and learn how to deal with the situation until either the fear is conquered or until the police and ambulance crew haul your glowing contaminated body from the room in a lead-lined biohazard body bag.   When it comes to phobias, I am pretty lucky, I only have a fear of heights. Our room was on the eighth floor, and we had a balcony which was accessible through a sliding glass door.   I decided to get our digital camera and take a few shots off of the balcony. As I stepped out onto the two foot wide balcony, I became suddenly aware that the ground was a mere 8 megafucktillion feet below the window out of which I had just voluntarily walked.   After noticing the distance between me and the pavement below, I casually turned around and made light-speed back into the hotel room.   While I did not manage to get a picture off the balcony I did manage to snap a shot of something. The picture on the left is my first in a series of shots taken while I attempted to overcome my fear of heights. While it is not the most accurate portrayal of reality, it is probably the most interesting.   The above look-at-Frank-run-like-a-lunatic picture is impossible to make out, I assume that this is because of the rate of speed that I had managed to attain while leaving the hotel's incarnation of My Own Personal Hell. I believe the picture is of my shoe or of the Zen version of the antichrist. It may be an anomaly resulting from my clothes catching fire as I reached warp 5 million.   As with all successful phobia-reduction programs, I found a simple but effective way to deal with my fear of heights, I stayed inside and sent my wife out onto The Ledge of Death to take some pictures.   Here is a picture of the pavement that would have been my cause of death had I decided to stay out on the Veranda of My Imminent Demise long enough to become dizzy, lose my balance, and fall to my imminent demise.   Kathy was a pretty good sport about it and stopped calling me a gimpified loser geek after only a few weeks of taunting. She took other pictures off of the balcony but I refuse to post them until she takes the "Home of the Gimpified Loser Geek" banner off of the front of the trailer.   On to other things.   Dinner and a Movie...   Well, it was actually a movie and dinner, anyway...   We scoured the paper for a full six minutes to find the perfect movie, The Ring. This movie was exactly what I wanted for four reasons:   1. The movie was released sometime after 1963.   2. It was not a musical.   3. An extremely unstable postal-worker friend of mine went to see it and said that watching the movie did not make him want to go to work and kill everyone.   4. It cost a dollar a piece to get in.   For a dollar, I would pretty much watch any movie that did not have Celine Dion singing a song in it. Needless to say, Kathy was truly impressed with my choice as the movie I chose did not contain Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, or one of either Pamela Anderson's breasts.   I rate the movie as a 9.9 on a scale of 10 as it was a movie released sometime after 1963, it was not a musical, and it cost a dollar a piece to get in.   After the movie, we went to a Black Eyed Pea restaurant to have dinner. The hostess was an interesting specimen because she hated everything. She appeared to be extrememly pissed off because we had the nerve to show up, pay money for our food, tip the waitress, and provide a way for the hostess to make her rent for yet another month.   At first I thought that the hostess disliked me because I was a cheapskate that had just treated his spouse to an exciting evening at the movies for a grand total of two bucks. I did not feel so bad about our mistreatment as I saw her clearing a table and acting as if the silverware had existed solely for the purpose of ruining her life.   Other than the screaming, naked, one-legged Lutheran selling subscriptions to a Christian narrow-band internet service provider, dinner was pretty uneventful so I'll move on to the sightseeing part of the vacation...   Seeing the Paris Sights...   The best part of any vacation is the joy that is to be had forcing others to look at photographs of stuff that they really couldn't care less about. The more mundane the sights, the more fun one can have watching others squirm while they act interested...   Imagine the horror of having to sit through the following...   "...and then we went into this great little restaurant. This is what it looked like from the table we sat at. That there is the one hotel that we couldn't afford to stay at. It cost like $80.00 a night. Screw that. I ain't paying no $80.00 a night for a friggin' room, no way. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   "This is the same restaurant. Did you know that they still make buildings? Here's one that they put up next to the Arby's that we sat in. We had some great coupons for Arby's. You ever use them there coupon thingies? I like Coupons." ---------------------------------------------------------------     "We got free coffee. Of course we only got free coffee for one day since the maids went on some sort of holiday the next day and couldn't clean our room. I had to go steal some coffee from one of them little rooms." -----------------------------------------------------------------------------     "They had a Wal-Mart Supercenter! Gosh, they have everything from country & western music to those weird little watches that play music from old vampire movies." -----------------------------------------------------------   "Just before the big fire and the appearance of the fourteen goats, we played that there game that had all them letters and things. I really don't know who won since we were real drunk." ----------------------------------------   "And this here pitcher looked real nice on our bedroom wall after we pried it from the hotel room wall. It doesn't look as good in our house after we tried to fix the bent up parts with duct tape, super-glue, and wads of gum." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Well, I've been working on this page for almost a month. There was a whole entry on white-trash sledding but after this stuff with all the pictures, I quit. Christ, it's gonna take me months just to upload this damned thing.   I'll update more later...   Copyright 2003 by Frank Emsley