How come I'm always the one sitting next to the child molester?

I was at the Virgin Megastore yesterday, killing time till I had to catch my train home. Oh, by the way, let me tell you what I saw on the train ride: this middle-aged white trash dude with an imitation-Jeff Foxworthy mullet hitting on a fifteen-year-old-ish girl. I never saw that before and I guess I just assumed I lived on a sex offender-free train line. Now I'm tempted to check out that online sex offender registry to see how many other perverts live around me and which of my neighbors I should be afraid of. (Okay, I just got back from doing that, and it turns out that I'd rather not know how many sex offenders live in my town, which I probably should have thought of before going to the sex offender map website.)

Anyway, here's what happened on the train. We've got these four guys who have "multiple appearances on Cops" written all over them, and between the four of them, they're trying to figure out the train map and whether this train goes anywhere there's a good selection of liquor stores. And these two girls get on the train in Westfield, and they're also looking at the map. The girls are trying to get to Hackettstown, which is on a different train line. But it's okay, cause they're "going there later," and that's when Mullet there tries to be helpful: "You can stay over at my house on your way over."

High-fives all around. And Mullet keeps his drinking buddies happy: "I can drop you off in Hackettstown tomorrow morning."

Dude! I'm not the type of person who finds a lot of things people say inappropriate, but holy crap that was totally inappropriate. And, Mr. Mullet, it's not just that when you're at the age you need to get a prostate exam regularly, your wife isn't gonna be thrilled that you're brining a high school girl home for the night. Even if this were Japan or Polynesia or sub-Saharan Africa where it's culturally acceptable for mid-aged dudes to ask out pubescent girls, and even if she were looking to sleep with an old geezer, she could do a whole lot better than you. That's why you're going to a liquor store with your football buddies in the first place, ass.

Anyway, back to the Virgin Megastore, which contrary to what you're now thinking, sells music, DVD's, other trendy electronic crap to accessorize your music and DVD collection. It's got this club atmosphere, with the bouncers and the DJ and everything, except there's no dancing and you're allowed in even though you're ugly. I used to buy stuff there — right after I started my Barnes & Noble boycott — until I realized that Sir Richard Branson is a douchebag and spending twenty bucks in one of his stores won't make him get trampled by a herd of psychotic antelopes any sooner. Now I just go to play the sample X-Box games they've got in the corner of the store.

Besides, music is free. I'm sick of hearing these overpaid musicians and multinational media conglomerates bitching about how much money they lose to music piracy because it pales in comparison to the money these assholes are making by shoving mediocre drivel and filler on the American public. Especially the musicians. Every now and then, somebody comes along with the dense-ass argument that how would I like it if I wrote something and then people copied it without paying me? I sit behind a desk at work writing up websites for a financial consultant — if I were making a living — let alone an obscenely profitable one — playing music for an appreciative audience, I would never complain about another thing in my life ever. I hope there's a special place in hell for ungrateful dickweeds like Metallica, but I'm afraid Dante didn't envision an "arrogant pop star" circle.

I'm actually proud that I haven't bought a CD since those greedy bastards at the RIAA started suing their customers.... Or actually, I have bought one CD: Moby's 18. I figured there's one and only one good reason to give the record labels money, and that is that they're not producing records to bring the beauty of music to humanity. They're greedy and they want my money, and hopefully if I spend money on stuff I like, they'll make more of it. I think that's actually a pretty productive symbiosis between consumers and the corporate bigwigs who make our junk. I mean, they made Saw II, right?