The phenomena known as “yiffing”

If you don’t know about Tina Ballerina, go there NOW. (orange bottles/silver cans) Reading her is like stumbling into a Filipino drag queen knife fight at Chuck E Cheese’s. Or getting chased by bees.

Speaking of which, my current job is wearing the six foot rat costume as the Chuck E Cheese mascot in South Milwaukee. Before hiring me, they filled the costume by kidnapping felons from the halfway house down the street. So I’m always finding cool stuff stashed in the leg of the costume. Prison shanks, mostly. And the inside of the costume smells horrid, since one time for maybe 3 days Management stored a dead body in it. Not that I complain. You know I have that hobby of sniffing gasoline. I keep a plastic baggie of Amoco Silver wadded up in the “nose” of the rat costume, that’s all I can ever smell. Keeps me sharp for work. Sharp and angry. I tend to lurch after the kids barking gibberish out of that rat head, there’s usually a mob of terrified children fleeing from me. Really. When I’m at work it’s like a prison riot at knee level. Waves of kids slamming into my legs, wailing and scrambling bug eyed for the exits. Which is cool with Management, they like to keep things edgy. What was my point? Right. My new girlfriend made me switch to Marlboro menthols because that’s the only thing I can steal out of her purse. So I’m smoking inside the rat costume as per usual, when strangely enough the menthol cigarette ignites the gasoline fumes inside the rat “head”. I’m aware of the blast of mint flavored flames shooting from the eyes of the mascot, but I remain heroically calm. Not so much the children. They were already agitated when I was thrashing through the plastic ball pit shrieking that I would drink their blood, and now demonic flames are pouring from Chuck E Cheese’s eyes. Children are so alarmist.