Tag Archives: echo park

Business Review: Royale Junior Liquor Market, Echo Park

28 Aug

Image stolen from Flickr user “OrangeCounty_Girl”

(Originally posted on Yelp.)

I must say I like the lack of personal interest the clerk at the Royale Junior Liquor Market has in my purchasing habits.  I mean, he may not even notice– he’s working at the type of place where he’s in front of a giant wall of Old Crow pint bottles and novelty skull and pistol shaped fifths of tequila, behind three quarters of an inch of GE® Lexan™ bulletproof plexiglass.  He faces a large shelf of pornographic DVD’s specifically tailored to the prurient interests of working-class Mexicans, whose bright eye-catching covers leave nothing to the imagination.  Shit is distracting. He has more things to worry about than my weird unnecessarily frequent and expensive daily purchases of small bottles of alcohol.  He has to stock nine different kinds of non FDA-approved herbal pill packets designed to enlarge your penis, give you bigger and more meaningful erections, enhance your sexual desire until is as that of el tigre.  He has to eyeball stumbling drunk day laborers as they come dangerously close to shoplifting a Payday; ward off these miscreants with merely the shaming power of his gaze.  He has to vigilantly head off customers steering toward the inoperable ATM machine in front– he clearly prides himself on sparing them a useless button push and confounded few seconds of bewilderment– “Hey! Is not working.”  The ATM is never working, but the giant glowing sign telling the public that the store has an ATM is always working. Continue reading

Hipsters

18 May

I am often accused by extremely unhip people of being a hipster. People who wear jeans with a blazer and have short, neat hair cuts, people who have no hobbies and talk about their jobs constantly and are pleased with their professional success use this slur because while I work in the same industry as them I wear tight pants and live in Echo Park and in the scant hours I have outside of the same office doing the same horrible things as these people I occasionally manage to put my penis in a nineteen year old who likes non-mainstream music.  They discuss how I must like drinking Pabst and how they are surprised that I don’t sport an “ironic” mustache.

All this tired, old shit– the tight pants, the mustaches, the Pabst drinking– all these tired old stereotype are in fact completely true; there are scores of these exact people whom you could have made by listening to anti hipster douchebags talk shit and then feeding this info into the computer from WEIRD SCIENCE.  They are real, and they’ve been around for over a decade, and they share the Echo Park streets with their fellow stereotypes, undereducated Mexicans; a guy with a teardrop tattoo pushing a stroller alongside his pregnant seventeen year old wife.  The whole scene looks like something out of Grand Theft Auto, where the game designers wanted to take a tongue in cheek jab at our culture but didn’t have they processing power to make realistic  human beings. Continue reading