Okay, so I got these two passes for a Matinee showing of Monsters, Inc. by letting the Kroger Grocery store log all of my shopping habits as well as my wife's proclivity to buy cheese snacks and Miller Life, so I decided to break up the monotony of my idled life and use them on Opening Day to see the movie.
Sure, I swore I'd never pay to see another movie from my former tormenters and torturers, the Walt Disney Corporation, but then this was for free, so it was just an exchange of dollars from one evil corporation to another. Where's the harm in that? A little free entertainment to kill a few hours and perhaps get a few ideas for this novel I'm trying to write...
Nothing in life is ever free.
Okay, so I saved $5.50 for the movie itself, which is rather scary since a matinee in my mind ought to be three or three and a half bucks. How the heck did movies get so expensive? Well, I still go to see matinees during the day anyway, since I don't have anything better to do after a long walk and half-assed job hunt, so I guess this is savings I can pocket.
Not so fast, white guy.
Instead of walking to the relatively-new Edwards Theater, which is 20 minutes away from my place and right next to the Benz dealership where I sometimes get my car tuned up while I played hooky from work and saw a movie, I decided to give myself a rest after a 5 mile trot and drive to the theater. As of October 1, they raised their parking fees from one dollar to two dollars. I hadn't noticed that, since I'd walked to the theater the last few movies I'd seen on passes and such.
But two dollars to park? One's bad enough for a skinflint like me, but two? Robbery! I saw their partners in crime, the police, lurking and circling the parking garage and ticketing anybody on the streets within several blocks.
The bayou city's bastard boys in blue, doing their finest to us all right where the sun doesn't shine.
So I went through the garage, used my toolkit to geld a stuck-in-the-down-position security arm, and got a space close to a stairwell. Then, after getting the free ticket with my pass, I decided to treat myself to a large diet Coke and popcorn. Sure, the beverages are watered-down and the popcorn is always some degree of stale, but I figure I will walk off the fake grease-flavored spooge on it. It's Friday... spend some of those pounds I've lost so I can lose them all over again and then some!
The damage there was $8.75. For that, I could have done an all-you-can-eat salad at the Souper Salad TWICE, and it would have tasted way better than that. Sure, it's a bitch getting a salad into a movie, because as we all know salads are the easiest way terrorists can cause havoc and mayhem at our theater establishments and end the American Way. Every time I try to sneak something in, somehow the produce-sniffing wombats always bray and hoot in my direction and I get hauled before the Lord of the Concession Stand.
Cinema Nazis!
For those of you skilled only in Fuzzy Math, the total is $10.75 to see a free movie, park, and have a snack in this about-to-be-second-in-air-pollution town! They had the audacity to show a preview reel of some patriotic bullshit thing saying that it's good to be in America... the home of the free, but that ends at our establishment's front doors.
It just doesn't pay to be a freeloader deadbeat anymore.  | 
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