Not the overtly weird places like sado doggiy style parlors (NTTAWWT) or minimarts at 3:30 in the morning but places that are ostensibly normal but just have that subtly peculiar David Lynch kind of atmosphere.
My first choice is a supermarket at 1:30 in the afternoon.
It's brightly lit with cheery colors and all the right kind of touches that make us want to buy buy buy. Ads, balloons, aggressively styled sales pitches. Consumerist smells. Grocery personnel restocking, watering the produce department, clinking in the arrays of bottles of juice, beer or sodas, clunking cardboard boxes of breakfast cereals, detergents or hygiene products.
But then there's the legions of older men who seem to have given up, schlumping around in sweat pants, peering at cell phones or dozing in the chairs they put by the Starbucks stand. And old ladies with gobs of poorly applied makeup, leaning heavily on the shopping carts seemingly wheezing in quiet utterances to phantoms only they can see. Plus the guys that are skipping out from work or on the run, grabbing a quick pint of shitty vodka or cheap beer plus some dorts or puffed corn snack, tattered cap pulled down, skittish eyes. Much more the heart of America than Lassie or the Cleavers would have us imagine.
Yours?