Werner Herzog
1976
44 minutes
This is a Werner Herzog documentary about auctioneers at some sort of auctioneer competition.
Unlike your uncle, who attended them compulsively and made a lot of money wheeling and dealing at them, you are generally not a fan of auctions. You stay away from them, whether online or in-person.
You did briefly date a young woman whose father was an auctioneer. She was responsible for several of the worst dates you've ever been on, which is saying a lot. Her name was Bobbie, but your roommate at the time, who came up with cruel nicknames for all the women you dated so he could name his fish after them, always referred to her as Spaz #2. Spaz #1 (who was initially just Spaz, just like WWI used to be The Great War) was responsible for several other worst dates you've ever been on, but her story won't be told here.
Spaz #2 was quite attractive. She was a thin, petite girl with short blonde hair in a pixie cut. Somehow she listened to fIREHOSE, which you found intriguing as a Mike Watt fan. However it was all downhill from there. On your first outing you went on a rather uneventful date to the Olive Garden she lived across the street from since neither of you had a car. Over dinner she told you several mundane facts about her life. She told you about her father, the auctioneer. She told you about her housemates, one of whom was a student at the technical college and another who was some manner of muffler mechanic. She told you that she and her female roommate were currently pet-sitting for a friend's chinchilla, which was staying at their apartment despite the fact that they aren't allowed to have pets. You were warned not to mention this fact to her male muffler-mechanic roommate if he came around since he would be upset. Their lease had a "no pets" clause, and he did not want the landlord to fine them.
After you finished your tiramisus, you walked her home across the busy highway and back to her apartment, and things looked slightly promising for the rest of the evening. However, upon entering her apartment, you found her other two roommates having a loud argument about the chinchilla, who was in a small cheap cage on the table. The muffler mechanic, who looked like the world's angriest muffler mechanic, was screaming at her other roommate, another petite girl in her twenties, telling her she had to get rid of the chinchilla immediately. Spaz #2 and the other roommate pleaded with him to calm down, but he declared if they didn't do something about the chinchilla, he would. To your horror, he seized the cage and stormed out of the apartment, leaving you with the two crying girls.
There was discussion about whether he was going to take it to the house of one of his friends or, worse, if he was going to release it into the woods. You held out hope that he would simply come back in the house with the chinchilla still in the cage, having made his point. Eventually he returned, empty-handed. When asked what he had done, he informed the young women that he had driven the rodent out to a wooded area a short distance away and beaten it to death with a shovel.
That was your cue to leave. You headed out the door and rode back home on the bus, horrified at how the evening had gone. You never even got to find how many chins a chinchilla could chill.
Time to choose something different: