I enjoyed immensely seeing a speeding red Ferrari spin out of control on Fallston Road tonight during one of the bouts of heavy-as-shit thunderstorm that seemed to come, go, and return. Unfortunatly, the driver regained control of the car before it crashed into a telephone pole and exploded in a billowing orange mushroom cloud, splattering debris and flesh across the roadway. Fudge.

Literally.

Lettering identification for the Zeus. U.I.W. (what does that stand for, anyway?), registry number One-Nine-Seven-Eight (my birthyear … totally coincidentally). Using inverted and regular slopes of different colors to give the illusion of paint, along with a break near the top to draw to mind the image of a stencil applied to the hull, and a bunch of space-suited crew-members using space-spray-paint-cans. While I’m happy with how the name came out, I’m not happy with the size – it’s much too large, so I’m going to try to shrink it down a little.

The “W” was tricky. To get the illusion while keeping it to a width of three bricks, I used a 1×1 brick modified (headlight) on the left-most “line” of the letter. Facing the headlight to the right, I used a 1×1 dark gray brick, topped with a 1×1 tan brick, that topped again with a 1×1 dark gray tile, which snugs up to the tan brick on the right. I’m happy with the effect.

Note, also, on the registry construction, the built-in spotlights to illuminate for the hapless smugglers or pirates who find this interdiction cruiser warping down on them. (Interdiction cruiser? What’s an interdiction cruiser? This project, I suppose. Don’t ask me what its purpose is. Er. Interdiction? And ventilating space pirates, I guess.)

Of course, a name isn’t going to scare Space John Silver off of a rich merchantman. Next on the pre-construction schedule? Cannon emplacements. Hard to make space pirates suffer from a irreversible case of explosive decompression without guns, y’know? These pose their own problems, but that’s another post.

So there’s a pack of Newports sitting on my kitchen table.

This is odd, because I don’t smoke.

(That’s not an entirely true statement, but for the next part of this post I need to elaborate to you, my very small reading audience, that I only put cigarettes in my mouth when I’m at a bar and/or drinking, and even then, I never ever ever inhale. If you’ve ever been in a bar with me, you’ve probably noticed that your cigarettes are literally wasted on me. If you’ve been in a bar with me and never noticed that I’m not actually, y’know, inhaling? You should pay more attention).

I have inhaled twice. I don’t know if the second inhalation counts seeing as it wasn’t a cigarette I was smoking. Can you smoke a bong? Anyway.

So the first time I inhaled I was in high school. I was a seventeen year old junior. I was dating a nineteen year old who was enrolled in community college. Or she could’ve been doing nothing productive with her life. I don’t remember. Anyway, I foolishly kissed her right after she’d taken a drag off her cigarette. About two seconds later I learned that one should never kiss anyone else right after they’ve taken a drag off a cigarette. Chalk one up to youthful stupidity.

The second time I inhaled I was dragging myself through classes at Towson for the first time (the second time, this fall, I won’t be dragging). I was working at a corporate pizza shop in Cockeysville and hanging out a lot with this girl named Amy who’d moved back home after spending years down south and who was a year or two older than I am. She was a total babe, not in the “smoking hot, bounce a quarter off her stomach” way, but the (and in her words), “I don’t get what it is with Maryland guys — in Florida, men LIKE their women to have asses.” Long story short, what I wouldn’t have given to get in her pants (where I never got), but something I did do to try to get in her pants was, after a night in a bar spent drinking, to go out and get high with her. So there we are, in her little Tercell, up off Greenpoint Road in Cockeysville, taking hits off her bong. Or at least she was, as I wasn’t inhaling … until she noticed me not inhaling, and gave me proper instruction on how to inhale (I wasn’t brave enough to tell her I wasn’t actually interested in getting high, as I was already pretty fucking drunk). And so that’s the story of the second time I inhaled, and the first (of two) time I smoked marijuana. (The second time was at Gary’s annual Christmas party two years ago — he hasn’t had another one since — where I and many of my coworkers — all of us drunk from six or nine hours of bingin’ off the kegs in his garage — passed around a joint as a bunch of Gary’s off-duty cop buddies watched, laughed, and repeatedly assured us they were off-duty and didn’t want the paperwork that would come with us being arrested).

So did you get through that paragraph? If you want to re-read it, just to make sure you understood it, that’d be great. All of this has been exposition so that I can bring you right back to where you were when you first started reading this post.

So there’s a pack of Newports sitting on my kitchen table.

This is odd, because I don’t smoke.

Sometimes, at the Indy, delivery customers will inquire if we can swing past the 7-11 and pick them something “extra” up. Something we don’t normally sell. Like cigarettes. For a few of our customers, the ones who order often and tip high, this has never been a problem (unless we’re ridiculously busy, which hasn’t been for awhile since like ten new pizza shops opened in Hunt Valley in the last year). It’s an arrangement that usually works out well for everyone involved — the customer gets to relax in their nice air conditioned apartment without having to fight traffic, and the driver is reimbursed by the customer not only for the pack of cigarettes (on top of the order total), but also by a larger-than-usual gratuity.

So Tuesday morning, I’ve been in the store for an hour by the time eleven o’clock rolls around. I’m in at ten the whole week to get a jump on the prep list, and Tuesday at ten I jumped right on the slicer — lettuce, provolone cheese, tomatoes, green peppers, onions, etcetra. I’m finished the slicer stuff by eleven and breaking the machine down, spraying it down, wiping the gooey build-up off of it, when Zap comes back with the low-down on the order he just took.

To wit, girl up off Loveton Circle ordered a pizza and a soda. In addition, she wants a pack of cigarettes and, Zap is near laughter at this point, a coffee with extra sugar. Now look, cigarettes are one thing, but we’re not going overboard with this “extra service” shit. One of Gary’s pals, R., who owns an Indy shop down near Towson, just started something with the nearby convenience store, offering to bring customers milk or bread or what-have-you with their pie orders. That’s the kind of bullshit retarded crap none of us need, and thankfully Gary’s not planning on following suit — trying to run out the door with a triple and having to remember to run over to 7-11 for milk? Fuck that.

Anyway, so while he’s on the phone with this girl, Zap absolutely refuses to get coffee for the girl. Tells her we do cigarettes, on occasion, for well-tipping customers. Zap’s sometimes got this swelled head about his Italian ancestry, but he can do the border-line threat stuff to make a Sopranos’ Mafiaoso proud. You want cigs? You tip well.

So since I was the first driver in, I bag up the pie when it comes out of the oven, grab a soda, throw that in my car, and walk over to 7-11 for cigs. Those in my pocket, I drive up to Loveton. Girl is sitting on her porch. I tell her the total: $13 for the pie and drink, $4 atop that for the cigs. She looks at me all confused.

All she’s got is nine bucks.

Can I take the pizza and the drink back?

Er. Huh?

All I really wanted was the cigarettes. You can take the rest back.

Normally, I’m a pretty laid back guy. But because I’m the first driver and she ordered, I got screwed out of a $10 tip. As things work out, the day was very busy and I wound up making a lot of money, but it’s just after eleven am, it’s hot as fuckin’ balls, this girl is totally fucking with me, and I can imagine Gary’s reaction if I bring the order back, and it’s going to involve molotov cocktails and Loveton engulfed in liquored flame (not to mention me, covered in Gary spittle).

After a brief arguement, she heads into the house to look for more money. I’m refusing to return anything with the order. Emerging with a handful of change — in addition to the Canadian money, there were two quarters and a ton of pennies.

Is this enough?

Well, no, because right off the fucking bat I can see she doesn’t have seventeen bucks. Forget a good tip off this order, right now I’m just hoping to break even, and I’m rapidly approaching I’M GOING TO BREAK THIS PIZZA OFF IN YOUR ASSHOLE stage.

She tries a different tactic. Can I return the cigarettes?

Excuse me? Why the fuck would you order all of this if you couldn’t pay for it? HOW CAN I RETURN SOMETHING WE DON’T EVEN SELL? Those three sentences I said. This next one I didn’t verbalize, preferring instead for my bewildered expression to say for me: I realize you’re stupid, but does your brain just not go tick-tock at fucking all?

After rummaging through her couch for another few minutes, she reemerges with another handful of pennies and nickels and Great White North coins. I’ve got maybe enough money now to cover the pizza.

I conceed. I tell her that I’ll return the sodas and the cigarettes. She seems a little upset — she’s not getting her smokes. I consider telling her that the next time she can’t pay for her order, I’ll have the police arrest her for “theft of service.” I remember looking up theft-of-service once, and while it actually exists, I don’t think the police’ll actually lock up a brain-dead for it. Still, the threat forms in my head before I ultimately decide not to go through with it.

Returning to the store, and relating the story, Gary just starts shaking his head as Zap stares at me with incredulous eyes. This is one of those things that happens that employees of this shop, years in the future, will hear and ask of themselves, “Did that really happen?” And while it did, the lesson is thus — it’s apparently illegal for a store to take a return on cigarettes once they’ve been sold, and thus I’ve got a pack of Newports sitting on my kitchen table.

I think one of these nights I might just drive up to this dipshit’s house and take a dump on her fucking porch. And then leave the cigs in the pile o’ poop.

Or, “photos taken at work.”

Enroute to my second last delivery of the night, I noticed something odd. On my way back, and enroute to my last delivery of the night, I stopped at the side of the road, stepped out of my car, and snapped a quick photograph. If you can’t tell what it is, it’s one of those prefabed kid-forts (in the shape of a pirate boat), loaded on a trailer and randomly parked on the edge of a farmer’s field. Odd.

At my second-to-the-last-delivery of the night, I noticed this little fanged fellow guarding the walkway from the driveway to the front porch. It’s a bit of an odd decoration for a McMansion, true, but his owners tipped me well.

I took my camera to work last night because I wanted to take a photo of the offensive church sign. As things worked out, none of my deliveries took my past the church, and when I got out of work I just wanted to get over to the grocery store and home as quickly as possible.

So walking into the Giant Food in Hunt Valley, my though process was something like this: “Okay, first stop, little green hand basket. Then over to dairy for milk, then over to pets for cat food, then checkout, then home. Hmmm, ginger snaps would be good while I … woah. There’s something wrong with this picture.”

So I take a step back — because of course, being the fan of ice cream I am and thus rarely in need of the produce section, it took me a ten seconds to realize something was missing and then a minute to realize what that something was — and my brain says, “Hey, this’d be a good blog post, and you’ve got your camera!”

And I did have my camera, so I took a photo, grabbed a green hand basket, and completed my shopping. And along the way, I noticed what happened to the produce racks. Glad I didn’t have to buy a skin mag.

When the crew of the Zeus (when it’s finished*) needs their caffeine fix, they can just pull into Timmy’s, point the big guns at the cash register, and get all their coffee for free.

(See, Tim Horton’s is apparently Canada’s answer to Starbucks. Not the fighter pilot, the place that sells overpriced coffee.)

*And for it to be finished, I do kind of need to start on it. What am I talking about? What’s Zeus?

One of the new dipshits at work asked me why I blogged.

I told him I blogged to see girls naked.

“Man, you’re full of shit.”

No, really, I told him. I told him about Blogtimore, a blog aggregator.

What’s an aggregator? he asked.

I told him it was relatively new software that, when used by attractive women, acted like 3-d glasses, allowing me to see them sans-clothing in front of their computers.

I thought I was being clear through my tone of voice that I was being, shall we say, not entirely serious. In his parlance, I was being “full of shit.”

He totally believed me.

This brings me much joy.

(I know he totally believe me because I actually said “sans-clothing” in describing Blogtimore’s fictitious purpose and he said “Huh?” until I replaced “sans-clothing” with the following verbiage: “buck fucking naked, stupid“).