“You don’t get it. This isn’t good cop, bad cop. It’s fag, and New Yorker. You’re in a lot of trouble.”

This is a great movie. Comedy, film noirre, cracks on Baltimore … oh, and Michelle Monaghan’s boobs. Fun for the whole family.

(Or the single guy at home).

So coming home from work, down Cranbrook, I wondered why the people speeding past me were suddenly slamming their brakes as they passed through the Padonia Road intersection. Then I got to the intersection, turn signal on, and glanced to my left before making my turn. Oh. Well. That explains it. I figured maybe a cop running radar, rather, one car on the right side of the road, three others on the left, flanking a fifth car, a civilian beater. Didn’t see the driver anywhere, but three cops were rooting through the seats and glovebox and trunk as another talked on his radio.

I don’t know if it was a drug bust. I doubt it. Figured I’d get more people to look if I wrote that.

Anyway, I got photo:

Wonder what he done do. Hey Gump, ask your cousin?

Friday night was pretty slow, as nights go. The soon-to-be-refired fell and hurt his leg the other night so he called out. I made arrangements to cover his shift, but Steve didn’t know, so A. came in to cover it — good for me, I was hoping to have tonight off anyway just so I could lounge around and do nothing in particular. Anyway, so I walk in from a solo-shot way down Sweet Air to a house back behind some barns. I had to dodge roosters to park, then avoid the big monsterous black thing they call a dog but is actually about the size of a tuck.

I walk in and Steve looks at me, looks at the routing computer, “Ah, I guess you’ve got a triple.”

Zebulon and Ghetto Boy are having a shouted discussion. Zebulon’s topping a pizza, Ghetto Boy is hanging slips. Ghetto Boy is waxing poetic on the art of picking women up at bars. This is slightly odd, because Ghetto Boy is eighteen or nineteen and I refuse to believe he has ever picked up a girl at a bar, so what the fuck does he know?

My only non-single of the night, even thought it won’t last for much longer and hasn’t been one for the history books anyway.

Two of the orders are ready to go. The third one is still in the oven. I bag up the first two, grab the sodas, and load them into my car. Ghetto Boy and Zebulon are continuing their discussion. I suppose I should add, at this point in the story, that Zebulon enjoys using the internet to meet those of the opposite sex. Now, true, although I describe Zebulon as a ‘he’, I’m not entirely certain he is. So when he says, “Anyone who has sex with a stranger they meet at a bar is pathetic!” I feel the urge to reply.

So, uh, well, I do. “Hey, uh, what about having sex with strangers you meet online? Pathetic, too?”

Ghetto Boy and Steve crack up. Zebulon freezes, black olives dribbling from his fingers onto the grill over the catch-trays as his eyes drift upwards and his features begin to harden and he tries to think of a response (personally, closing his mouth would’ve been a good start). I’m not certain why he’s bothering to try to think up a response — Zebulon is an affirmed virgin, who just a few weeks ago, claimed he’d been in a menage-a-trois, then stormed off in a puff when it was explained to him that the phrase means “having sex with two women at the same time.” Or maybe it means “having sex with two other people at the same time”, whatever, it involves sex with people other than Zebulon’s right-hand, and that’s the important part I’ve been spending half of this paragraph trying to explain for no reason whatsomotherfuckingever.

I’m waiting for a response so I can respond to Zebulon that, despite his response, I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with meeting people over the internet, either for friendship or random acts of humping, but that the point I’m trying to make is that when you’re meeting people you’ve never met, what’s the big fucking difference between a bar or a computer?

In my imagination, Zebulon stammers as I wait for a response, then I lecture him on being stupid.

But he doesn’t respond. He turns back to the pizza, fuming as he tops.

Dork.

The last run comes out, I bag it, and I’m gone. If you’re curious, the first house tips me $2.6some, and the last two both get me for five and change. I get one more run, a single, then I’m gone and get a neat little episode of “Cops” in my front yard — four county cruisers searching a car on Padonia Road. Pictures soon.

(I have never had sex with a woman I’ve picked up at a bar. Er. Primarily because I’ve never picked a woman up at a bar).

I saw Nacho Libre last night. Actually, I dreamed I saw Nacho Libre. I gotta say, I didn’t like it, Jack Black wasn’t anywhere in the movie — not a bad thing — and I just don’t understand why the big fat bartender from Deadwood was pounding the shit out of the kid from Napolean Dynamite. Again, not a bad thing. I was also disappointed about Britney Spears’ nude scenes. She really isn’t all that. I thought it was a movie about a Spanish friar wrestling, instead it seemed to be a frenzied for-all about jarheads beating up cowboys, and ex-pop stars fucking carrots. Anyway, not a movie I’d ever care to see again.

Lots of runners this time of year. There are two types: those who will wave back, and those who give you a ‘who the fuck are you?’ look.

I like those who wave back. They smile and look cheery, even if it’s only because, “Hey, a driver not hell bent on running me over! You’re okay in my book!”

As for those who don’t, those who give the “who the fuck are you?” look, as I lower my hand, it forms around the steering wheel, where the studs connect the center hub and the horn. Out of sight, my thumb and fingers curl around the wheel, my middle finger projects out, against the stud — an unseen finger for the unwaving runner, a boner for the world.

Hooters to reimburse FEMA for $200 bottle of Dom Perignon.

And for what it’s worth, considering the mass bumfuck that FEMA’s relief efforts came around to being, at that point, I don’t think there was anything else they could’ve done except make money available for displaced citizens and hope that it would be used responsibly to provide goods and services FEMA was lacking. The need for those in crisis, and providing for those people, trumps the poorly chosen spending habits of those who abused the assistance.

$27 and change on my debit card, at the pump. Print Receipt? the screen flashes.

I don’t need the receipt. I know online checking will track the purchase. If I print the receipt, I’ll just crumple into a ball, and bounce it off the rear-view mirror as I drive south, leaving it forgotten where it falls, until some future date, where in a spurt of motivation, I find it while vacuuming the carpet with a dust-buster.

I have two choices. Yes/No.

I choose yes.

I crumple it into a ball as soon as it prints. I don’t need the receipt. I’ve never needed the receipt. But lately, I’ve been selecting ‘yes.’

I imagine it costs $2 for that roll of paper in the machine. Two per pump stand, I think in my head, four pump stands total. $16 to replace the paper rolls when they run out of them.

The price of regular unleaded here, tonight, is $2.959. The cheapest in the area. I heard something on the news about gas station clerks becoming the victims of “gas rage” — customers, upset over super high prices, getting all pissy with the attendants.

This afternoon I took a delivery at the Indy, and had to stop at the bank to make a deposit. Not my bank, the bank Gary uses for store receipts. The woman ahead of me didn’t have ID and two clerks were tied up trying to resolve the situation and approve a withdrawl. I’d already been waiting ten minutes. The woman behind me, who walked in five minutes after I did, starts complaing loudly. “Isn’t there ANYONE ELSE who can help this person? Does it take TWO CLERKS to solve this?” I think about turning around and telling her to shut the fuck up before I rip her tongue out, orally pleasure myself with it, then stuff it back down her worthless cunt throat. I don’t because I’m actually wearing a shirt with the Indy’s logo on it, and Gary hates when bad PR shit gives people an excuse to call and complain*. I contemplate my temper, I contemplate her rudeness and impatience. When I’m up at the counter, and the clerk is going through the deposits, the woman behind me is now next to me, with a long list of deposits and withdrawls and money orders to get made up and transfered and deposited. She’s very rude, and condescending, demanding to know if the tape ribbon in the bank’s money order machine has been redone. Apparently, last time she had to go to Bank of America. I want to turn to her and say, “Oh, poor you.” In my day dreams, the employees applaud me.

I think of gas station clerks getting yelled at for policies and prices not of their control. I think of the bitch at the bank. The faster society goes, the faster goes go, the easier it is to go to the bank … the faster, the easier, the less patient we become. Cars speed past me, recklessly changing lanes, just so they can be in front of me at the red light. Hurry up and wait. Make bank and gas clerks feel bad. Cut people off. I think this is the only way most people can make their mark on the system, get themselves noticed. You only notice me when I cut you off.

I’m smarter than that. I take my mark on the system a different way.

$16 to replace all the printer paper at the station. I wonder how many times a roll of paper runs out. I don’t know, I don’t care, what I do know is that every time I press “YES” for a receipt, I’m helping inflict an (extraordinarily minor) financial pinch to the station’s owner/operator.

It feels so gooooooood.

*I wonder how that conversation would go. One sided, I’d imagine something like: “Ma’am, I’ve only been on the phone with you for about a minute, and right now I have to tell you that, given the opportunity, I’d rip your tongue out too, but I wouldn’t orally pleasure myself with it, because my wife would probably consider that cheating. On second thought, I would, because then she’d kick your ass for blowing me. Yes, fuck you too, and have a nice day.”)