Saved by Something Bad
Have you ever been saved from something bad that’s happening to you by something bad that’s already happened to you, only you didn’t know it until it happened?
In what I thought might be a fitting end to the god-awful year that was 2020, I figured I would take my good buddy, sidekick and lead singer out for an early afternoon drink to celebrate his recovery from a stent operation he had a few weeks earlier. He’s doing great and we’re looking forward to rocking 2021 like a couple of geriatric “Grateful Dead”wannabes.
So, with all of the Covid protocols being adhered to, we set about going to the Taphouse in Surrey for a couple of beverages. I park my truck in the lot, where I am pretty much the only vehicle there, and we make a joke about when I come out that if anyone else has parked in the lot that they’d probably park right next to me.
We go in, my buddy has a couple of beers and I have a couple of gin and sodas in a tall glass with lots of ice. I wasn’t all that impressed with my drinks (but saturating the gin was the whole point). We had a good conversation over a lengthy period of time but decided to leave instead of having a third one because the bartender wasn’t properly wearing his mask (how much more educating needs to be done in order to get the mask wearing message across, especially to people in the service industry who are probably hurting as much as anybody).
As I’m warming up the truck waiting for my partner who made a bathroom detour (I’m still the only vehicle in the lot), I notice a police SUV flying down the street next to the bar. I felt perfectly fine, so I didn’t give it much thought (wrongly thinking he was heading somewhere else anyway) until I pulled out onto the road and noticed him suddenly appear out of a side street behind me. I turned to my buddy like Han Solo to his sidekick Chewbacca and said, “Chewy, I got a bad feeling about this” (okay, I didn’t call him Chewy, but you get the rest).
Of course, as I turn on to 152nd, the policeman flips on the lights of his cruiser and I pull over to the right, properly blocking up the main boulevard leading into the mall like the cholesterol in my friend’s arteries (I know, bad simile but it’s all I got). I think though that this is the perfect example of the kind of officer I’m dealing with as he could have pulled me over on the side street where there wasn’t any traffic at all but chose instead to put the big show on the main Avenue, accompanied of course by the typical idiots in the passing car that give me the Family Guy “Ahh hah!”. Dicks!
As he walks up the side of my vehicle, I notice he’s barely taller than the panels of my flatbed (I own a 2005 Tundra, which is only a three-quarter ton and not full sized). He then instructs me to take my mask off so he can see who’s he’s dealing with (cowboy all the way). I answer his questions and admit to having a drink (I mean why lie when I know he’s seen me in the parking lot), so naturally he puts me through all of the tests which include reciting my address, birthday and telling him what my middle name is (which is kind of tricky, because if I include my catholic name then I have two middle names, but I’ve never really been sure what order they’re in? Is it Richard Joseph or Joseph Richard? Religion will be the death of all of us, but I digress).
Of course, this all leads to me having to exit the truck, walk back to his SUV and do the blowing thing, which I swear to god he had to stand on his tip toes in order to administer to me due to my 6’ 3” height. This entire time I am 99.9% confident that I will be fine, but as he instructs me to “Blow, blow, blow, blow” there’s always that .1% feeling that things could go awry.
Now it’s here that I suppose I should mention that I understand that this policeman is only doing his job, and I truly don’t have a problem with that because I wouldn’t have been driving anyway if I thought I was over the limit (the first ridiculous limit, not even the DUI limit), but this fucker could have been far more polite and professional in his approach, which he wasn’t.
Having said that, there was a certain amount of satisfaction on my part when I saw the dismay on his face after blowing a big fat fucking Zero on his machine. I grabbed my license off of the hood of his SUV, looked him straight in the eye shaking my head and said with a Spanish accent, “My name is Iñigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Okay, I didn’t say that. I simply said, “Unbelievable” and walked away feeling even taller than I already was.
As I get back into my truck with my buddy asking me how everything went, I began to think that the bartender at the Taphouse watered down my drinks even more than I thought. I mean realistically, I probably should have blown something, like maybe a .0000001? I turned to my friend and I said, “I don’t think there was any gin in my drinks at all. That fucker at the bar ripped me off!” And there I was, possibly saved from something bad happening to me, because something bad happened to me.
Well...that’s my pathetic ending to a pathetic year. I truly hope that 2021 shakes itself off from the dismal slimy mire that was the start to this decade and brings with it better health and improved prosperity for all of you sane and deserving people. As for all you lunatics out there that think everything is a conspiracy designed to rob you of your guns and religious freedoms, I sure hope you know which of your middle names goes first.
Until next time.