The Monroe's Birthday Party

It is a sunny, summer, Sunday afternoon and I am driving my car. It's a black Dodge Magnum and this is real! I am headed through Pennsylvania to visit my friends Randy and Robin who have decided to throw a birthday party for me. They have moved and I am having a hard time finding their house. I am on the edge of Pittsburgh, heading east, the city starting to fade into suburban sprawl when I come to a red light. I think I am going to make a right but decide to wait the light our so I can look down the road to check that it is the road I want. During the wait a biker behind me gets mad and guns his engine. Then he speeds by in the breakdown lane and takes the right. The light turns and I take the right and head behind the biker, a little disturbed at his impatience.

At the next light I can see the bikers face in the rearview mirror of the van ahead of us. He cusses me, and as he does this I am watching his mouth only from the mirror. I can hear everything as he gives me and object lesson taken from a passion play from the movie EASY RIDER. Very strange, I think, and we are moving again. East. To the country. High Country. Lots of pines out here. To the Double R's new house I go.

I finally get there and I have followed the biker the whole way. The new house is an A-frame, mostly glass, and looks like a craftsman style church. I am welcomed along with the biker who is here for the birthday party. The wood walls have a reddish stain to them. Randy and Robin and I engage in some small talk and I notice a poster on the wall for the rock band Camper-Steen. It is done in a folk art style on an American flag background, but the flags colors are way off and clashing.

Robin is excited to give me my birthday present and rushes Randy and I downstairs to get it. It is a retro pong game, but cooler. The Oxblood plastic case and silver lettering are beautiful and the premise was a way cool updated version of Pong. The first screen was like hockey style with a small goal to get the blip into, but once you did the screen followed the ball into the goal and to a new screen and a new set up. Maybe foose ball this time. And it was in color. Red VS Green!! And the graphics were way detailed and became more so the more goals you made and the further you went into your opponents territory. COOL! The biker was currently playing the game against the computer and I couldn't play now. Then Camper-Steen came out as a curtain in the back of the basement lifted and Played a song about Choo-Choo Charlie. Oh Yeah!

The Big Heist

I am in a liquor store. There is a friend with me, but I don't know who he is. He seems to be a mixture of friends I have had, preternaturally given the features of a young Glen Campbell, the original Rhinestone Cowboy. We are robbing this liquor store and we both have agreed up to this point that it sounded like a pretty good idea. It's the usual, Colt .45 in the face, a couple Get on the ground! Now!!'s and we got the clerk putting money in a brown paper bag, no small bills and keep the change. Why the brown paper bag? I don't know, surely no one would think anything suspicious about a person walking sown a city street with a brown paper bag, would they?

We bust though the door that has the convenient height chart on the door frame and beat feet to our car. Our car is a 1972 mustard colored Torino. It is beautiful and we get in. The tires readily smoke as we make our get away down the main street of town, store fronts warping with speed. That's when we notice the cops.

It couldn't have been more plain and we were straight caught. Those cops were about to have a rabbit. Knowing the dark continent of the Cop Heart, they secretly wanted us to run so they could chase us. There is no reason for law enforcement to have car chases in this day of modern electronic technology, yet somehow we let them photograph our faces, and catalog us, video tape us, fingerprint us, take our DNA, take our property, remove our property rights, remove our right to privacy, tap our banking information, tap our phones, tap our television, tap our e-mail, monitor our book store and library usage, monitor our internet usage, when no crime at all has been committed, all for the sake of better pre-emptive law enforcement and we still have car chases. It doesn't make any sense.

We knew we were going to give up, but when you are looking at a long term sentence for armed robbery, why the hell not give 'em a chase. It's gonna make their day. Burning rubber, growling engines, small kisses of broken glass, and the warm security of tunnel vision as the high speed rush kicks in, we eventually made it out to the country, the trees on the side of the road blurred into a continuous wall. You can find anyone, anywhere, anytime. If you use the technology, and aren't just masterbating with it, and telling everyone that car chases are essential to public safety. Tell that to the thousands of law abiding by-standers each year that are injured or killed by car chases gone wild.

We pulled over.

Like that. We knew we were caught, but it was the thrill of the chase we wanted after the fact. When we pulled over, the shoulder of the road disappeared into a culvert, and the Torino went on it's side at a crazy angle. The cops helped us out of the car. Nice guys. They even put us back in the car after they handcuffed us and let us drive as they formed a police escort back to town and into the county jail.